a large city about 1 hours drive from Xinzheng, my new hometown. Xinzheng is considered a rural farming town out here in China, but it actually boasts of about 600,000 people living here. While it has a ton of normal shopping, the prices can be a little high and the variety of items is small. Consequently, a lot of the foreigners and students prefer to go into the much larger Zhengzhou (8 Million Inhabitants ~ the size of New York City) for a greater selection of products and more opportunities for bartering prices down.
One of the things Zhengzhou offers that Xinzheng doesn’t is a far larger number or walk-in clinics, including one that works solely on Job Physicals or Physicals required by Visa Applications. So this past week we were sent into Zhengzhou to visit the clinic to have our physicals for the Permanent Residency. This was really our first major foray outside of the College Campus, since we have been so busy moving in and settling down. It didn’t help that classes were starting last Monday and we had to instantly jump into lesson planning. But all that aside, this was really our first adventure and we soaked up every minute of it. I’ll post more about the physical itself later, but here are a few things we noticed in our drive through the city:
Two lane roads that suddenly have five lanes of cars, scooter and taxis driving down the sidewalks, huge poles holding up the overpasses above suddenly appearing in the middle of a driving lane, no merging lanes, and a complete disregard for any road signs contributes to what seems like absolute chaos. It’s truly amazing that there are not more accidents than we saw. There are NO traffic laws ~ at one point we had a four way corner with cars going from each corner all at the same time, crossing three lanes of traffic in any given direction. The only exception is that you are responsible for everything in front of you. Conversely, you don’t have to look behind you at all, whoever is behind you is responsible for not hitting you. It’s pretty confusing, but they work it out. Makes for a lot of butting into lines.
Sorry! I started writing this back on the 25th, but I only just finished it. 😦 Many Apologies!
Well this trip was quite the fun experience. . . ~ Murphy’s Law was working in overtime throwing things in our path! If one more thing had gotten screwed up, I’d have just screamed. I probably should have known that was how it was going to go when my first photo of the trip was of the Jack Swigert (coined “Houston, we’ve had a problem) 😛
As I mentioned before, my mother and I were part of a group of four people who weren’t going to fit on the original flights arranged for everyone else ~ they ran out of seats for us. So instead, they decided we should leave the morning after the rest of our team. Which would have been fine had Sias not wanted us to pay for the hotel up front. They agreed to re-imburse us later, but with hotels around the Denver Airport as expensive as they were, this was a lot of money that we didn’t really want to spend out-of-pocket. Who knew how long we were going to have to wait to be re-imbursed? . . . it just didn’t seem worth the risk. Continue reading
Not that I necessarily love the style itself ~ 20s pole dresses are more my mom’s style than mine (I like the 40s and 50s) ~ but I just adore girls who are confident enough to dress up “sassily” and have some fun with their style. It took a lot of courage for me to just wear my really big, feathery headband out on a non-Halloween day ~ but I really want to be more confident about my slightly unique sense of style like this girl is!
Now that I am in China, I have learned that having the WeChat application (texting app) is absolutely vital to living here. However, when I attempted to download it to my mom’s Samsung Galaxy Phone, it kept giving me an Error 497 message and refusing to download. After a few days of fiddling with it, I finally figured out the problem (can apply to other apps having errors to)~ I needed to clear the Google Play Cashe (it screwed up on the first download and this scrambled its brains 😛 )
1. Go to your Phone’s home screen.
2. Find “Settings” (Usually looks like a Gear)
3. Go to the “More” tab.
4. Find “Application Manager”
5. Go down the list to find “Google Play Store” (or app you are struggling with) and Click to open
6. There will be a lot of information here ~ “Force Stop”, “Uninstall Updates,” and a certain ways down, you will see “Clear Cashe”
7. Click the “Clear Cashe Button”
8. Now close and go try your app again!
Good Luck!
“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city” ~ Roman Payne
Language Translation
Deceptively Blonde 