The Chinese love “physical checks.”  Chris and I were required to have all sorts of medical tests done back in December in order to get our invitation letters from Tsinghua. These tests included EKGs, HIV tests, and lung x-rays, and our doctors had to verify that we weren’t suffering from such ailments as leprosy, black plague, or yellow fever.  A few days after our arrival, we were notified that we would need to have our physical checks verified by the Chinese government, so we were loaded into a van and carted across the city to a place where we were told we’d have to have new physical checks done.  Who knows why, but the good news is that we’re still HIV and plague-free.

In trying to get P into Tsinghua’s kindergarten, I made a trip to visit the kindergarten’s director.  At one point, the director spoke for several minutes without pause.  After this very long monologue, my interpreter turned to me and said one short sentence, “She said your daughter will need a physical check.”  Great.

The next day, P and I found ourselves in a taxi with yet another interpreter on our way to a hospital in downtown Beijing. Of all the culture shock situations I’ve encountered in my life, experiencing a Chinese hospital was by far the most shocking. First, there was the dirt. Although I don’t normally like the antiseptic smell of American hospitals, I found myself longing for it that day. The cracked and peeling walls, which had been painted pink at some point in time, were now a dingy shade of pinkish gray. I know the place is at least occasionally cleaned, as I spotted two black mops hanging in a corner of the waiting room. Here’s the sink I saw doctors and nurses using to wash their hands:

No hot water. I checked.

In addition to the dirt, there were the massive crowds of people. People were standing in the waiting room shoulder-to-shoulder.

Miraculously, the wait was shorter than in a typical American hospital. P first visited with two women, who weighed and measured her and then looked in her ears and mouth. Notice the lack of gloves:

We then had to wait in another massive line for the “venous blood extraction.” Again, people were shoulder-to-shoulder. P, who had up until this point been very well-behaved, flipped out. She simply couldn’t handle the crowd and stood in the middle of a large floor tile, screaming at each person who walked by, “This is my square. Get off my square right now!” She quickly grew more and more frustrated, as scores of people continued to walk on her square. Here’s a shot of her in the midst of her frustration:

I wish I could say things got better once we made it to the front of the venous blood extraction line. They didn’t. Luckily, P has forgiven me for the experience. A little chocolate for the cab ride home helped, but as you can see, she remained a bit resentful for a while:

The good news is that P is extraordinarily happy with her new school, so the hospital trip was worth the effort and pain. Call me a xenophobe, but the experience taught me to avoid Chinese hospitals at all costs. If any of us require medical attention while we’re here, we’ll head directly to an international facility. As for P, in the past week, she has altered her sense of personal space a bit and hasn’t lately claimed any squares to be for her use alone. This is a good thing, I think.

In close, although I’ll spare you the lame jokes about China’s crack problems, I can’t help but post this photo of a little boy in split pants I spotted in the waiting room.

We have so much to report, but we’re off to buy bikes now.  Expect more soon.  Don’t worry.  All posts from this point on will be typed at an actual desk.  Good thing germs aren’t transmitted electronically…

We’re finally in our apartment and can tell already that this place it going to feel like home really quickly. P loves her new bedroom and is having a fantastic time setting it up to her specifications. She’s currently in the living room watching Dora the Explorer in Mandarin. The kid is in heaven!

While I’m on the topic of P, this morning, she brought me a piece of paper and asked me to write her name on it. She then went into her room and came out a few minutes later to show me this:

Holy cow!

We decided to take a trip last night to a nearby shopping center to buy provisions for the house. While we were out, we wanted to treat P to a Western-style meal to thank her for being such a trooper through all the changes we’ve encountered. We were therefore thrilled when we saw a place called “Big Pizza” as soon as we got out of our taxi.

As usual, we got lots of attention in the restaurant, and most of this attention was directed at Wee P. At one point, I began to wonder if the servers were ever going to take our order, as they seemed to be too blinded by intense Wee P adoration to remember to do their jobs.

At one point, Wee P started to cry, so two of the servers rushed over and took off with her in the stroller. They pushed her all over the restaurant while I nervously followed behind. Wee P was clearly bewildered, but P thought the entire scene was the funniest thing she’d ever seen.

After dinner, we went shopping at Carrefour, which is a really nice, French supermarket/department store. In the middle of our shopping extravaganza, I realized I really needed to find a restroom. In my finest Marcel Marceau style, I approached several store clerks and tried to convey the state of my bladder to them. For the record, crossing one’s knees, bouncing slightly up and down while pretending to gnaw on one’s knuckles does not appear to be the universal gesture for “Where’s the toilet?” After unsuccessfully bouncing and gnawing for three very confused clerks, I finally took what I had learned from the Itsy Bitsy Spider and stood in front of a young male clerk, squatted, and used my hands to gesture liquid flowing down to my feet. This time, success! Apparently, success is occasionally accompanied by some degree of public humiliation, but that’s okay.

One of my favorite things about shopping in China is reading the English labels on products. Here’s some laundry detergent:

To save your eyesight, I’ll fill you in on the text.  The product claims it “eliminates the fungus,” is “mild-mannered,” and “increases colorfully,” all while “not injurying hand.”  I like this sound of that!

After paying  for our stuff, we were all on the verge of passing out from exhaustion, so we loaded up as quickly as possible and headed out in the snow to hail a taxi. We assumed incorrectly this would be an easy procedure. I waved to several drivers, who slowed down, gave us the once over, and then sped off. I finally got one driver to stop for us, and when I handed him the piece of paper with our address written on it, he took a look at it, shook his head, and just like his taxi driving brethren before him, he quickly drove away. At that point, I lost it. My babies were out in the cold, Chris and I were delirious from sleep deprivation, and I had no idea when we would ever make it home. I yelled at the taxi as it drove away the worst Chinese curse I knew (luckily in English) and told the driver what I’d like to see done to his 18 generations. I then continued to play the crazy foreigner and screamed my curse to each passing taxi with an added, “…all y’all’s 18 generations” just to throw in a little Arkansas flavor.

Eventually, a group of very nice people, who appeared to be university students, intervened, hailed a taxi, and somehow persuaded the driver to take us home. We still aren’t sure why so many drivers refused to give us a ride. We need to figure that out pronto.

Maybe this apartment is so quickly feeling like home to us because it provided such a sense of security to us when we finally walked through its door last night. Although we have very little understanding about how to navigate our world outside these walls, we’ve almost got the stuff within them figured out. Of course, we’ve yet to try operating the shower…

After P was in her pajamas and finally in bed, I asked her if she was upset with us for bringing her here and if she wanted to go home. After pondering my question for a few seconds, she replied, “No, I think I’wl just stay in our new home for a while. Maybe waiter we can go back to our udder home. I wike China a wot.” The combination of that response and her new found writing skills might just cause me to spontaneously burst into flames of pride.

We spent all day yesterday at the university figuring out our housing situation.  Since we didn’t get the keys until the late afternoon, we decided to spend another night in the hotel and move in today.  I’ll post photos of the joint as soon as I can.  We’re going to find out today if P will be able to get into the kindergarten on campus.  We were told months ago that it was full, but our fingers are crossed that some Chinese stings will be pulled for us.

We continue to be amazed at how well both girls are doing.  P has always been a great traveler, and it appears W Pee takes after her big sister.  They’re tired, though.

1)  Gratitude. We’ve been amazed at how incredibly helpful people have been to us since we arrived.  The Chinese love children, so I think we’re receiving VIP treatment thanks to the presence of P and Wee P.  Everywhere we go, people go out of their way to help us in various ways.

We’re particularly grateful for all the help our new friend Laura has given us.  Laura is an English professor from a university in Georgia and she’s also teaching at Tsinghua this semester.  Given that she arrived last week, she’s already figured out a little about how to navigate life here.  After meeting us for breakfast, Laura spent her day showing us around.  Here’s the first place she took us:

Don’t judge.  We needed diapers!

She then took us to her favorite restaurant.  P was excited at the idea of going out to eat and asked me, “Do you think they’ll have my favorites, like hamburgers, and grilled cheese, and tater tots?”  I told her that I doubted it but that they might have something close.

This is sort of close:

Or maybe this is better:

I’m sure she’d love this:

This is probably the closest they had to tater tots:

For those of you as slow on the uptake as I am, “delicacies” are…um…gonads.

In the name of being open-minded, I tried a bite of Laura’s duck hearts.  The taste wasn’t  terrible, but I couldn’t keep my gag reflex from engaging.  I kept having intrusive mental images of sweet, little ducks swimming around a pond with their hearts glowing through their little duck chests.  I can only imagine what my mind would have done to me if I had taken a bite of the ox delicacies.

I’m also grateful to this little baby for being the sweetest, easiest, sleep anywhere-est thing in the word.

2)  Exhaustion. We haven’t slept much in a very long time.  I feel crazed, and my word-find ability has been wiped out.   As I was walking with Laura today, we passed a street vendor selling carved pineapple on a stick.  Laura commented that she would avoid buying food like that on the street.  To this, I responded, “Because you’re worried about the sanity of the food?”  The sanity?  Insane pineapple?  The thing is, I still can’t think of the appropriate word.

3)  Frustration. We spent a large part of the day trying to find electrical converters for our laptops.  I discovered that it’s very hard to ask for help in Chinese stores given that the only thing I know how to say in Mandarin is “Please don’t touch her.”  I was getting particularly frustrated trying to pantomime an exploding computer for one store clerk, when it occurred to me that I’m a pretty decent Pictionary player.  I grabbed a pad of paper and a pen and quickly drew a map of the U.S., a picture of a computer with a cord coming out, flames around the computer, and a picture of a crying woman. I was certain the clerk would understand my intended message and I was fantasizing about coming back to the hotel and bragging to Chris about my amazing communication skills.  Didn’t happen.  The clerk looked at my drawing, went to a wall display, took down an outlet cover, handed it to me, smiled, and walked away.  In the end, we discovered laptops have built-in converters.  Who knew?

In close, in case you think that just because we’re in a huge metropolitan area, sights like this don’t exist right outside our hotel…

…you’re wrong.