Day 1
LOTS of travel! We
left our apartment at 1pm, drove the 50 min to the airport (such a blessing to
be able to leave from Tianjin rather than drive the 3 hours to Beijing!), then
began the long flight west. Our flight
was scheduled to be 6 hours, including a one-hour layover in a city we’d never
heard of (which ended up being in Inner Mongolia; there was as much snow on the
ground around the airport as you’d imagine in a place called “Inner Mongolia”!). However, due to “bad weather” in Urumqi, the
city we were trying to eventually arrive in, we had to circle the airport for a
little over an hour before landing and walking through the snow to the shuttle
that would eventually land us on dry ground in the middle of a COLD
dessert. It was 10:45pm by the time we
got our luggage, 11:30 by the time the taxi driver got us to the hotel, and
midnight before kids were in bed. It was
a long day, but besides the extra hour of flying due to the snow and fog and
the arguing with the taxi driver for most of the drive to the hotel because of
how many people we had (he thought we should pay double since we had so many
people, in spite of our insisting that this was only ONE taxi that we were in,
not two requiring double gas and double drivers), we arrived no worse for the
wear.
Day 2
The kids slept in!
But in spite of the late hour of them (and Kevin and I) awakening, it
was still dark outside at 9:30am when we finally opened up our hotel room
curtains. We were shocked! We’d heard that the daylight hours were much
fewer here, but we didn’t know just how extreme it was. We got dressed and headed out to explore the
city; but I should add that the “getting dressed” process was not nearly as
simple as I make it sound! We had to
bundle up in a way that we’ve never done before. I donned my best friend’s borrowed furry long
underwear pants. That’s right—furry long
underwear. And let me tell you, it
is a beautiful thing! If there’s one thing Chinese people know,
it’s how to layer your long underwear in the cold. The kids all have ski bibs and face masks
(picture what you saw when there was the SARs outbreak, only with cute-sy
designs like duck bills and floral prints to dress them up a bit), along with
countless scarves, gloves, boots, and hats.
The process requires all hands on deck, and the kids were rewarded for
their patience in the process by getting a mint to take for the road.
We trekked out into the snow, found a Kentucky Fried
Chicken, and ate brunch (it was 10:30am).
The time here is a tricky thing.
There is Beijing time and local time, which the minority people groups
all follow that is 2 hours earlier than Beijing time. So we thought it was 10:30am, but it was
probably 8:30am to most of the people around us. I still can’t wrap my mind around this time
distinction. In just our 2 days here
I’ve seen how it affects so many areas of life.
Every time you schedule something, you have to specify BJ time or local
time. And if you are meeting with
someone from 11-2pm (like we did today), you don’t know if you should plan on
eating lunch with them or not. If you’re
like us, then 11-2 means lunch time, but if you’re on local time, your kids
have just awakened and you think it is 10-12 noon, so not necessarily time to
eat a meal! Talk about confusing!
We ate a meal at KFC and then took off walking to explore
some of the city. We intentionally found
a hotel in a part of time that is known to be a melting pot of the different
people groups and cultures that are represented here in this one city. What we saw made us feel that we were in a
different country. We passed so many
people on the slippery roads (every sidewalk, unfortunately, was a road rather
than just a place for pedestrians to walk) and they looked so different from
our Han friends that make up the majority of the people in Tianjin (and China,
for that matter). The people, the
languages, the way they were dressed, it was all foreign-feeling. There were quite a few who did look like
“typical” Chinese, but just as many or more who had a Middle Eastern or Turkish
look. There were even some who looked
almost Russian in their dress and facial features. 
We asked several people how to get to a local market we’d
heard about, and had a heck of a time getting there. At one point, we were told to cross the
street. But you don’t do this by walking
through the intersection, but rather by going underground at an entrance that
looked like a subway entrance. Once you
are underground, the paths become a labyrinth of rows of vendors of all types
of retail merchandise. It was amazing,
like an underground shopping mall with kind of an eerie feeling and a way of
leaving you totally disoriented as to which way you are trying to go. We emerged at one point, certain we’d made it
“across the street”, only to find ourselves at another doorway that was
literally 20 yards from the one we’d entered 10 minutes before, and still on
the same side of the street! We laughed
and had another go of it, this time successfully emerging at the desired
location, whooping and hollering in joy with the kids at our small success!
We made it to the market, cold and with whining kids after
the 30-minute walk in the cold. We
managed to explore for a brief time, finding a new treasured Spiderman stocking
hat for Noah. After that we decided to
go on a hunt for a place to eat lunch.
What we found upon discovering a row of restaurants shocked me in a way
I was not expecting. On the side of one of the restaurants, we saw them pulling
apart the carcass of a freshly slaughtered animal—I think it was a goat or
sheep. The Chinese word for the two
animals is the same, so it’s hard to distinguish between the two, and this one
was so long-haired that it was not a variety of either that I was familiar
with. But the way the 2 men were pulling
the thing apart and separating the different parts—I’ll spare you the
details. But it was fascinating and
disgusting all at the same time. And the
kids were totally intrigued, with Karis being pretty grossed out by it. We were still able to find a restaurant (not
that one!) and managed to get the kids to eat food that they were NOT excited
about before catching a cab back to the hotel and imposing a mandatory rest
time on everyone (we were all at the fall-apart stage at this point). Overall, we were struck by the vast
differences we felt and experienced between our city and this one we were
in. Even communicating is more
difficult, with the accents being so thick when people around us did speak
Mandarin.
After our rest time, we had fun playing at the hotel indoor
pool, although it was quite cold, and enjoyed a dinner at the hotel
restaurant. We finished the evening up
with a movie night and an early bedtime, kids spread out on the small amount of
floor space in their sleeping bags.
(Chinese hotels usually have one king sized bed or two smaller beds,
which are smaller than American-style double beds.)
Day 3
The kids slept in again.
It was either 9:00am or 7:00am, depending on whose clock you are going
by! Kevin found a convenience store
nearby to get some bread and yogurt for breakfast, and then we began the
bundling up process to go outside and play in the snow. The kids stayed warm for over an hour (can’t
say the same for myself, as I was merely overseeing the activity rather than
taking part in much of it myself) building a snow fort in the enormous drifts
of snow that were in the huge public courtyard across the street from our
hotel. We had many passersby stopping to
admire their work; some to fuss at us for allowing some of the snow to spill
off the pile onto the cleanly-shoveled paths and others to marvel that we had 4
kids so close in age and none of them were twins. We ran inside to change some clothes (Eli’s
shirt sleeves that were exposed had actually frozen as they had gotten wet in
the snow and then frozen in the sub-zero temperatures) and warm up for about 15
minutes before we had a time set to meet with some new friends here in town.
The friends were actually friends of friends who we had been
emailing with for the past several weeks.
When we first met several of them face-to-face, it ended up that two of
them were friends who I knew while in college!
Talk about a small world; who would think we needed to go to far western
China to connect 12 years after last having seen one another! We spent the afternoon meeting with others
who have lived here for quite some time, asking questions about life here in
Urumqi as an ex-pat. It was incredibly
helpful and the kids had a ball getting to go to one of the family’s homes and
play with their kids (and their toys)!
We were all a little ready to get out of the hotel for an afternoon and
have a change of scenery that was indoors and provided heating. Another benefit to meeting with these new
friends was getting some names of places that were helpful—like a pizza place
close enough to go get dinner and a Mexican restaurant that we plan on going to
tomorrow that is a little distance away, but in an area of town we were hoping
to explore while here.
Day 4
Our final full day to explore the city of Urumqi was
COLD! I couldn’t get on-line while we
were there to check the temperatures, but based on how it felt while outside,
it was definitely our coldest day of the trip.
We started off the morning with the older 3 kids really wanting to go
outside to continue building their snow fort.
Kevin graciously offered to take them out while Noah and I stayed inside
to read and color (Noah’s choice! He was
much more content than the other kids to NOT spend any more time in the cold
than he needed to.) Kevin lasted a full
hour in the cold with the kids in the courtyard with the older 3 before they
came in to warm up briefly before we headed out to the Texas Café for
lunch. We arrived only to discover that
the restaurant didn’t open for another hour and a half (it was on local time,
rather than the BJ time we expected), so we had some time to kill.
We’ve found one of the more difficult elements to living in
China is that there just are not that many places you can go and “kill some
time” comfortably. In Dallas, you have
your pick of malls with indoor play areas, fun restaurants with kid-friendly
atmospheres, even coffee shops all over that you can nurse a warm drink and
have a comfortable seat for as long as you’d like. Not so in China. Pretty much everywhere you go is crowded with
people, difficult to find a seat, tight quarters if you do get to sit, usually
pretty dirty, and generally just hard to come by. This was the case in Urumqi, too. So we walked around outside as long as we
could trying to find some venue that could fit 6 foreigners, some with more
energy than just a sitting-still location would accommodate. We came up empty-handed, but finally got so
cold we bustled through a door to a second-floor fast food-type restaurant that
had enough chairs for all of us. We were
hoping for hot chocolate to aid in our thawing-out process, but had to settle
for ice cream when we discovered that all of the hot water, and therefore any
hot drinks, in the restaurant was not working.
The kids miraculously stayed entertained by each of them coloring on 2
pieces of paper that I pulled from a small pad I had in my purse, sharing a
pencil Hudson had found outside in the snow during our trek , and making paper
airplanes with their papers when they’d finished their artwork. The had a mini-competition with the airplanes
to see who could hit the target on the wall, then we headed back out in the
cold to head back to the restaurant where we knew good ole’ Tex Mex food was
awaiting; not totally warmed up, but at least with the kids having non-growling
stomachs due to the pre-lunch ice cream treat!
After a fun lunch at this restaurant owned and run by Americans,
we walked back to the hotel. The kids
begged to go back out in the snow again, but Kevin and I decided we needed to
warm up some, so we convinced them to return to the swimming pool instead. Can’t say that it was much warmer there, so
after an hour of some shivering and blue lips we went back to the hotel
room. One of the things that interested
me in the pool was how the adults there were doing laps. Rather than staying in one lane (that was
marked, the same as you see them marked on the bottom of pools in the US), each
of the swimmers was swimming in a circle around the entire circumference of the
pool. It was really quite amusing,
except that this left the kids very little area to play where they were not in
the way of the lap-swimmers. (If the
kids played in the center of the pool, it was too deep for them to reach; so
not ideal for Hud or Noah.) At first I
was a little anxious about them being in the way of the swimmers, but finally
decided that I should relax and let the swimmers figure out a better plan of
taking up less of the pool area if they were worried about the kids (which they
didn’t seem to be!).
Kevin braved the cold one more time with them to head back
out and complete the finishing touches of their snow fort, knowing it was their
last chance to do so. Then we all took
off for a dinner of hot pot at a nearby restaurant we’d discovered while out
and about. The kids had a ball getting
to pick out their own dinner then cook it in their own pot in front of them on
the table. It was all going well, until
Hudson’s pet mini-octopus that he was eating/playing with was dropped. When he reached out quickly to try to grab it
and put it in the pot again (it was dead, so there really was not concern about
it getting off the table and away from him), he ended up touching the pot with
his arm and got a small, but very painful burn on his forearm. He recovered quickly and his main concern
again became his octopus.
The other picture of Eli is him with lychee fruit, which
Karis loves to eat and Eli loves the challenge of getting open! They make a good team…
Day 5
Another day of travel!
We made it back home, this time without any extra circling in the plane,
PTL. We had a much earlier flight, so we
had an early morning and no problems on the journey. We thought we were giving ourselves a large
cushion of time to get to the gate at the airport, but ended up having a lot
more steps at the airport due to them having incredibly high standards for
security. When we arrived in Tianjin at
3pm, it was soooooo nice to be able to walk out to our car in the parking lot
and drive ourselves back to our “big” house, as Noah kept referring to it (as
compared to the small hotel room we’d all been sharing). We didn’t realize how much that one
difference of not having to wait in a long taxi line and haggle over how many
people we could fit, how much we were willing to pay, etc., would make a
difference in removing the stress of that final leg. We arrived home, thankful for our home and
the warmer temperatures (all the way up to 30 degrees Fahrenheit!).
Overall, our trip to Urumqi was incredibly helpful. We really enjoyed the people we met there and
seeing the city. We decided that while
we were not particularly looking for Antarctic-like climate to move to, we
could survive there if we are supposed to.
We were encouraged by the work we saw being done and blessed by those
who are laboring there. But no “answers”
at this point for our family, as far as a firm direction to try to make the
move there ourselves. It will, however,
be at the front of our minds as we go into this next year, with the plan to
continue to be open to making such a huge transition and willing to go should
the doors open to do so.
