It's nice to see respect isn't outdated...

I had to write about this because when I was back in Chicago commuting on the brown line or travelling on the Clark bus, rarely did you see this happen. I can recall one time on the brown line, due to some stations being closed, the "El" was slower than molasses, and the trains were packed like sardines, so it was quite common to wait for the next train hoping that the cars had more space. There was a young woman who was pregnant and looked like she was going to have the baby at any moment. I was sitting by the window at the back watching the scene unfold or should I say not unfold. I kept looking at the young people sitting down and for three stops no one bothered to offer this gal a seat. The occupants who by the way were all young women and men chose to ignore her. I finally got her attention and nodded to her to come over and sit. As I stood up, a guy about 30 wanted the seat before I told him that the seat was for the gal who was pregnant.

What did that story have to do with today's blog?

This morning while on the bus going to university, I noticed a very strange phenomenon, not seen back home on a frequent basis. This happens most of the time here and thought I would share this with you. Each time an elderly person would board, the younger person relinquish their seats for them. This didn't just happen once or twice, each time someone older would board the person who was younger would give their seat to that person. In fact at one point, there were three people trying to give up their seats to the elderly and you couldn't tell which one was the older person.

How refreshing!

It's about time...

We've been in Xiamen for almost 5 months now, and we've adjusted a lot and grown more and more accustomed to doing things the Chinese way, but there are still some things that we haven't gotten around to. Some of those are things that you should never put off for too long.

Case in point, putting off getting a haircut. I had my haircut in Chicago the last weekend that we were there, and hadn't gotten back around to getting it cut again. I knew that it needed it, Tina also made a point of letting me know that it was getting long. There's been several time that I was going to get it cut, but somehow it would always take back burner to other activities, such a shopping for cheese...

Finally I decided, or I guess we decided, that enough was enough. If I didn't bother to put any gel into my hair to try and hold it in place, it exploded into a big old afro...
So today our main goal was to get me a haircut. There are tons of salons all over the place, but we have read stories and talked to people here and those haircuts run more than one hour, usually at least an hour and a half. You go in, get your hair washed, scalp massaged, hair cut, washed again, and then finally styled. We didn't want to do that, especially since I'm used to the $15 hair cuts in Chicago where they try to get you seated, cut, and out the door in 15 minutes.

We have also seen really small, one chair in a 4'x6' room small, barbers while wandering the back alleys, that is what we went looking for today.
We found the perfect place, three chairs and a good size, with a few people in there getting haircuts. We went in, I pointed to the mop on my head, everybody laughed and I sat down. Twenty minutes later I'm paying 8元 for my haircut, that's $1.08.

Yep according to Tina, I'm all sexy again.

Dinner at the Wichmann's

So last night we hosted a dinner party, and surprisingly it went rather well. Tina spent all day cleaning the place so that it was presentable, and then once everyone showed up I ducked into the kitchen and cooked up nachos and then chicken marsala.

I don't know if we've complained about it before, but our kitchen is incredibly small which makes it tough even when we are only cooking for ourselves, much less trying to prepare food for nine people. With only two burners we had to stagger the food, and we ate in two seatings but we managed and everyone told us that they enjoyed the food.

What, you haven't been to Chilii's yet?

We received the same response that Mark would get when he mentioned that he hadn't been to Gu Lang Yu whenever we mentioned that we hadn't been to Litte Chilii's yet. Apparently this is one of the hot restaurants to eat at for both Westerners and Chinese. Everyone keeps raving about this place and it's a short walk from where we live, so we figure that will be our restaurant of choice this evening.

The restaurant is by no means fancy, in fact quite basic and not that big. It was filled with tourists, Westerners, and Chinese. We sit down and we see the chef smoking in the kitchen. It has to be good right? Actually it was, we had fish fillet in a sweet and sour sauce, noodles with pork, rice and two beers. The portions are large and we couldn't finish them, so we asked for a doggie bag.

We forget how inexpensive it is to eat here. Our bill was a total of 40RMB, which is equivalent to $5.50. We may have to eat out more often.

Dining out

So after almost two months with all of our belongings we've finally cooked and eaten enough western foods that we are going to go out for local food again.

After eating out every night for our first three months here, we more more than happy to finally be able to cook at home. For the last two months our nights have been that nice boring type of life, come home, cook dinner, eat and go to bed...

When we would travel out of the country we would eat all the things we can't get locally, so although we were going out, a) we were traveling, and b) it wasn't Chinese food. Which, strangely enough, you start to crave a little...

Yep, tonight we're acting all crazy and going out to dinner on a school night.

Also, it'll be a break from our tiny kitchen which we will be spending too much time in tomorrow night when we throw our dinner party.