Pictionary

My sister is currently in Paris and she just reminded me of one of my favorite things about navigating in foreign countries: their signs. We are so used to our own road signs and directional signs in buildings that it is surprising that other people have had different ideas of how to show people around. The following are some of my favorites, feel free to add your own interpretations of what these signs mean:

don’t feed the walrus

why did the penguin cross the road?

“no tromboning in the street”

don’t lean on a friend

don’t travel with giraffes

hard to see but it looks like another don’t drink and drive version

“dont play your flute into your phone”

“don’t drink and drive”

found on a wall in a school

“dig for burried treasure”

fans so strong they make men and women fly?

bathroom? that little girl has to pee I think

Don’t let the bed bugs bite?

When I got bit by the travel bug I didn’t know it would leave a welt. An unfortunate trend I’ve noticed when traveling is getting bit, and as I’ve said before I don’t react well to buzzing in my ears (or ringing for that matter). Almost a decade of showing up to my older sister’s birthday parties with one eye swollen shut  from a run in with a black fly or mosquito has left me quite paranoid about bites.

In Brazil one of my friends came to my room in a panic because he’d seen a lizard in his room. A lizard actually probably was a good thing because he was hopefully eating the bugs in the room. Maybe I’ll start traveling with a lizard. Another one of my friends was bit by some unknown bug which resulted in black and blue welts all over her legs.

In Italy my sister and I laid an elaborate ambush for a mosquito. The start of the problem was that the window to our hotel room had been left open. I’ve learned the hard way that most other countries don’t have screens the way we do in America. Just the other day a cousin of mine from France was lamenting all of the screen things in the window because he didn’t have the freedom to chuck things out the window. Since I was unaware of this convenience of chucking things out of windows and more concerned about what was climbing in the windows I have always been careful to restrict air circulation to a minimum when staying in screen-less accommodations. Therefore when my sister and I returned to our hotel room and found the window left open I knew we were in for trouble. Shortly after laying down I heard the tell-tale buzz in my ear. I knew there was no way I would sleep with that buzzing noise going on. Since my sister also heard the buzzing noise I knew I had her on my side. The two of us set up our trap in the bathroom. We shut off all other lights but the bathroom light and left the door open a crack so the mosquito would have to come through the tiny crack to get to us. I was perched on the bidet and my sister was probably perched on the sink as we sat in wait. The little buzzer never saw it coming.

While on safari in South Africa I knew bugs would be an issue. And of course this time there was malaria to contend with as well. I had enough bug spray on to keep a small elephant away, but nothing could change the fact that we were staying in a bungalow that 1000 different species of bugs called home. I barely slept all night listening to the rustlings in the thatch roof. And I certainly didn’t eat anything since I could tell even in the firelight that my dinner was crawling.

Most recently in China I again had the problem of bugs to deal with. The first night sleeping at my friend’s apartment his sister and I awoke with bites all over our faces and arms-basically anything that had been exposed while sleeping. Since it was just the areas exposed I dismissed the possibility of bed bugs (we had been staying at a hostel the weekend before, a good place to pick up bed bugs I’ve heard). And since there were more than enough mosquitoes flying around the room to share I assumed that must be it. I resorted to sleeping with my ipod in my ears to drown out the buzzing and a sweater over my face with just a tiny air hole to breath out of and sacrificed my arms to the bugs since it was too hot to be fully covered. I didn’t think I’d have any luck getting my friend and his sister to stage a trap in the bathroom for multiple reasons: a) there were too many mosquitoes, b) the bathroom was too tiny for us all to fit there, and c) as I’ve already mentioned I had destroyed the bathroom. When I returned home looking like I had chicken poxes my mom panicked and threw all of my stuff in the freezer which is apparently how you get rid of bed bugs. Luckily no more bites occurred once I was home and I still don’t think they were actually bed bugs.

Tonight’s special: a Chinese lesson

*The following was written shortly after my arrival in Wuhan China

We are in Wuhan now where Lee has been living and teaching English for the year. So far I have almost set fire to the apartment with a hair dryer and shattered one of the only sit down toilets in all of china just by sitting on it. The kids in Lee’s class laugh at how tall I am and Lee’s sister and I have changed from “Sarah and Katy” to “Carol and Sadie”, though I might have been “Shirley” this morning. Today I got my hair done at school. When we were sitting in the office this math teacher was braiding one of the other teacher’s hair. So Lee asked her to do my hair, and she didn’t really hesitate at all, just sort of laughed and got to work. Like there was nothing odd about foreign strangers asking her to braid their hair. 

 

The other night we went for dinner at a teacher’s house from Lee’s school. Turns out by dinner we actually were getting a strict introductory Mandarin lesson. Now I’m all for Mandarin lessons, just surprise ones when I’m expecting food are a little awkward. We almost had brought beer to go with dinner but Colette (another American teaching English at the school) said our host had said we needn’t bring anything (that should have been our first clue). I’m not sure on what bringing beer to a Mandarin lesson would look like. We didn’t realize our mistake right away, it all sort of happened gradually. First we went over and our host Alice offered us bananas, tomatoes and orange juice. Luckily I ate the banana since that was the only dinner I was going to get… I thought we were waiting for her husband, who does the cooking, to come home, but then she mentioned something about him not coming home till 9:00 “and you know I don’t cook”. That was a red light right there. But I was still thinking for a bit that perhaps we were having a late dinner, or perhaps she meant tomorrow night he was coming home at 9:00 since her tenses weren’t always accurate. Then her in-laws arrived and set up a circle around us and passed out the lesson paper. Still I was thinking this was just for fun to look at while we waited for dinner. In her nervousness Alice spilled tea all over me as she tried to pass it to her mother in law. I wondered why she was so nervous for dinner. Apparently her mother in law is from Beijing and speaks with precise Mandarin-hence her teaching the lesson. The father in-law disappeared and for a while we were hoping he was making us dinner. The lesson was interesting. If I watched the mother’s mouth and mimicked it I could do decent at repeating the sounds, however I couldn’t remember what sound went with what letter. The lesson was two hours long. Which wasn’t bad; though my head was starting to spin trying to remember things and understand of which I could do neither, and of course it was now two hours later than we thought we were having dinner. Alice kept saying how we should practice and that we should go around and ask people words. I didn’t know if she meant right then or in the future-how long was this lesson going to last? Alice and her mom said that Lee was clever, but bad at tones, Colette did pretty well, Katy was afraid to try and that I had “a thick voice that sounded musical”. I don’t really like the sound of “thick” but she seemed to mean it as a compliment. She also said “my mother says you are doing just ok!” Which doesn’t really sound good, but her voice sounded positive so we think her “just” was kind of like “just swell!” or “just fine!” and “ok” wasn’t meant as mediocre. But maybe she did mean it was only ok and said it so positively to temper the blow. Finally at 9:00 the in-laws took there leave. We’d finally given up hope on dinner by then, however I was still hoping the husband would come home and say “Hey did you guys eat? Let’s order a pizza!”  I do wonder if at any point they realized that we hadn’t known what we were getting into. Did our stomachs growl loudly and signal our hunger? Did our nervous laughter and whispers of “do you think we’re getting food?” clue them in? Perhaps they had expected something different from the lesson too. Maybe they were expecting us to come with primers and pencils. Or maybe we were supposed to have dinner and we were supposed to have picked up a pizza on the way. Perhaps they weren’t teaching us Chinese, just repeating slowly and enunciating “Where is the pizza you crazy kids?”

  

Dehydration Nation, or a Travel’s Guide to Going in China

*The following is an email I wrote in May while visiting my friend Lee who had been teaching English to elementary school students in Wuhan China for the school year.

Well, I thought I wasn’t going to write about this, but I’ve concluded that you can’t really understand this trip to China if you don’t know about the toilet situation in China. Think of everything you know about toilets and now forget it all. Let’s get this out of the way first: toilet seats-they don’t have them. My friend Lee (whose apartment I was staying at) actually had one until it shattered under my ass the second day of using it. Who knew toilet seats could shatter so easily? I guess they don’t expect people to actually use them much so they aren’t very durable. The shattering of the seat led to the other problem we’re still arguing about. Just what happened, I can’t be sure, but Lee thinks I must have knocked some of the shattered toilet seat bits into the toilet which then clogged the toilet. I think the problem is that in every public restroom I’ve been in they have signs that say “don’t put the toilet paper in the toilet”. Um, isn’t that where it goes? Isn’t that why it’s called toilet paper? I’ve probably been clogging toilets across China just because I can’t handle dropping the TP in the garbage can that may or may not be in the stall instead of in the toilet where I think it belongs. Once we clogged Lee’s toilet I checked down the hallway in the empty half finished apartments for a flushing toilet (Lee’s apartment is in the top of an elementary school building so it is mostly deserted at night). None have seats of course since Lee has stolen them after he breaks each successive one. But four down has been flushing so it’s our makeshift outhouse. The door doesn’t latch and a thick layer of dust and dried bugs coat most everything. The school did send someone to plunge our toilet. There was a lot of banging and confused looks and then the man said “fixed” as he trotted out of the apartment tracking toilet water all over the entry way and making a swimming pool out of the bathroom floor. The teacher at school scolded us to not ”stick foreign objects in the toilets” I think she meant “foreigners shouldn’t stick anything in the toilet” since I never knew toilet paper was a foreign object for a toilet. And for all that it has stopped working again.

School bathrooms are in a category all on their own: A trough runs along the ground with only a couple drains spaced out in it with open stalls over the trough. So now you’re squatting over a channel watching other people’s excretions float by with the high probability of a teacher or an elementary student similarly squatting across the way. In the hallway i enjoy being mobbed with jubilant “hello Sarah”-s, but in the bathroom I don’t have a free hand to wave back… Is it any wonder why I’m actively courting dehydration in the 100 degree heat?

 

Public restrooms are a step up and by a “step up” I mean realistic-that-i-will-actually-use-them.  There hardly ever is toilet paper and even rarer are actual seats. They’re just holes in the ground. What’s more shocking is that I consider the presence of one or the other an occasion to dance in the bathroom.  A dance that may or may not result in my foot being squeegeed by the bathroom attendant mopping up the floor/toilets on the floor. Restaurants give out packs of tissues instead of the hassle of having separate napkins, paper towels, tissues or toilet paper anywhere on the premise. Which is great since tissues when wet normally dissolve and leave little bits of paper on whatever you choose to be wiping with them (case in point I had tissue stuck to my lip after lunch today). I brought these little travel bathroom packs that have TP, a hand wipe and a sanitary toilet cover; I always laugh at the seat cover since it’s useless without a seat.

 

I never before questioned the legitimacy of letting the person waiting in line in the bathroom go first. But here people just walk in and pick a door and jostle their way into an open one, men and women alike since many bathrooms are co-ed. (Though not all as Lee’s sister Katy discovered the hard way after getting strange looks using the pit in the men’s room next to the urinal.) I got passed over many times as I politely waited my turn until I realized it was never going to come. So yes, now I fight for my right to balance and squat over a pit while holding my clothing away from where the last person missed. I was so proud of myself the first time I went, but my pride was short lived as the next bathroom had a door that wouldn’t shut so I had to try to hold the door while balancing and holding my clothes at the same time. I don’t know how to say “can you hold the door while I go?”  And I have a feeling that any person I asked would just take the stall from me.

 

People’s houses are hit or miss as well. We went to someone’s apartment where they had a pit in their house. Which I would have considered trying until I realized that floor length frosted glass windows are essentially see through when lit from behind. One step at a time here-I’m just not yet ready to pee while on display.