Bamspeedy
CheeseBob
Recession
Yes, in the middle of this recession, here I am going on vacation again to China. With the hours I've been working lately I would think there is no recession going on at all, but I realize it is only my department that is getting their regular full hours because of staffing, while other departments are working fewer hours since business is slower. There are no forced layoffs in my company (only temporary one week voluntary layoffs for those who want more time off from work than what they have vacation days available), only less hours available to work, so my job is secure. If even Wal-mart goes under then we are all really, really screwed.
After taking the first short flight from my local, small airport to Minneapolis (small, 'puddle-jumper' plane that was filled to capacity), the next flights from Minneapolis to Tokyo then Tokyo to Guangzhou, the planes were less than half full. I thought, Wow, the recession is really hitting big. I got a whole row of seats to myself and could raise the armrests up and lay down to sleep for the 15 hour flight from MN to Tokyo and the 5 hour flight from Tokyo to Guangzhou. But on the flight back, all the planes were filled to capacity again, so maybe the only thing that was different was what time of day I was leaving. I left the MN airport at 1 PM on a Tuesday, whereas the last time I went it was 9 or 10 AM I think (still arrived in China at 10:30 PM Wednesday both times). I left Guangzhou at 8:30 AM on a Monday both times. Not as many american couples bringing back adopted Chinese babies this time around, as last time there was like a dozen of them and this time there was only one.
Me, a vegetarian?
During my stay there this time around, yes, I was pretty much becoming a vegetarian. Last time I went I stayed almost exclusively in the tourist areas, and in the commercial district of Guangzhou. While I had some meals at the McDonald's, I did eat at several Chinese restaurants, but since they deal with more westerners they have adapted/adjusted their meals (or at least the presentation of them) to accomodate western tastes. This year it was the complete opposite and I stayed almost exclusively in the rural areas, eating at restaurants in small towns and having home-cooked meals at the homes of her family. Last year out of the thousands and thousands of faces I saw (outside the immediate airport area) of people walking around, in restaurants, on buses, etc. I saw maybe 100 westerners, this year I saw zero.
When eating at restaurants in China the first thing you want to do is wash your dishes. At the fancier places in the tourist areas they do this for you, but at the cheaper places you do it yourself or even if it looks clean you do it anyways. If you are unsure, wait to see if the people you are with are doing it. The restuarant will supply you with hot water or some tea, so you fill up your bowl with it, swish it around (don't forget to dip the chopsticks in the water/tea also!) then dump it out (usually in a bowl the restuarant provides).
From what I am guessing/witnessed, it's not that the restuarant doesn't wash the dishes at all (though some don't do a perfect job at washing them), it is just the water is not safe for drinking if it was not boiled first. It would be awfully time consuming to boil all that dishwater (and waiting for the water to cool enough to handle the dishes by hand), so the dishes need a good rinsing with clean, boiled water/tea after they were washed with the 'regular' (not safe for drinking) water.
During the ride from the airport to the resort my fiancee gave me a snack to eat (over an hour drive from the airport to the resort). She said it was 'cake', and it was packaged up like a Twinkie or Little Debbie snack. It was dark so I didn't get a good look at it, but I tasted like cake.....except for the outer coating. Don't know what it was, but it tasted like fish skin. Not that I know what fish skin tastes like, that is the only thing I can think of that it would taste like.
Ok, now to the part about why I was becoming a vegetarian. I was warned about these things last time I went but I didn't really experience them except for one dish at a resort. When it comes to meat they don't waste anything, they will serve/chop up the meat with the fat, bones and everything....including the head. Chicken, I don't know what they do differently but most of it wasn't the chicken I am familiar with. Every piece had a really thick layer of fat/skin on it, so for every 'piece' of chicken I had, only 1/2 to 3/4 of it was the actual meat that I liked and it tasted kind of like the chicken I'm used to.
Then I had FRIED chicken and I was excited about that when I saw the wings and the legs (wasn't KFC style chicken, but it looked as close to the kind of stuff I am used to eating as anything else in China with the exception of strawberries and grapes-grapes were quite large). Then I saw one big piece of fried chicken that I didn't recognize. It was a fried chicken head.
I had goose for the first time I remember ever eating it (compared to Europe and other places, eating goose in America is pretty rare), and I had other meats (except fish, I will get to that in a minute). While the meat itself wasn't so bad, there was always so much fat with it and the bones were a real problem. You could have a small chunk of meat but 80% of it could be bone. You have to eat very carefully so you don't swallow small pieces of bone. By the end of the meal, everybody will have a small pile of bones next to their plate that they've spit out. It's amazing that there aren't many Chinese people choking to death on the bones.
I avoided fish because it was right away I saw it being served with the head and tail still attached. And I had the awful experience last time of eating fried whole minnows (yes, we have sardines in America but I avoid those too). When I was eating at my fiancee's parent's house (with her parents, her 3 sisters, 1 of her 2 brothers, her daughter, nephew and some other in-laws) fish was one of the dishes. One of the children pointed at the fish and was asking for something. Someone took a toothpick, plucked out the eyeball and dropped it in the child's soup and then the child was happy. Seeing that I didn't want any fish at all even if it was a part of the fish that was nowhere near the head.
The most annoying part was that over there there was no passing around of the food so that I could get what I want and as much of it as I wanted. Everyone would just put stuff onto my plate/into my bowl thinking I would like it.
<someone says> "Here, have some ____, it's good for you".
<me thinking-not spoken> "Yes, it may be good for me, but I don't like it, or don't want anymore of it"
I'd try something, not like it, then be given another piece without asking for it. I'd be polite and force myself to eat it only to be given another piece. So I tried leaving it on my plate/bowl and work on eating other stuff, leaving the 'mystery meat/food' for last thinking that as long as I still have some of that stuff I don't like on my plate I won't be given anymore of it. That didn't always work as I would still sometimes be given more of the stuff I didn't want to eat.
There was so many times I was starting to get full so I was thinking, "OK, I'll just finish what is in my bowl and then I will be done eating", only to have something more added to my bowl (most often something I didn't want to eat). Many of times I was having to be tossing the mystery meat around in my bowl to get at the 'good stuff' (rice, noodles, green vegtables). It may have been rude, but I had to eventually put a hand over my bowl whenever someone was making a move to add more mystery meat to my bowl.
Then I was asked how I could be so tall when I eat so little....
Resort/Hotel
This year I stayed at a fancy resort. It was closer to her hometown and wasn't as expensive as I thought (otherwise I would have stayed there last year), and it wasn't expensive since it isn't closer to the airport. It cost me $221 for five nights (1500 RMB), or $44 a night where the cheaper hotel I stayed at last year was $22 a night. Other fancy hotels I looked at in Guangzhou, closer to the airport, was $79-$100+/night. The internet site I used to reserve the room however did not warn me that the resort required a 3000 RMB deposit (double the cost of the room for five nights), but I was still given the room without making the deposit (I could have paid it but then I would have had no money, but my fiancee and her family ended up paying for almost everything anyways). Of course they had trouble finding my reservation, so that had me worried for awhile, I guess they don't get many reservations through that website.
The bed was more comfortable this time. Last time the mattress was on hard wood instead of a box spring so it was pretty much like sleeping on the floor. This time the mattress was still placed on a harder surface than a box spring, but it was a little softer so I slept comfortably. The resort has two restaurants and a spa. Didn't actually go to the spa. I was tempted to, but now I think it was better that I didn't go to it. It had an outdoor pool and tennis court but the weather was cloudy and cold so neither one was used at all (cold for China at that time of year, but hot compared to Wisconsin this time of year). Felt like it was going to rain everyday, but didn't actually rain until the last full day I was there when we went to the mountains.
And once again I was denied a good view from my hotel window. Last year it was construction of a tall building right next door to the hotel, this year it was because the resort was built next to a hill so my view was of a road on the hill that ran behind the resort. Had a great view of two cars parked right in front of my window. The lobby/main entrance was actually on the 3rd floor, my room was on the fifth floor but right next to the back entrance of the hotel. Last night I was there I walked out to the back entrance to smoke a cigarette at 4 AM then a security guard comes walking up to me and stands nearby. He said something to me, not sure if he was telling me to get back inside or what, but I was done with the cigarette anyways so I went back inside. Alot of people worked at the resort and they mostly all drove motorbikes, so basically all the motorbikes were employees and all the cars were guests.
Transportation
Buses exist in the countryside and smaller cities because there are enough people there that they actually can be put to good use. Even the countryside had lots of people. Not sure of actual numbers here, but just trying to put things in perspective, but if for example in the US, if there is two towns separated by let's say 10 miles, there would be maybe 50-100 people living in the farms and houses between those two towns. In China it is more like 1000+ people living in between those two towns. With that many people it makes more sense to have buses run on a regular basis between the two towns (not to mention all the people who work in the fields between the towns, so there is alot of stops in the country to pick up/drop off people).
Everywhere we went we could have taken buses to get where we were going, but sometimes it was just more convenient to take a taxi or to use her sister's boyfriend's van. Although in the smaller cities and towns motorbike taxis are the norm instead of taxi cars (there were a couple of taxi cars that made trips back and forth from the resort which was a mile or two outide the city to the city/town).
Traffic isn't very organized. Yeah, there is stoplights, but mostly people are left on their own to merge into traffic and cross intersections. Pedestrians, bicycles, motorbikes are always crisscrossing in traffic in front of the cars without warning and you constantly have to dodge them by mere inches if you want to progress through traffic at any kind of reasonable pace. Traffic lines exist but are ignored (like the solid yellow line meaning no passing zone).
Throwing trash out car windows is very common. That is one thing I will have to make sure I tell my fiancee not to do when she gets here before we get a $500 littering fine.
One of the buses we were on broke down so we had to get off and get on the next bus. The next bus to come was actually from a seperate bus line so if we didn't want to wait for the next bus from the same bus line we had to pay the bus fee all over again. I really don't understand that. I could if they were seperate (private) companies, but I would have thought the buses were ran by the government so it is all basically the same thing so one bus line should honor the tickets from the other bus line.
Oh well, stuck it to the government in another way. When we went to this waterfall tourist area, my fiancee forgot to bring her ID. Since she didn't have her ID she would have to pay a higher entrance fee (and so would I). So instead, while the other three people with us went through the main gate paying the lower fee, she paid a local to take me and her on a motorbike through a side, blocked off entrance (about a three mile bike trip), and we met up with the rest of the group partway through the trail.
Country life
Went to her parent's house out in the country and walked through the fields outside their house. Went to where her parents worked in the fields and picked some vegtables from the small patch of land that they are allowed to use for their own food consumption and then paid someone to allow us to pick strawberries from their field. The parent's house actually had tiled floors which was a little surprising considering that looking at the house from the outside I would have expected dirt or at least stone floor. But chickens were allowed free access to the house and there was even a bucket inside the house with some hay in it so that one of the chickens would lay there and lay it's eggs so there was no need to go outside for eggs. And the house actually had a TV, but otherwise was pretty bare, but of course had a poster of Mao Zedong.
Trash everywhere outside, with the chickens pecking through the trash for food. Ox are as common over there as cows are over here. I was told my fiancee's mother had an ox one time and it was like her 'baby' where the family joked that she took better care of it then she did her own children. Well, my fiancee's father sold it eventually and he never heard the end of that! Years later whenever the family had some money the mother was still telling the father to use the money to go buy another ox.
Then we walked across the highway to see where she lived before her parents moved to her current house. The houses here were dirt floors with wooden doors that were half rotted away. The door handles on these were different than the other handles and locks I had seen on other houses during the trip. The other houses, like at her parent's, her apartment, and her sister's boyfriend's had metal doors, with a bolt on the outside that was locked with a padlock, kind of like how you would lock up an outdoor shed.
The Family
Met her whole family except one of her brothers. One of her sister's husband was supposedly an English teacher, but if he said 10 words to me I'd be lucky to understand 3 of them. I had to keep asking my fiancee what he was saying to me. I think she might have started learning english from him (and why when I first met her a year ago she was saying stuff like 'sugar' when she meant 'shower'), but since her english is so much more advanced than his is now, I don't think she got too much help from him. She taught herself most of it from books and she did take a couple of classes. The english teacher was teaching her daughter to call me 'Uncle' and I'm not sure that is a good idea. She can't call me 'Dad' yet, but that will be confusing/weird when her mom marries her 'uncle'...
Other than the 'English teacher' (and my fiancee), nobody spoke english, although her nephew did know a few english words and phrases, but that pretty much amounted to "hello", "English" and "I don't know".
The men in the family didn't really pay much attention to me until they saw me smoking. After the 3rd day I had bought a pack of smokes just so I could say I tried some Chinese cigarettes (no difference, FYI) and while I was at her parent's house waiting for all the women to cook I snuck outside to have my second cigarette of the trip. The men of the family (the only ones who smoke, none of the women smoked) started offering me cigarettes whenever they were smoking and after I gave them the rest of my cigarettes since I doubted I would be able to bring them back with me anyways, they were offering me beer too. Beer was sometimes cold, but when the english teacher offered me beer it was warm. Yuck. The beer was kind of close to American Beers (Miller, Budweiser, etc.) so it is what I was used to...when it is served cold at least.
The mother was a riot. Though she is in her mid 60's, her outer appearance makes her look like she is 90, but her heart makes her seem 20 or younger. Always with a smile on her face, except when the children were causing trouble. When the nephew got into some trouble she was chasing him around with a thick metal rod that was bigger (taller at least) than she was. Another time she was yelling at the children while she had a machete in her hand. No, she wasn't waving the machete around, but just seeing her holding it while yelling at the children was kind of surreal.
Shopping
The last day we went shopping to several little shop/towns in the mountains. we would stop at a place that had about a dozen tents/shops, then drive a few miles where there was another dozen or so tents/shops selling things, then a few more miles down the road the same thing, etc. There wasn't much to buy here unless you wanted food, but I did buy a couple small trinkets. Even in the cities and towns we went to before this, most of the shops I saw didn't sell much for tourists. Basically going down most streets the shops were set up something like this: Food/Food/Water(bottled water and water purifiers)/Food/Food/Scrap metal/Food/an alley full of a dozen or more fruit and vegetable sellers/Water/Food/Food/Food/Food/Water/Scrap metal
Anything else was very sparsely dotting in between these repetetive shops, like an occassional barber shop or a cell phone dealer. Even in China, most people have a cell phone.
Immigration
For those wondering how things are going with the immigration part of bringing my fiancee here to the US from China, I filed the k-1 application in July, so it was 11 months after I first started communicating with her. This was several months later than when I would have sent it originally, but it gave us more time to collect all the necessary paperwork so that we were prepared. We were overprepared actually as I got several things from her we didn't actually need at all, or at least not until much later in the process. Sent the application to the Nebraska service center by mistake rather than California so it got delayed a couple of weeks because of that.
Doing it all without a lawyer, and while that makes it a bit more confusing and time consuming, it saves alot of money. I used a couple of websites to help guide me through the process, so if anyone is interested and is going to be going through a similar process (or thinking of doing it) you can PM me for the links. These are sites filled with people who are currently (or have completed) going through the immigration processes (more than just the K-1 visa).
Got the approval notice from the visa center in the first week of December so the application was sent from the US to the consulate in Guangzhou, China. Took a month to get there then they sent her some forms to fill out which she mailed back, only to have it returned to her a couple weeks later because she also needed to fill out a form for her daughter. So that was another two week delay. And that is where we are right now.
She and her daughter will have an interview (which I am not allowed to attend-I could if my fiancee lived in certain countries, but the Guangzhou consulate does not allow this), so my trip was to see her again since I hadn't seen her in a little over a year and to deliver some documents to her that she will need for the interview. The mail system to China is terrible, with sometimes my packages not getting to her at all, while other times she gets them two months after I sent them. She is able to send me things though and I get them after two weeks or less.
Yes, the 5 year old daughter is required to attend the interview because she will be an immigrant too, but they probably won't ask her too many questions because of her age. They may just ask her if she knows about me and the situation and had met me, that kind of thing.
I have been hearing that her interview might not be for another 5 months yet, but in other countries it could have been next month. The Guangzhou consulate deals with 2,000 cases a month so that is why the wait is so long. While I had been told here on CFC that the rejection rate is high, I have been told on many other sites that if the application has made it to the consulate in the other country the rejection rate at that stage is very low (with the exception of possibly some countries in the middle east because of the 'war on terror' thing). So it is looking good at this point. Not filing the application so early may have been a good thing and might have helped get the application move past that first critical stage (homeland security, FBI background check, initial immigration evaluation of our relationship, etc.).
Part of the paperwork I had to give her was I had to prove that I am able to financially support my fiancee (and her daughter) so that she does not become a liability to the government (welfare, etc.). This basically means that if she does end up needing welfare then the government can come after me and make me pay the $ they spend on her (up to 5 years I believe). The threshold for this is I need to have an income that is 125% of the poverty level. I earn well over that limit (for a family of 3) so that is not a concern so I didn't even need to include my assets that other people have had to use (if you earn less than the poverty level you can still bring a fiancee to the US if you have sufficient assets-it is assumed that you would have to sell those assets if they are needed to support the fiance/fiancee).
Pictures
And now for the pictures. Last time since it was just me and her we didn't really get any pictures of us together. Only one picture in fact, of me holding the camera in front of us and getting a real close-up shot of our faces. This presented a challenge for the initial application where they ask for at least 2-3 pictures of us together. So what I did was send that one picture and then a picture of just me and a picture of just her when we both posed against the same tiger statue. I figured even though we weren't in the same picture it would at least show we were at the same place and time. I am not sure, but I may have also sent a second copy of the same picture of us together because I think I read somewhere that is allowed if you only have one picture. In any case since it was approved it must have worked. But we took no chances this time around and took many pictures of us together so now this time I don't have too many pictures that don't have us in them. So there won't be as many pictures I will be posting here (I had 159 pictures altogether).
The waterfall:
The dam:
(mountain trip on the last day, this time the cloudiness is actually fog/clouds and not pollution like during my last trip)
Country:
Misc/More country:
Yes, in the middle of this recession, here I am going on vacation again to China. With the hours I've been working lately I would think there is no recession going on at all, but I realize it is only my department that is getting their regular full hours because of staffing, while other departments are working fewer hours since business is slower. There are no forced layoffs in my company (only temporary one week voluntary layoffs for those who want more time off from work than what they have vacation days available), only less hours available to work, so my job is secure. If even Wal-mart goes under then we are all really, really screwed.
After taking the first short flight from my local, small airport to Minneapolis (small, 'puddle-jumper' plane that was filled to capacity), the next flights from Minneapolis to Tokyo then Tokyo to Guangzhou, the planes were less than half full. I thought, Wow, the recession is really hitting big. I got a whole row of seats to myself and could raise the armrests up and lay down to sleep for the 15 hour flight from MN to Tokyo and the 5 hour flight from Tokyo to Guangzhou. But on the flight back, all the planes were filled to capacity again, so maybe the only thing that was different was what time of day I was leaving. I left the MN airport at 1 PM on a Tuesday, whereas the last time I went it was 9 or 10 AM I think (still arrived in China at 10:30 PM Wednesday both times). I left Guangzhou at 8:30 AM on a Monday both times. Not as many american couples bringing back adopted Chinese babies this time around, as last time there was like a dozen of them and this time there was only one.
Me, a vegetarian?
During my stay there this time around, yes, I was pretty much becoming a vegetarian. Last time I went I stayed almost exclusively in the tourist areas, and in the commercial district of Guangzhou. While I had some meals at the McDonald's, I did eat at several Chinese restaurants, but since they deal with more westerners they have adapted/adjusted their meals (or at least the presentation of them) to accomodate western tastes. This year it was the complete opposite and I stayed almost exclusively in the rural areas, eating at restaurants in small towns and having home-cooked meals at the homes of her family. Last year out of the thousands and thousands of faces I saw (outside the immediate airport area) of people walking around, in restaurants, on buses, etc. I saw maybe 100 westerners, this year I saw zero.
When eating at restaurants in China the first thing you want to do is wash your dishes. At the fancier places in the tourist areas they do this for you, but at the cheaper places you do it yourself or even if it looks clean you do it anyways. If you are unsure, wait to see if the people you are with are doing it. The restuarant will supply you with hot water or some tea, so you fill up your bowl with it, swish it around (don't forget to dip the chopsticks in the water/tea also!) then dump it out (usually in a bowl the restuarant provides).
From what I am guessing/witnessed, it's not that the restuarant doesn't wash the dishes at all (though some don't do a perfect job at washing them), it is just the water is not safe for drinking if it was not boiled first. It would be awfully time consuming to boil all that dishwater (and waiting for the water to cool enough to handle the dishes by hand), so the dishes need a good rinsing with clean, boiled water/tea after they were washed with the 'regular' (not safe for drinking) water.
During the ride from the airport to the resort my fiancee gave me a snack to eat (over an hour drive from the airport to the resort). She said it was 'cake', and it was packaged up like a Twinkie or Little Debbie snack. It was dark so I didn't get a good look at it, but I tasted like cake.....except for the outer coating. Don't know what it was, but it tasted like fish skin. Not that I know what fish skin tastes like, that is the only thing I can think of that it would taste like.
Ok, now to the part about why I was becoming a vegetarian. I was warned about these things last time I went but I didn't really experience them except for one dish at a resort. When it comes to meat they don't waste anything, they will serve/chop up the meat with the fat, bones and everything....including the head. Chicken, I don't know what they do differently but most of it wasn't the chicken I am familiar with. Every piece had a really thick layer of fat/skin on it, so for every 'piece' of chicken I had, only 1/2 to 3/4 of it was the actual meat that I liked and it tasted kind of like the chicken I'm used to.
Then I had FRIED chicken and I was excited about that when I saw the wings and the legs (wasn't KFC style chicken, but it looked as close to the kind of stuff I am used to eating as anything else in China with the exception of strawberries and grapes-grapes were quite large). Then I saw one big piece of fried chicken that I didn't recognize. It was a fried chicken head.
I had goose for the first time I remember ever eating it (compared to Europe and other places, eating goose in America is pretty rare), and I had other meats (except fish, I will get to that in a minute). While the meat itself wasn't so bad, there was always so much fat with it and the bones were a real problem. You could have a small chunk of meat but 80% of it could be bone. You have to eat very carefully so you don't swallow small pieces of bone. By the end of the meal, everybody will have a small pile of bones next to their plate that they've spit out. It's amazing that there aren't many Chinese people choking to death on the bones.
I avoided fish because it was right away I saw it being served with the head and tail still attached. And I had the awful experience last time of eating fried whole minnows (yes, we have sardines in America but I avoid those too). When I was eating at my fiancee's parent's house (with her parents, her 3 sisters, 1 of her 2 brothers, her daughter, nephew and some other in-laws) fish was one of the dishes. One of the children pointed at the fish and was asking for something. Someone took a toothpick, plucked out the eyeball and dropped it in the child's soup and then the child was happy. Seeing that I didn't want any fish at all even if it was a part of the fish that was nowhere near the head.
The most annoying part was that over there there was no passing around of the food so that I could get what I want and as much of it as I wanted. Everyone would just put stuff onto my plate/into my bowl thinking I would like it.
<someone says> "Here, have some ____, it's good for you".
<me thinking-not spoken> "Yes, it may be good for me, but I don't like it, or don't want anymore of it"
I'd try something, not like it, then be given another piece without asking for it. I'd be polite and force myself to eat it only to be given another piece. So I tried leaving it on my plate/bowl and work on eating other stuff, leaving the 'mystery meat/food' for last thinking that as long as I still have some of that stuff I don't like on my plate I won't be given anymore of it. That didn't always work as I would still sometimes be given more of the stuff I didn't want to eat.
There was so many times I was starting to get full so I was thinking, "OK, I'll just finish what is in my bowl and then I will be done eating", only to have something more added to my bowl (most often something I didn't want to eat). Many of times I was having to be tossing the mystery meat around in my bowl to get at the 'good stuff' (rice, noodles, green vegtables). It may have been rude, but I had to eventually put a hand over my bowl whenever someone was making a move to add more mystery meat to my bowl.
Then I was asked how I could be so tall when I eat so little....
Resort/Hotel
This year I stayed at a fancy resort. It was closer to her hometown and wasn't as expensive as I thought (otherwise I would have stayed there last year), and it wasn't expensive since it isn't closer to the airport. It cost me $221 for five nights (1500 RMB), or $44 a night where the cheaper hotel I stayed at last year was $22 a night. Other fancy hotels I looked at in Guangzhou, closer to the airport, was $79-$100+/night. The internet site I used to reserve the room however did not warn me that the resort required a 3000 RMB deposit (double the cost of the room for five nights), but I was still given the room without making the deposit (I could have paid it but then I would have had no money, but my fiancee and her family ended up paying for almost everything anyways). Of course they had trouble finding my reservation, so that had me worried for awhile, I guess they don't get many reservations through that website.
The bed was more comfortable this time. Last time the mattress was on hard wood instead of a box spring so it was pretty much like sleeping on the floor. This time the mattress was still placed on a harder surface than a box spring, but it was a little softer so I slept comfortably. The resort has two restaurants and a spa. Didn't actually go to the spa. I was tempted to, but now I think it was better that I didn't go to it. It had an outdoor pool and tennis court but the weather was cloudy and cold so neither one was used at all (cold for China at that time of year, but hot compared to Wisconsin this time of year). Felt like it was going to rain everyday, but didn't actually rain until the last full day I was there when we went to the mountains.
And once again I was denied a good view from my hotel window. Last year it was construction of a tall building right next door to the hotel, this year it was because the resort was built next to a hill so my view was of a road on the hill that ran behind the resort. Had a great view of two cars parked right in front of my window. The lobby/main entrance was actually on the 3rd floor, my room was on the fifth floor but right next to the back entrance of the hotel. Last night I was there I walked out to the back entrance to smoke a cigarette at 4 AM then a security guard comes walking up to me and stands nearby. He said something to me, not sure if he was telling me to get back inside or what, but I was done with the cigarette anyways so I went back inside. Alot of people worked at the resort and they mostly all drove motorbikes, so basically all the motorbikes were employees and all the cars were guests.
Transportation
Buses exist in the countryside and smaller cities because there are enough people there that they actually can be put to good use. Even the countryside had lots of people. Not sure of actual numbers here, but just trying to put things in perspective, but if for example in the US, if there is two towns separated by let's say 10 miles, there would be maybe 50-100 people living in the farms and houses between those two towns. In China it is more like 1000+ people living in between those two towns. With that many people it makes more sense to have buses run on a regular basis between the two towns (not to mention all the people who work in the fields between the towns, so there is alot of stops in the country to pick up/drop off people).
Everywhere we went we could have taken buses to get where we were going, but sometimes it was just more convenient to take a taxi or to use her sister's boyfriend's van. Although in the smaller cities and towns motorbike taxis are the norm instead of taxi cars (there were a couple of taxi cars that made trips back and forth from the resort which was a mile or two outide the city to the city/town).
Traffic isn't very organized. Yeah, there is stoplights, but mostly people are left on their own to merge into traffic and cross intersections. Pedestrians, bicycles, motorbikes are always crisscrossing in traffic in front of the cars without warning and you constantly have to dodge them by mere inches if you want to progress through traffic at any kind of reasonable pace. Traffic lines exist but are ignored (like the solid yellow line meaning no passing zone).
Throwing trash out car windows is very common. That is one thing I will have to make sure I tell my fiancee not to do when she gets here before we get a $500 littering fine.
One of the buses we were on broke down so we had to get off and get on the next bus. The next bus to come was actually from a seperate bus line so if we didn't want to wait for the next bus from the same bus line we had to pay the bus fee all over again. I really don't understand that. I could if they were seperate (private) companies, but I would have thought the buses were ran by the government so it is all basically the same thing so one bus line should honor the tickets from the other bus line.
Oh well, stuck it to the government in another way. When we went to this waterfall tourist area, my fiancee forgot to bring her ID. Since she didn't have her ID she would have to pay a higher entrance fee (and so would I). So instead, while the other three people with us went through the main gate paying the lower fee, she paid a local to take me and her on a motorbike through a side, blocked off entrance (about a three mile bike trip), and we met up with the rest of the group partway through the trail.
Country life
Went to her parent's house out in the country and walked through the fields outside their house. Went to where her parents worked in the fields and picked some vegtables from the small patch of land that they are allowed to use for their own food consumption and then paid someone to allow us to pick strawberries from their field. The parent's house actually had tiled floors which was a little surprising considering that looking at the house from the outside I would have expected dirt or at least stone floor. But chickens were allowed free access to the house and there was even a bucket inside the house with some hay in it so that one of the chickens would lay there and lay it's eggs so there was no need to go outside for eggs. And the house actually had a TV, but otherwise was pretty bare, but of course had a poster of Mao Zedong.
Trash everywhere outside, with the chickens pecking through the trash for food. Ox are as common over there as cows are over here. I was told my fiancee's mother had an ox one time and it was like her 'baby' where the family joked that she took better care of it then she did her own children. Well, my fiancee's father sold it eventually and he never heard the end of that! Years later whenever the family had some money the mother was still telling the father to use the money to go buy another ox.
Then we walked across the highway to see where she lived before her parents moved to her current house. The houses here were dirt floors with wooden doors that were half rotted away. The door handles on these were different than the other handles and locks I had seen on other houses during the trip. The other houses, like at her parent's, her apartment, and her sister's boyfriend's had metal doors, with a bolt on the outside that was locked with a padlock, kind of like how you would lock up an outdoor shed.
The Family
Met her whole family except one of her brothers. One of her sister's husband was supposedly an English teacher, but if he said 10 words to me I'd be lucky to understand 3 of them. I had to keep asking my fiancee what he was saying to me. I think she might have started learning english from him (and why when I first met her a year ago she was saying stuff like 'sugar' when she meant 'shower'), but since her english is so much more advanced than his is now, I don't think she got too much help from him. She taught herself most of it from books and she did take a couple of classes. The english teacher was teaching her daughter to call me 'Uncle' and I'm not sure that is a good idea. She can't call me 'Dad' yet, but that will be confusing/weird when her mom marries her 'uncle'...
Other than the 'English teacher' (and my fiancee), nobody spoke english, although her nephew did know a few english words and phrases, but that pretty much amounted to "hello", "English" and "I don't know".
The men in the family didn't really pay much attention to me until they saw me smoking. After the 3rd day I had bought a pack of smokes just so I could say I tried some Chinese cigarettes (no difference, FYI) and while I was at her parent's house waiting for all the women to cook I snuck outside to have my second cigarette of the trip. The men of the family (the only ones who smoke, none of the women smoked) started offering me cigarettes whenever they were smoking and after I gave them the rest of my cigarettes since I doubted I would be able to bring them back with me anyways, they were offering me beer too. Beer was sometimes cold, but when the english teacher offered me beer it was warm. Yuck. The beer was kind of close to American Beers (Miller, Budweiser, etc.) so it is what I was used to...when it is served cold at least.
The mother was a riot. Though she is in her mid 60's, her outer appearance makes her look like she is 90, but her heart makes her seem 20 or younger. Always with a smile on her face, except when the children were causing trouble. When the nephew got into some trouble she was chasing him around with a thick metal rod that was bigger (taller at least) than she was. Another time she was yelling at the children while she had a machete in her hand. No, she wasn't waving the machete around, but just seeing her holding it while yelling at the children was kind of surreal.
Shopping
The last day we went shopping to several little shop/towns in the mountains. we would stop at a place that had about a dozen tents/shops, then drive a few miles where there was another dozen or so tents/shops selling things, then a few more miles down the road the same thing, etc. There wasn't much to buy here unless you wanted food, but I did buy a couple small trinkets. Even in the cities and towns we went to before this, most of the shops I saw didn't sell much for tourists. Basically going down most streets the shops were set up something like this: Food/Food/Water(bottled water and water purifiers)/Food/Food/Scrap metal/Food/an alley full of a dozen or more fruit and vegetable sellers/Water/Food/Food/Food/Food/Water/Scrap metal
Anything else was very sparsely dotting in between these repetetive shops, like an occassional barber shop or a cell phone dealer. Even in China, most people have a cell phone.
Immigration
For those wondering how things are going with the immigration part of bringing my fiancee here to the US from China, I filed the k-1 application in July, so it was 11 months after I first started communicating with her. This was several months later than when I would have sent it originally, but it gave us more time to collect all the necessary paperwork so that we were prepared. We were overprepared actually as I got several things from her we didn't actually need at all, or at least not until much later in the process. Sent the application to the Nebraska service center by mistake rather than California so it got delayed a couple of weeks because of that.
Doing it all without a lawyer, and while that makes it a bit more confusing and time consuming, it saves alot of money. I used a couple of websites to help guide me through the process, so if anyone is interested and is going to be going through a similar process (or thinking of doing it) you can PM me for the links. These are sites filled with people who are currently (or have completed) going through the immigration processes (more than just the K-1 visa).
Got the approval notice from the visa center in the first week of December so the application was sent from the US to the consulate in Guangzhou, China. Took a month to get there then they sent her some forms to fill out which she mailed back, only to have it returned to her a couple weeks later because she also needed to fill out a form for her daughter. So that was another two week delay. And that is where we are right now.
She and her daughter will have an interview (which I am not allowed to attend-I could if my fiancee lived in certain countries, but the Guangzhou consulate does not allow this), so my trip was to see her again since I hadn't seen her in a little over a year and to deliver some documents to her that she will need for the interview. The mail system to China is terrible, with sometimes my packages not getting to her at all, while other times she gets them two months after I sent them. She is able to send me things though and I get them after two weeks or less.
Yes, the 5 year old daughter is required to attend the interview because she will be an immigrant too, but they probably won't ask her too many questions because of her age. They may just ask her if she knows about me and the situation and had met me, that kind of thing.
I have been hearing that her interview might not be for another 5 months yet, but in other countries it could have been next month. The Guangzhou consulate deals with 2,000 cases a month so that is why the wait is so long. While I had been told here on CFC that the rejection rate is high, I have been told on many other sites that if the application has made it to the consulate in the other country the rejection rate at that stage is very low (with the exception of possibly some countries in the middle east because of the 'war on terror' thing). So it is looking good at this point. Not filing the application so early may have been a good thing and might have helped get the application move past that first critical stage (homeland security, FBI background check, initial immigration evaluation of our relationship, etc.).
Part of the paperwork I had to give her was I had to prove that I am able to financially support my fiancee (and her daughter) so that she does not become a liability to the government (welfare, etc.). This basically means that if she does end up needing welfare then the government can come after me and make me pay the $ they spend on her (up to 5 years I believe). The threshold for this is I need to have an income that is 125% of the poverty level. I earn well over that limit (for a family of 3) so that is not a concern so I didn't even need to include my assets that other people have had to use (if you earn less than the poverty level you can still bring a fiancee to the US if you have sufficient assets-it is assumed that you would have to sell those assets if they are needed to support the fiance/fiancee).
Pictures
And now for the pictures. Last time since it was just me and her we didn't really get any pictures of us together. Only one picture in fact, of me holding the camera in front of us and getting a real close-up shot of our faces. This presented a challenge for the initial application where they ask for at least 2-3 pictures of us together. So what I did was send that one picture and then a picture of just me and a picture of just her when we both posed against the same tiger statue. I figured even though we weren't in the same picture it would at least show we were at the same place and time. I am not sure, but I may have also sent a second copy of the same picture of us together because I think I read somewhere that is allowed if you only have one picture. In any case since it was approved it must have worked. But we took no chances this time around and took many pictures of us together so now this time I don't have too many pictures that don't have us in them. So there won't be as many pictures I will be posting here (I had 159 pictures altogether).
The waterfall:
Spoiler :
The dam:
(mountain trip on the last day, this time the cloudiness is actually fog/clouds and not pollution like during my last trip)
Spoiler :
Country:
Spoiler :
Misc/More country:
Spoiler :
All people have the desire (and the right) to want to improve their lives...
![[party]](/images/smilies/partytime.gif "Party [party]")
