Our "New" Old Bicycles

We bought some bikes last week. After hearing that nice bikes get stolen all the time, we've invested just $44 in these two old gems. Check 'em out.

Our First Apartment (Ever)

We’ve been on the move since our wedding, traveling around or staying at our parents’ places. So the apartment we’re about to discover is going to be our first official apartment.

The apartment is one of the foreign teachers’ buildings, on the southern end of the empty campus, directly across the soccer field, which is circled by the running track. We get our luggage out of the car, say hi to the landlady living on the first floor of the building, and say bye to LJ and the Peugeot driver.

Our apartment is on the sixth and last floor, and the building doesn’t have an elevator. So Yellow’s first duty is to bring all the heavy bags up. And it’s quite the difficult task. 

Our landlady speaks very good English and starts showing us around the apartment. The door opens up to the living room, with an old TV in front of the large window and h a big air conditioner/heater unit in the corner. The only unit in the apartment and it is pretty chilly in here right now. A table with two chairs on one side and a gray futon on the other side completes the room. The bedroom on the left, with a large bed and a wardrobe, is adjacent to an office room, with a couple of desks and shelves. A washer is on the balcony outside this last room, but it looks like the water inside the pipes is frozen. Straight ahead is a tiny little square with a sink and mirror connecting the living room to the bathroom, large enough to fit a toilet and a shower. The kitchen is well equipped with the usual kitchen appliances, even featuring an electric rice cooker.

This looks good, and it’s going to look even better once everything is cleaned. And once that standing water is removed. No wonder there is black mold a little bit everywhere. And for the instructions on all the electronics, they are written in Chinese. No surprise there, but we’ll have to figure out the meaning of these characters pretty fast if we want to know how to use the washer for example. And that heater, because man, it is cold!

We haven't even been here five minutes and somebody knocks on the door. Janay, a fellow foreign teacher from Southern California, is the first one to come visit. She is followed very rapidly by John, who we’ve been in contact with, arriving with a welcome food package featuring a delicious smelling loaf of banana bread, some homemade granola, milk powder, and a jug of yogurt. No time to feel out of place, we are already connected.

   

 

 

 

A Ride in a Peugeot

We wait for a little bit less than an hour in the arrival hall, as we ended up in another terminal than the one we told LJ. You can't get an idea of a city or a country by looking at its airport, they look the same everywhere. And it seems that people in airports all over the world do the same thing these days: they talk on their smart phone or touch the screen of their tablet. Or perhaps it’s the contrary. Well, the airport in Wuhan is not an exception.

LJ finally rushes into the arrival hall, welcomes us and soon we are in the car. Her friend, who happens to speak French and owns the car – a Peugeot – is driving while LJ is making conversation.

The drive to our university takes about an hour, mostly on multi-lane highways. We definitely notice some driving trends. First of all, people never really stay in their lane. It’s like the driver looks straight ahead and doesn’t care too much about what’s going on behind or on the sides. So if you want to pass a car, on the left or on the right, you honk as a warning. Also, it seems that people in Wuhan don’t really know how to drive in the snow, like people in the south of the US or France. Cars are stopped, in the middle of the road. They are bumping into each other and some have stopped traffic.

Finally, people own pretty nice cars. The German brands of course are around; the Japanese and American ones are also pretty common. The French ones – Peugeot and Citroen – are some of the favorites, may be because the factory is in the city. Citroen is even the official taxi car.

We don’t really get to drive through Wuhan. We feel a bit lost somewhere between the countryside and the sprawling city. Here and there, we see clusters of high-rises. And an explosion of development everywhere else: new interstates and train lines being built, new high-rises and factories being constructed. We finally make our way across the Han river to our town: Hanshang, one of the “three towns of Wuhan”.

After being stuck in a traffic jam right in front of our university – Jianghan University (JU) – we finally arrive on the campus. Three years ago, this area was assimilated to the countryside. In two years, the subway is arriving in front of the university, hence the construction and the traffic jams.

Landing in China

We’ve been in the air for three hours and the three-year old boy that is seated in front of Red is finally sleeping, after spending the first half of the flight screaming in every direction. He kept repeating the same words over and over again. Of course, we didn’t understand anything. Almost everybody else did. There are may be five other white people in this plane, the rest are probably Chinese.

As we are starting the descent, we make our way through the clouds and get our first sight of China. Lakes, rivers and ponds are all over the landscape, and snow is sprinkled on the ground. Rectangle-shaped ponds of every size are almost overlapping.

As soon as the plane stops moving, everybody rushes through the aisle to get off. The plane is on the tarmac, meaning we’ll have to take a bus to the terminal. We are greeted by a cold, humid breeze as we get off the plane. Fortunately, we already have our thick scarves on.

In line before going through immigration, we get excited as we recognized the Chinese characters 谢谢, which mean “thank you”. The young couple in front of us, very nicely, teaches us how to say “you’re welcome”.

We show our passports, the immigration officer looks at it for about thirty seconds and gives it back. Our bags come right away on the belt and, as we have nothing to declare, we move toward the exit. Hard to believe, but in five minutes, we are already in the arrival hall, waiting for LJ, our contact at the university, to pick us up.