Rebecca A. Foster

This morning while teaching a class I took that first swig of my oolong tea and OH SWEET DRAGONS, THE PAIN, my tongue is still scorched from the scalding hot water. And the thing is, I guess I am not very smart, this happens to me all the time. (Boiling hot water for tea is provided for us at school all day long.) I'm evidently terrible at calculating heat loss divided by time lapse. Or time lapse divided by heat loss. Whatever. So then I had the best idea ever: why not make tea/coffee travel tumblers out of that plastic-y material they make mood rings out of? You could easily see when your coffee or tea moves from boiling-hot to drinkable hot-hot, and determine your favorite color of hot. No more scorched tongues! Has anyone invented this yet? (I ask because I had the idea to put television shows for sale on the internet about three years before iTunes came out, and hello! I don't want that to happen again.) If not, I'm inventing it now. I want one! Related: have you e...

Chongqing is trying to kill me, one infection at a time. After my last post, I caught a bad cold. At least it wasn't the flu again? I have a tradition of catching Thanksgiving colds, so if this cold thought it was going to stop me from gorging myself at the hotel, oh no it did not. I pilled-up, and gorge I did. Three servings of mashed potatoes, a half a wheel of brie and three desserts later, I was the fullest I've been since I came to China. (It was also my first time having sushi on Thanksgiving.) Our group stayed for about 4 hours, and it was such a delight to feel like my old self again, for at least a few hours. It's pretty incredible the power that foods have on our psyche. Friday night I went out of town with a couple of friends to visit another friend for the weekend. I was still popping down cold medicine pills every few hours, and I almost didn't go, but our trip was a lot of fun! Here is a picture of us having lunch at a very typical roadside restaurant, e...

Today I went running out at T's and took a few pictures along the way: A power line worker having a nap in the trees: An elderly man sitting on his porch reading a book: Just for you, Techno, a Chinese chicken coop: A woman doing the wash, and two de-feathered ducks for dinner (hanging on the pole): Pretty much everyone thought I was crazy for running for no reason. I stopped to talk to a few people along the way. I could see it in their eyes, "Why are you running if no one is chasing you?" One guy stopped on his motorcycle and backed up to offer me a ride back to town. So last year's Thanksgiving was not great. I taught all day, and then we had possibly the worst Thanksgiving dinner ever of dry chicken. So, this year, my thoughtful mom sent me money to go to a hotel in the city serving Thanksgiving dinner for expats. Really good food, and I am so excited!! 10 of us are going, and I am going to eat and eat and eat to my heart's content. I...

1. Chinglish thing I said on the phone: "I hope you feel very a lot better." The word for 'very' is frequently used in Chinese articulation. I try to break my students of adding 'very' to everything, but looks like I've caught the 'very' bug. D'oh! 2. This week I jumped into a taxi while it was making a u-turn in the middle of a busy intersection. I could see a bunch of people waiting on the other side of the street for a taxi, so I darted out in traffic and jumped in while it was pausing in the u-turn. The driver didn't even blink. I could hear people on my side of the street saying, "Look at that foreign girl!" I think I now have my PhD in Chinese Taxi Hailing. I wonder how my skills will transfer to NYC taxi hailing? 3. A couple of the Peace Corps guys here play on an expat (mostly British, Australian and American) rugby team. Our team always loses. There aren't a lot of foreigners in Chongqing compared to other large Chine...

Packaged dry beauty face masks (Hello Kitty, of course!): I also bought green tea powder, which I mix with about a 1/4 cup of hot water. The mask expands and soaks up green tea solution, and I wear it for about 1/2 an hour. Green tea is great, it makes my skin look very clear and even. It costs about $2.00 for 12 masks and a box of green tea powder, super cheap! *sniff* I will miss you dry masks when I leave China. I also make masks with really cheap red wine (heated), which has high levels of acid. Also great for the skin, like a little mini acid facial at a spa. My electric hand/body warmer: It comes pre-filled with some kind of fluid, plugs into an outlet, heats up in five minutes, and stays warm for two hours. Did you know I don't have heat? I live below the 'heat line' the Chinese government drew across China; people above the line get indoor heat, people below it don't. It doesn't freeze here, which is why we don't get heat, but it does get down...

Today I was walking with T. through the square near my house and I started laughing at something he said and the bright green gum I was chewing flew out of my mouth and landed at his feet. He had to do a little skip thing to avoid stepping in it. To his credit, he didn't flinch. I started laughing even harder. Just call me Grace.

I'm finally recovered from the flu; I'm not sure if the Chinese strain is the same as the U.S. or Canadian strain, but  it sure knocked me out. I'm back to my old self now, though. Hope you all have stayed healthy, and continue to be healthy. The last few weeks I've been panicking about leaving China. I know the economy back home isn't great and I worry about finding a job. But I also panic because I don't remember anymore how to live without China. How can I go back home and have no more contact with the Chinese language and culture and people? It has been almost my whole life here, how can it vanish into a black hole of nothingness overnight? One option is to stay here and relocate to very developed and easy-to-live-in Eastern China (Shanghai!) and find a well paying job, which with my qualifications, is probably more possible than in the U.S. right now. The other is to seek out a Chinese community in the States where I can go to Chinese school and shop in...

Somehow this flu is still kicking my trash. A new virus (probably not) or a resurgence (more likely), I'm not sure. In any case, I'm way behind on my correspondence, but I can't bring myself to do very much but sleep. I did find out the person I crashed with on Halloween also has the flu; I guess it wasn't the goats after all. In the words of my little brother, "Ew, outbreak monkey!" And with that, this outbreak monkey is going back to bed.

Last Tuesday I went biking in the countryside, and saw a mamma goat with four little baby goats (one of which was sunbathing!). I couldn't resist stopping for a few minutes to play with them. (Little known fact: I love goats! My family used to have pet goats, and they are smart like dogs.) But two days later, I was one sick puppy. Is there such a thing as Goat Flu? I am feeling better now, still some bad fatigue and achiness, but wow, it really knocked me off my feet. Hence the lack of posts lately. And these are the other goats in my life: the Chinese "Happy Goats", aka Xi Yang Yang , a local kid's cartoon taking China (the world?) by storm. It's a simple cartoon about cute little goats who have to fight off a wolf; the wolf doesn't want to eat the goats, but his wife makes him try. All the goats have their own little nicknames and skills and they always succeed in besting the wolf, but the wolf always comes back for another try. This show is also popular w...

It's been interesting to me to see which things from my home culture are popular here and which are completely unknown, even though in my eyes, they are comparable products. These things listed as 'popular' are well-known to people in my city; that is the average Chinese person you meet here would know and like them. The 'unpopular' category are things I consider popular in the U.S., but are unknown here. Popular TV: Prison Break (they LOVE it), Big Bang Theory (this one surprised me), Lost , Gossip Girl , Desperate Housewives , Ugly Betty Unpopular TV: 30 Rock , The Office , The Daily Show , CSI -type shows, Reality TV Popular Fast Food Chains: KFC, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Subway Unpopular Fast Food Chains: Wendy's, Taco Bell, Carl's Junior, Quizno's Popular Candy Bars: Snickers, M&Ms Unpopular Candy Bars: Everything else Popular Movies: Titanic (oh man, you have no idea), Forrest Gump , Gone With The Wind , recent action movies ...

Last night I was taking the bus to a friend's campus and sat down next to a grandma. Now, in the words of my friend Patrick, "Chinese grandmas are the sh*t." It's true: they can do anything and exude a quiet confidence I aspire to. (Also, they can totally snake all the good veggies at the market before anyone realizes what's happening.) They rule with a silk fist. You don't mess with a Chinese grandma. And to a Chinese grandma, all the world's a grandchild, especially a lone foreign girl. I sat down next to grandma in my short skirt and knee-high boots, sans stockings, and she immediately began chastising me for being bare-legged. I explained I don't have stockings, and she started running her hands up and down the bare-showing parts of my thighs, trying to warm me up. After a year and a half here, this didn't faze me (haha, I first wrote "phase" me), but I still had to laugh at the image of a Chinese grandma feeling up a random foreig...

First the fun: We had an expat Halloween party at a friend's house with lots of refreshments, glowsticks, cookies and candles, what could be more fun than that? Here's a picture of me in-costume (as old-school Britney Spears, with 'Rambo'): A few of us crashed at the party site instead of going home that early in the morning. I fell asleep around 4:30 a.m., which wouldn't be a big deal except someone started pipe construction at 6 a.m., right outside the bedroom window. On a Sunday morning, are you kidding me? I hate it when Chinese work ethics collide with my sleep time! Now the awkward: Later in the morning, we decided to get Chinese brunch (which here is just 'lunch' early, there are no brunch foods, that's a little joke) but all I had to wear was my Halloween costume. And here's the thing I learned: Halloween costumes are like Cinderella's pumpkin carriage: good for one night only. That getup, which had been so fun only a few hours ...