Daily Life

I haven't yet written about daily life.  This might be a good time to do it.  Let's start with food!

Most of the time, Dave and I go out to eat.  Restaurant eating is extremely inexpensive.  A large plate a dumplings costs about 10 yuan (30-cents). A bowl of soup costs about 12 yuan.

However, there are times when you feel like eating in.  The grocery store is two blocks away. It has lots of staples -- bread, fruits, vegetables.  Fewer meat options -- one or two types of fish, chicken legs and wings, and some sort of meat that might be beef or might be pork.  Not sure.  A whole aisle is taken up with oil and soy sauce.  Another aisle for rice. Eggs come in cartons... and also this cute little basket.

Egg custard cups

The second floor of the grocery store is the expensive floor -- gifts of all sorts and foreign imports -- cereal, peanut butter, danish butter cookies.  The food that we miss most is chocolate and cheese.  There is food that looks like chocolate, but unfortunately tastes less sweet, more waxy.  My current favorite  dessert is an egg custard cup.  They make them fresh at the grocery store, and they are quite delicious.

For meals, we have a limited repertoire.  Dave makes lots of soup -- chicken soup, vegetable soup, potato soup.  He also buys pasta and sauce from the second floor and makes spaghetti with vegetables from the first floor.  I make chicken and rice, and omelettes.... although omelettes with out cheese is like, um, well, pasta without cheese.

Milk comes in a square container like this...

Milk

Camping!!

Tiny salt

It took a long time for me to find salt.  I found it in this very cute little container that comes with a tiny spoon.  (Before I found it, I used soy sauce and chicken bouillon to flavor everything.)

Everything has to be cooked on a two burner stove -- no oven.  As Dave says, it feels a bit like camping.

Our washing machines is this cool blocky thing.  That plastic pipe off to the left drains into the kitchen floor, hopefully not in the apartment below.  It not infrequently gets dislodged, which means we get to mop the floor.  Dryers are very rare in China.  We hang out our clothes on a porch in the back.  They dry quicker than you'd think, although lately they've been very cold.

Washing machine

All of the water that we use for cooking, washing vegetables and drinking. comes from these bottles.  We go through several over the week.  They aren't expensive - about 9 yuan, and when we bring them to the garbage/recycling container, there are a couple of older women who snap them up immediately, so I suspect that you can bring them somewhere for money.

And speaking of garbage, here is the local garbage truck.

*                *               *

Interesting fact dealing with daily life that is unrelated to food is heat.  Heat has not yet come on, and won't until the end of this week.  It has been quite cold.

For what it is worth, Chinese heating is different from other countries in that there is an imaginary line that goes through the center of the country.  All areas north of line enjoy central heating with subsidies from the government.  Below there is no heating systems provided by the government.  We're just north of the line.  Yay.

According to Xi'an Municipal Management Bureau, central heating companies can only start to supply heat starting November 8th to ensure the heating of all houses reaches the standard on November 15th.  Xi'an heating period lasts from November 15 to March 15, and temperatures shall not go below  64 degrees... which sounds cold to me.

My expat colleagues say that it isn't bad, once the heat gets up to its anticipated level.  We look forward to that time.

Mason-Dixon line for heat!