Preparing for a party

The Fourth of July part is coming up and I am getting out of town. Looking forward to it. As I’ve mentioned, I did not want to get roped into working it. It’s the third such event since I’ve been here, and I took a GIANT role in the first and a big role in the second. My intention was to only work the actual event and no preparation, but due to some factors I won’t get into here, I decided it was better if I stayed away. Let’s just say I had no intentions of getting sucked in to save the day.

So the best way of going about that came in the form of a flight ticket, which, so far – knock on wood – hasn’t yet been canceled. My luck with flights right now isn’t going to get me into the Hall of Fame. I’m only one for four of late, with the one departing on Wednesday still set but three others canceled. That’s only .250. No Cooperstown for me.

Anyway, back to the Fourth. A couple of weeks ago, when I was working in the Big Boss’ office, she asked what my “plans” were for the Fourth. I said I was leaving town. She seemed surprised that I wasn’t planning on working the event. Rather than tell her my thoughts on its organization – the main reason, worded nicely, that I’m not taking part – I said last year I’d done a big role with the intent of sitting back and letting the newbies take over. Quite truthfully, this is what people told me happened at post. You’re there for two years and in the first year you enthusiastically work it and the second year, you sit back and let the newcomers do it.

Well, apparently, this year, a bunch of the newcomers opted to get out of town or simply declined to volunteer, so they’ve been scrambling for help. And, as I am a sucker, I did decide to help – but not the day of.

Today, I spent five hours in the sweltering weather as the contractors put up the tents. I guess it wasn’t too bad, and even though I was out there at 6 a.m. it’s probably better that it went off on a weekend than as it had been planned originally, which was Tuesday from 5 p.m. until midnight.

The volunteer coordination has been so haphazard it’s not funny. Part of that is that the coordinator has been getting some bad information from all areas. Poor guy got notified Friday about 4:15 that he needed volunteers to work all day Sunday, six people every hour from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. He got a handful of people signed up and then the time changed from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. I felt so sorry I volunteered for both 6-11 shifts.

When I showed up this morning, things changed again. Somehow, they didn’t need as many people as they originally thought and two folks got dispatched to some other department’s overtime for the weekend (in the air conditioning, lucky bastards!). I stuck to my five-hour shift but when I left it didn’t look like there was any way in heck the work would last until 11 p.m. (Contractors are paid a flat rate per day; it’s not an hourly rate, so it’s really in the workers’ best interest to get stuff done quickly and efficiently.)

I’d left my contact information just in case I was needed, but it’s not even 8 p.m. and from what I can tell – I can see the tent from my window – it’s completely done. I don’t see any people milling around.

So I’m quite content with my overtime workload this time around. I hope that I am able to escape Guangzhou on Wednesday and that everything goes all right. I’m honestly out of practice leaving the country. I thought about packing today and had a complete mental block on what I was supposed to take.

So far, I’ve thrown extra underwear and a spare T-shirt and pants in a bag. That’s it. I really can’t remember what all I am supposed to bring.

I’m out of practice. Gotta fix that.

This is what it means to chillax

 It’s another three-day weekend here and I’m still in Guangzhou. After another flight change by China Southern and another round of calls to Expedia (just as frustrating as the canceled Katmandu trip, although it took nine calls v. 13 this time) I wound up with no place to go for the holiday.

My last-minute alternate plan was to hit the safari park, which is what I tried to do that other three-day here but my friends canceled out of me. Even though we knew it’d be super hot, over crowded, and a bit more expensive than a non-holiday weekend, we decided to go for it.

And once again, my friends canceled. Something about the kids preferred going to a pool party. Imagine that. A 100-degree day and kids wanted to have fun in the pool rather than be pushed and shoved by locals. Hard to begrudge them, for sure.

 

At first, I was just kind of like, oh, man, not again. And then I figured why not go ahead with the plan? So I schlepped myself out there and in the end, boy, was I glad I went by myself. Even with good kids, I can’t imagine dealing with that.

I wound up staying only about five hours, which was enough time for me to see most of the critters, but at some point, it got to be kind of like, “Oh look, another monkey.” Since I couldn’t read most of the signs, I couldn’t decipher the different species of each. And no one spoke English. The very first exhibit I saw was bears and one of the bears had much bigger ears than the other. I tried to ask three employees, using a lot of miming, what kind of bear it was (they had a bunch of lists on the side) but the people didn’t even try to understand what I was trying to ask.

 

The park, Chimelong, is a zoo plus “safari park.” The zoo has white tigers en masse – I loved them – and three panda cubs that are about a year old now. Lots of other stuff, of course, but those were the important ones for me.

The safari park is this big area where you can self-drive or take a little Disney-like mini train (drive train, not one on a track) and see animals in their “natural habitat.” It was kind of nice but a little sad. I don’t think camels and spotted deer are found in the same parts of the world.

To that end, it reminded me a little of Wild Adventures. I think the animals were better cared for – they at least had much more room – but it was stiff jolting to see. They had a show with monkeys and bears and even though it wasn’t that big a deal, it still made me sad. (All the bear did was follow a path that he’d clearly done before and ate treats along the way. The monkey thing was a little comic routine and it wasn’t like he was being mistreated, but it still was depressing.)

The “tiger diving show” was 4-5 white tigers in a big glassed-in area. There was someone on the roof with raw chicken on a pulley string. The chicken was dropped in view of the cats, trawled around for a bit until the tigers jumped into a little moat at the glass so people could ooh and aww at them. Eventually, one of the tigers would get the chicken and it would start again. I’ve no idea how long it went on because I couldn’t bear to watch it.

 

There were a bunch of white tigers spread throughout several pens and I couldn’t help but think for solitary animals they were pretty tight. However, it did demonstrate the successful breeding program they have there. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one white tiger and suddenly there were 3-4 in multiple pens. I gave them that.

Same for the pandas, which I saved for last. Their breeding program has been very successful and the triplet cubs are getting pretty big. I’d been meaning to see them for awhile and it was nice to finally to cross that off the list.

The day was brutally hot. I got there around 10 a.m. and most of the animals were in their after-lunch naps. (I don’t blame them; that’s what I did as soon as I got home.)  Elephants were getting hosed down and rhinos were wading in the pools. Despite the fact we’re still in the rainy season, it’s so hot and all the standing water evaporates quickly. I guess the heat was because the camel’s humps were empty. I’ve never even seen that before.

For the most part, everyone who could was just chillaxin’ in the shade. The pandas had the best – solid patches of ice on which to crash. I was so jealous.

So that’s day one of the three-day weekend. Tomorrow’s plan is the glasses market again, but I have no idea about Monday. “Jurassic World” is showing here somewhere so I hope to find it.

Full house

My household doubled this weekend. My one intern and myself have gotten company in the form of another intern and an intern-to-be.

Well, technically, that last one isn’t in just yet, or at least hasn’t made it to the apartment. He’s one I had from last year but his paperwork hasn’t come through yet. However, he already had a plane ticket and asked if I could house him until all the paperwork is done. We can’t officially house him until it comes through, but he can stay with me more or less informally until then. So he’s coming tonight and joining the two I already have.

They’re sick puppies right now. Apparently yesterday’s meal – whatever it was – didn’t agree with them. One was puking all night last night and the other is down for the count now.

Collectively and individually, they are so much better than Girl Intern last year. They have personalities, and they’re nice personalities.

One’s from Kansas and goes to grad school in Texas; one goes to school in Nebraska, where he’s from; the remaining one goes to school in Virginia but is from Montana, where our ambassador is from. He said his dad knows him, but it’s from work – his dad is an editor and publisher.

Anyway, we officially have more people than are allotted free breakfasts in the morning. I get one for every bedroom, and the guys are doubling up. So no free breakfast for me this week, a sacrifice I’m fine with making. I think it’s awesome that my apartment building is willing to feed me but it’s really rather inconvenient to go down and get it.

First world problems, I know.

Next week is going to be a very busy one at work. I am booked Tuesday through Friday evening. As a result, I had to spend today baking. We’ve got a going-away party for the big boss on Friday (though she’s not leaving for some time after that; I’ve no idea why it’s so early) and I signed up to bring something sweet.

When I packed out that apartment, I got custody of the leftover foodstuffs to keep or distribute, and I kept the baking stuff. One of the items was cacao powder, and I poked around for a cookie recipe that used it and whatever else I happened to have. I found one that bills itself as Mexican Hot or something like that – it has cinnamon, cayenne and black pepper in it. Not bad at all.

And I got just a generic chocolate cookie recipe, which, as it turns out, is really hard to find. I never did find just a plaint chocolate cookie recipe; they all called for chocolate chips. Those are really pricey, and not even available in my little neck of the woods, so I just took that recipe and skipped that part. Instead, I dunked them in powdered sugar (even rarer here, but I bought mine when I was in the U.S. last September) and made kind of “snow on the mountain”-type cookies.

My kitchen continues to be a thorn in my side. It’s way too small for cooking, so I brought everything out to the kitchen and coffee tables to work. The pepper cookies are pretty good, and the others are really tasty, too.

I also have a cake mix, but I’ve run into another problem: I don’t have any room in my little fridge and freezer. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a stunted freezer that’s filled with Junior Mints. Right now, it also has Tuesday’s Bible study meal in it; I had planned on hosting last week but we went out to dinner instead. It’s in three big Ziplocs, which takes up an entire shelf. The shelf, incidentally, used to be a drawer, but I learned I could expand the area a tiny bit by pulling out the drawer.

The other two drawers are the ones mostly filled with Junior Mints. I have eaten some; enough to have crammed one batch of the cookies in there, but that’s about it. I have no room to store a cake, and no airtight container to store it in anyway. I’ve decided that I will just bake it tomorrow night and use it for dessert for Bible study. I doubt we will finish it, but that’s what interns are for.

I also did my cooking for the week this afternoon, so I’ve really been in the kitchen all day. The part when I wasn’t in the kitchen was when I was down in the breakfast room, which I did solely because I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it for the rest of the week.

We’ve been doing a lot of movies. Even before the two guys got here, the two women had been watching a lot. Last night, the guy present wanted to see “Being John Malkovich” and right now, we’re into “O Brother, Where Art Thou.”

It’s likely that the intern from last year won’t stay too long, and the other guy is only here for a week, max. But right now, we’re just brimming with people.

Closing the book on a month

The last two weeks were just super busy and I am so glad they are over. It’s now June, which is kind of unbelievable.

I guess I have about 10 more months in Guangzhou, and then home leave and then training in D.C., followed by an arrival in Istanbul about this time next year. 

Between now and the time I leave here, I calculated I have about 12 more holidays, two of them multi-day ones. I tried to lay out some potential travel or stuff to do on those days. In September, I’m taking off a week to travel through China, and I’m debating taking off a week in November to go to New Zealand. 

The next one, the one I’m taking off a spare day for, is in June and I finally got an alternate for Katmandu: I’m going to go to Busan, Korea. It’s on the southeast tip and is on a beach, plus there are mountains. The ticket was about the same as Katmandu, so that worked out fine. I don’t have a place to stay yet but am not worried about it. A guy at work is married to a woman from there so I am going to pick his brain on suggestions. It’ll be low-key, though.

It’d be nice if before I leave here, the Disneyland in Shanghai would open, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. It was due to open this summer, fall and then winter but it’s now been postponed until spring. Tokyo Disney is still an option, though. 

I still want to go to Katmandu, and Brunei is also on the list. Those are really only the two new countries I can probably visit (at least unless I take off more time on any given day) but I am considering Krabi, Thailand; and Singapore again. I’ve been to Singapore for a daylong visa run and to Bangkok and Chiang Mai, but there’d be something new to see. 

Who knows, though. Hong Kong is still the go-to place. It’s expensive, but cheap to get to and that counts for something. Plus, it’s also only two hours away and requires little planning. That counts for a lot.

A group went this weekend but I stayed home and opted to do not a whole lot. It’s just so amazingly hot. The other day it was 93 with a “feels like” of 110. My two-block walk to work is enough to sweat through clothes. Yesterday, it also monsooned like nobody’s business. We’ve got it all here, folks. 

I woke up with a sore throat yesterday (it’s escaladed today) and decided to just do some cooking. I’m going to make a dessert for a going-away party next week and I needed to test-run a new recipe. After packing out some colleagues, I got some cacao powder and found a cookie recipe. It sounded a little sketchy – cookies with two kinds of pepper – so I wanted to give it a shot. They’re pretty good. They definitely bit you back. 

The cacao powder – yes, not cocoa – came from the apartment of a colleague who had to leave quickly. This week was the packout. I am so glad it’s over. I still have a couple of steps late, but they pale in comparison to arranging someone’s house, then overseeing people come in and pack everything, then load it and take it away.

It took all day Wednesday and then Thursday morning. They had 86 boxes and 3300 pounds of stuff. By comparison, I had about 750 pounds, and probably 250 of that was toiletries and other consumables. 

Today is one more small inventory and after that, I hope it’s done. Of course, I still have five bottles of wine to try to get to them. Maybe it’s never done.