The bacon to my scrambled eggs

Happy bacon day! Classic. 

This post isn't as much about me (thank god, right?), it's more about my best friend, Lindsay Thompson. Lindsay is a perfect balance for me, an unparalleled puzzle piece that fits me perfectly. When I'm a drama queen (never), she's calm. Do you know her? I hope so. Everyone should have a Lindsay

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Homesickness is a strange thing. Everyone's experienced it. When you are nostalgic for home, it doesn't matter how far you are from your family or friends. You can be a short drive from home or on the opposite side of the earth, it's the same feeling. It can come from missing a person, a place, food that doesn't upset your belly, or just lacking familiar things. I've not had too much of this during my first year in Asia.  (A year!?!?). However, recently I had some serious homesickness, manifesting itself in the form of nightmares and tears, triggered by my concern for my friend, Lindsay.

Lindsay and I were college roommates for 2 years, fluent in interpreting each others eye contact and mumbles (sometimes it's scary good), captains of our university volleyball team, and often found not more than a foot away from the other-even on the SU Athletic Hall of Honor.  She is the bacon to my scrambled eggs. She's hit a bit of a rough patch regarding her health. Not a stop sign but a speed bump.  She just had surgery and is now recovering from major surgery trying to get back to her normal life...working 3 jobs, 

Lindsay's taught me a lot. Yeah I know that sounds mad cheesy. Besides the unwavering courage she has sustained through this time, she also recently taught me about homesickness. When she first went to the hospital, she spent quite some time in the ICU. When she got home, I asked her what the best things about being home were. She said she missed her bed, soft sheets and soft clothes, food, and obviously the comfort of being somewhere familiar after somewhere so unassimilable. Do you want to know how different that is from being homesick on literally the other side of the world in Asia? Absolutely nothing.


Great, now that makes my wallowing self pitty days where I JUST WANT A SANDWICH feel embarrassingly trivial. Well Christina at least people aren't sticking needles in your arms searching  for a vein. Oh and just shut up about the lack of AC.


It doesn't matter where you are. Missing home is missing home. If you're 15 miles away at Seton, you'll miss the same things as you do when you're living in Asia. I'll be fine, Lindsay will be fine.






I've spent more time alone in the past year than ever before, by far. This has made me realize how lucky I am to have my friendships back home. I'm grateful for the people who keep in contact with me, and vice versa. My success in making friends in China has been...uhh, unfruitful. That's alright though, because its made me realize that the friendships like the one I have with Lindsay, the sustainable ones, are not only valuable but INvaluable. The relationships like Lindsay's that transcend oceans of distance, and a year of time (a lot when you're 22) are something to be clutched to for dear life. Thanks for that, Linds.




Other things Lindsay has taught me? How to take really good photos....volleyball ones that end up in Southwestern magazines sent to all current students and alumni. Remember that time?

CRU socks are always appropriate (perhaps that was just me...)

That serious pictures are never necessary, and there is no other chin my head fits under more perfectly. Oh and of course, EVERY DAY SHOULD BE BACON DAY, Y'ALL.

My mom and sister arrive tomorrow. AHHHHH. Soon this temporary homesickness will be relieved. And Lindsay is recovering well, not without pain, but she's a fighter if I've ever seen one.

Mountaineering through Inner Mongolia

Honestly, if given the choice, above almost anything else I would really like to climb mountains. Not just any mountains, but the biggest baddest mountains out there. Serious mountaineering is the coolest thing ever. I watch countless documentaries about them just to pretend for 5 minutes I am one of them. I know it's a random, dangerous and expensive hobby...so I'd just like to try it for half a day then give it back to the people who aren't posers like me. Like the pinch hitter on the Everest summit team. Okay.. not not my best metaphor.

Just a few minutes outside of Yinchuan lie the Helan Mountains. They run between Ningxia (my province) and Inner Mongolia. I've been a few times, to a place called suyukou. I live in the desert of china and somehow there's a national forest towards at the top of the mountains? The first time I forgot my camera. Smooth move. The second time I brought Austin back! 

AustIn and I both agreed that this was our favorite day of his trip. 

After being up pretty high, we wandered down the mountain, out of the forest, and down a road where we stumbled on a quiet little Buddhist temple and part of the Great Wall. It was amazing.  Sometimes between the snot rockets, rice comas, and the horrifying toilets I kind of forget how awesome China is. Things like this are necessary reminders because they help me keep in mind how much I like China, and why I'm here.

Another part of the Helan mountains has really crazy old rock art carvings. I went back in May to see some of the 6,000 pictures found carved into the side of the mountain. Some of them date back 10,000 years. Imagine Mongolian Mountain Men carving pictures into rocks on the side of a mountain 30 feet in the air. Although I personally like the scenery better, the rock art is what makes these mountains somewhat famous in China. It's nice to spend some time in the mountains because I've not had much time around mountains before. Which makes me interest in mountain climbing all that more bizarre. Although, most of all I just want to jump the border to Inner Mongolia before I leave.

This is the most famous rock art picture of them all. It's the sun god and it kind of definitely looks like an alien. The weather was not great, and lots of the carvings were really high up so I had to mega zoom so I didn't get the best photos...

Branching out and blending: Austin in China

Austin came to visit me! After nearly 10 months in Asia, somebody finally made the trek to this side of the world.  It was a pretty stellar 3 weeks. We spent some time in Yinchaun, went to the mountains and he watched Netflix while I babysat..err taught English. Having him here was just as awesome as it sounds. 

We also took an overnight train to Xi’an, famous for the Terracotta Army. The Terracotta Warriors were built in about 200 BC by a 13 year old emperor who was so terrified of death, he needed a fake army with over 8,000 soldiers and hundreds of horses and chariots to be buried with him (no seriously). 

The army was pretty cool…but not nearly cool enough for people to call it the 8^th wonder of the world (that should be Angkor Wat in Cambodia). Most of our time was spent buying souvenirs for Austin, and hunting down the nearest sandwich for me.  Yinchuan has two restaurants with western food: KFC and Pizza Hut. So, naturally when presented with a weekend outside of this city, I established a Chinese food ban from our diets. Austin didn’t fight me for a second.

The coolest part might have been successfully blending in as real Terracotta Warriors. 

Culinary highlights of Xi’an included me inhaling a subway foot long sandwich in about 2 ½ minutes…my first sandwich in almost 4 months... and spending probably ¼ of my paycheck on Starbucks.

... and eating french fries and an oreo  Mcflurry from McDonalds.

I promise we got a little bit of Eastern culture into our days, I just ensured they were adequately alternated with Starbucks and sandwich breaks.

 

Moving from Cambodia to China: 10 differences

I realize this is a little late...um I moved here months ago...but thank goodness for my borderline obsessive nature to write everything down. Moving from Cambodia to China resulted in some culture shock. Spending half a year in a 3rd world country will make moving anywhere much different. I realized many different things upon my arrival in China than I ever would have if I'd come straight from America. Here are 10 things (in no order) that I noticed immediately after arriving in China.

1) PEOPLE FOLLOW TRAFFIC LAWS? Well kind of. By this I mean they usually drive on the right side of the road. Traffic in Cambodia was like nothing I've ever seen. I honestly can't believe I biked my butt around in the middle it for months and made it out with all my limbs intact. If you've seen traffic in China, you might think I'm nuts for using the adjective "organized"....but the fact that a red light receives a usually stop response, rather than a plow-straight-through-but-honk-your-horn-to-make-it-legitimate response is just mind blowing.

2) So. Many. Old. People. China's population is about 15% elderly, while Cambodia's elderly population is under 4%. Old people in China are so active, they are always out walking in the parks, playing mahjong or exercising. In Cambodia it was very rare to see an elderly person. That is partly due to poor healthcare and also a very obvious result of the Khmer Rouge where about 2 million people died. My very first day in China I realized that I could count on one hand the number of elderly people I had seen in the previous 6 months.

3) Sidewalks. What are these? We can (usually) walk here without being run over?

4) Oh my gosh I can understand what people are saying. My Khmer is...nonexistent.

5) Oh lawwwwwd it's cold. When I left Cambodia it was in the high 90s daily with painful humidity, where AC was a HUGE luxury.When I arrived in China it dropped to the 20s at night. The heat was shut off by the government a week later.

6) A car? When was the last time I rode in a car? Oh. My sister's VW bug on the way to LAX in September.

7) WHOOP I blend in. Kind of. Sometimes.

8) Walking. Why aren't people yelling at me while I walk? What if I want a ride? A tuk tuk? A moto? Oh right, no one walks anywhere in Cambodia.

9) Wow there are literally no Westerners here. Where are the white people? Cambodia was crawling with tourists and NGOs working to save everything. After a few months here I can count on my two hands the number of foreigners I've seen here who aren't my coworkers.

10) PEOPLE ARE HUGE. No they're not. Chinese people are tiny. In comparison to Cambodians, Chinese people are monsters. Me in comparison to both..I'm Shrek.

The Resurrection: The time I beat a teen with a pineapple.

I haven't blogged in a while, partly because I became lazy, and partly because I felt that I didn't have many exciting things to share. Buuuut with some encouragement from friends back home (Kiersten Brown) I have decided to resurrect my blog.

I've since moved to Yinchuan, Ningxia. This is my first blog post from China, and it marks 8 months living in Asia! On my 7 month anniversary, I celebrated by beating a teen (maybe a preteen) with a pineapple.

Here is a picture of the entrance to my apartment building. This photo is taken with the flash of my camera, but my apartment complex has no outside lights. I do realize that I am a bit of a pansy but I'm always a little bit nervous walking through dark places at night alone in a foreign country...call me crazy.

One night I was walking home after dinner with friends, holding a pineapple in a plastic bag that was given to me for free by a creepy middle aged Chinese man who runs the fruit stand by my apartment (that's a different story). There were kids playing some kind of game, one of them was holding something that looked like a plastic sword. I heard the boys say "It's the foreigner!" so they stopped playing. Thanks boys for the flattering introduction and wildly obvious statement regarding my nationality.

Anyways, the boys stopped playing and I walked on by towards my apartment building. Suddenly, the boy with the sword came straight towards me and grabbed me by the forearm. Cue fight or flight instincts. And terror. Without even thinking, I swung the pineapple like a sledgehammer. I'm talking full force swing, over my head, with all of my 5 foot 8 strength, into the upper back/neck of this kid...with my pineapple. Not really the ideal equipment to be armed with in a fight. I was horrified and frightened, so my first instinct was to beat the person who grabbed me by any means possible. This particular day, those means were in the form of the free tropical fruit I had in my hand.

 Well, the good news is that there was no fight. Because immediately after bludgeoning this Chinese teen with my pineapple, I see that he's blindfolded. Ummm what? It turns out, he was playing a game with his friends and thought I was one of them...cause he couldn't see me...cause he was blindfolded. Whoops.

I didn't apologize, and I'm not sorry at all. The only thing I am sorry about it losing that pineapple. I was going to eat that...

Don't be a hero

One time, on my way to play with an elephant I had an allergic reaction to a deer in the form of hives on my face and neck. One time, Cambodians rubbed Tiger Balm all over my hives to heal me. Actually...four times.

I've allllllways wanted to play with elephants. It's actually kind of amazing that I spent almost 6 months in southeast Asia without seeing any elephants. My roommate, Melissa, and I have been talking about elephants since we arrived in Cambodia in September. FINE-NUH-LY we made the trip by jeep to a wildlife rescue center about 90 minutes outside of the city to see ourselves some wildlife. 

Our trip started with some really big deer. Everyone was petting the deer. However, because I'm from central Austin where deer are so plentiful it's more exciting to see a squirrel, I wasn't going to touch this mammoth of a creature. When people stopped loving on it, the monster started bowing its head and touching it's antlers to a girl with a camera that could cover my rent for the next 12 months. So naturally, I started petting it to calm it down to help her out. DON'T BE A HERO CHRISTINA. Approximately 47 seconds later I started breaking out in hives all over my face, neck, and chest. No one had benadryl, but oh good we had liquid Tiger Balm.



The first time they applied Tiger Balm, it burned, but it was preferable to the burning hives. The second time, it hurt more, but was tolerable. The third time, my eyes began to water. The fourth time tiger balm was rubbed on my face, I couldn't hold back tears. It felt like someone lit my face on fire. In the middle of the Sahara desert. While pouring shampoo in my eyes. And drinking clorox.

The remedy for that? Rub the coldest thing I could get my hands on all over my face. A can of beer from a local vendor. After about an hour of pain, the hives went down, and I continued on my tour as if nothing happened. I did, however, lose almost all my dignity as I sat on a wooden table, teary eyed, rubbing a can of beer on my face.  Now, I really wish I had a picture of that.

Once fully recovered, I hung out with tigers, lions, leopards, sun bears, snakes, monkeys (not too exciting...you see them in the city), and Lucy the elephant.

I didn't quite keep my composure while interacting with Lucy the elephant...which has subsequently provided some pretty funny photos.

Lessons learned: Don't touch deer. Don't be a vet. Don't be a hero. 

Ridin' Dirty

Navigating the roads in Cambodia is all about finding a delicate balance between cautious-this-is-my-first-day-of-driving-school defensive driving, and I-was-Evel-Knievel-in-a-former-life-everybody-move-over aggression. If you aren't careful, you'll get run over. Literally. If you aren't aggressive, you won't get anywhere. Literally.

Things I've seen while biking in the past week:
-Cows getting in the way of traffic

-Two men transporting a fridge on a moto

-A 10 passenger van full of pineapples. Completely full. Literally, I couldn't see in any of the windows. Or the driver of the van, for that matter.

-A monkey running across telephone wire above me. Like a squirrel. 

-4 adults crammed onto one motorbike

-A 10 or 11 year old child operating a moto. 

-A mother nursing her newborn on the back of the fathers motorbike 

-People getting bag snatched 

Things I haven't seen while biking in the past week:

-Traffic signals. They took out signals on one of the busiest roads in the city.

-People obeying the few traffic signals that do exist. 

-Helmets being used 

-The moto that nicked my arm with their side mirror while zooming past. 

-Turn signals being used

-The multiple cars/motos/buses that have almost hit me 

-Any indication that the concept "yield" exists

Here are some photos of what the traffic and crazy vehicles that occupy the road here.

Just a casual commute to work with 98 other people on a truck with standing room only. If you look closely at the moto closest to the camera, there is a family of 4 piled on. The youngest is half standing/half squatting in front of the father who is driving...without a helmet. This is the Cambodian car seat. 

Chillin' on some plant life. 

A moto with 50 kites attached. 

A bike with 50 balloons attached. I've actually been bopped in the head multiple times by balloons attached to bikes. 

A bike with a small convenient store attached. 

Casual traffic in front of the royal palace. Blocks away from my apartment. 

Today, while driving in the right lane of a 3 lane road, luckily, I saw the car attempting to turn right from the left lane. This was annoying. Unfortunately, because I was paying attention to the car attempting to turn right from the left lane 5 feet before his turn came, I neglected the car driving the WRONG way down the road straight at me in my right lane. This was more annoying. I successfully avoided both cars. Narrowly. Somehow, I'm still alive.