Getting Ready For School

For the past week we wake up every morning to the sound of fireworks. One morning we got up at 6:00 and within 2 minutes someone lit a string of fireworks that must have gone on for 2 minutes. And, for the past week, every evening when the sun goes down there is a little fireworks show outside our living room window. A couple of times we've turned the light out and just watched. These do not rival the New Year's Eve shows but there they are every night. We keep thinking that they're over but we keep hearing and seeing them. One funny thing about the fireworks is that they often set off car alarms either from the noise or the vibrations, so we hear the wailing of car alarms mixed in with the fireworks. New Year's Eve night there were car alarms going off all over the city.

No blog entry yesterday. Woops or the shape of things to come. Linda worked on her class a lot yesterday and that meant the computer was not available. Last evening we watched a video on the computer of an American/Chinese singer named Le Hom Wang. He sings in Chinese with some English words so we couldn't understand what he was singing but he's pretty interesting musically. He is very popular here and in other parts of Asia. I don't know if he sings in totally English or not. He was born in Rochester, NY to Chinese parents so he does speak English.

Yesterday afternoon Linda and I were sitting here trying to figure out if we should book tickets to Macau or not because we don't have our passports back yet and won't until Friday. We were looking at flights and wondering if the people on Macau would even want us to come since we're going to be 2 days late. So we're talking about all this and wondering about which flight to book, when we flipped over to our email to send one more message to Macau asking Tom, our friend there if we should come or not and there was an email from him telling us yes, come on down, he'll talk to us and get us caught up with the rest of the group.

So we flipped back over to book our flight and that went pretty well until it came time to pay. Linda decided to call the phone number on the computer screen to ask some questions and that turned into an exercise in frustration for her. Well, there was one thing we did wrong which made it a little worse but it seems that everything is ok now, except that we haven't gotten an email confirmation from them so we're not sure if the tickets are actually purchased or not. I'm going to let Linda tell you about talking on the phone because I was just a third party listening to one side of the conversations.
Well, it was an interesting time. I had worked on my class before lunch and for about a half hour after lunch and we were going to head out for a walk and thought maybe we should look quick for tickets online. We pulled it up and filled in the necessary info putting our friend here as our contact name, number, and email address, thinking it was in case of emergency. So, it came to how to pay for it. We could either pay by international credit card, go to their office in Tianjin to pick it up, or have someone deliver it to our door and we would pay them then. We decided since we had no idea where they were located or how to tell a taxi driver how to get us there even if we knew, to have them deliver it to us here. We could not imagine anyone doing that so called to verify that the address I put in would work. So, I got a young woman pretty easily with only 2 extra numbers to push and no wait, who spoke English with a Chinese accent. She understood that I had not finalized my ticket yet but the address part didn't make sense to her. She first tried to book our flight online with the spelling of names, etc and I decided we would do that online, quicker. She got a colleage on who understood the address thing and said it would take 3-4 hours to get it to our home and we could pay cash. That was the next hurdle - we had to go to the bank to cash some American money into yuan to pay for it and didn't know for sure if the bank would be open. We told him and he said to hurry because if we waited til tomorrow, the price may change. So, off we went to the bank which is about 10 minutes from here by foot. It was partially open in that we could get our American money out but could not change any to yuan. So, home we came and called the number again. She encouraged us to use our credit card and try it because then it would be an e ticket and we would get more airmiles for China air. So, we tried it and it worked! So, after that, we realized why we were unable to find any lamps or a nice tray to go under the tea set that we bought. It was because the vacation is over and we are spending all of our extra money on plane tickets. They were about $450 a piece which is even expensive to us in the US. We did not get our confirmation via email because it is going to our contact person who is not home (until tomorrow) and should have been us. Live and learn. We decided we will have to now try to live within our means which is great for all the food we need and eating out and some taxi and bus rides but no big purchases at least until we get paid again. We are very excited about seeing our friends in Macau, though so it will be worth it. We have found that things are really not all that cheap here. Some things are but some of the things we have needed to buy are not. Or, we have not found our perfect store, yet.