Baby's Bare Bottom

I came across a quote (during my frequent quote Google expeditions) when I first got to Cangzhou that not only made me laugh but also was so true that it has stuck with me: “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling. 

Before this trip, this quote would have been just words on a page that made me laugh, but now they are the words prompting me to write how Cangzhou is affecting my senses.  So let’s run through them starting with smell.  I ride my bike everywhere now.  Even though I wear a face mask to protect my lungs and, let’s be real here, my snot, I still am able to experience the lovely aromas Cangzhou has to offer.  If I use Kipling’s quote I would have to say that what the smells teach me is that Cangzhou is normally pleasant at times, so putrid it takes everything in you not to vomit about 50% of the time, and every once in a while you are graced with something so lovely you take a minute to let it go through your whole body.  Every area in the world has a smell, as do the people that live there.  Here the people don’t smell bad, not like some places in Eastern Europe but they have a distinct smell, which reminds me daily that ‘yup, I am in China’.  Now the city smells are what really cement it in.  I will be riding my bike and everything is fine, it smells like air and normal stuff, them WHAM…I ride so fast and try not to breath just to get through a stench.  There must be sewer let outs on the streets or just concentrated spots where multiple people have participated in way too frequent practice of street urination, because about ever 50-100 feet you hit this 30ft area of rotten stench.  It’s a smell that just makes it physically painful to breath, so horrible.  But then there are rare those times (normally near a good restaurant) when the smells are just wonderful! But when those smells are overpowered by the street stench, there is always my trusty Japanese Cherry Blossom scented body spray from Bath & Body works!

These wonderful smells take us to my next sense: taste.  Finding good food in Cangzhou has been a culinary rollercoaster.  Since Cangzhou isn’t a tourist town we are left with nearly one type of food: Chinese.  There is a Japanese place, but its way overpriced and not that good.  Then there are the pizza places, and even though the Chinese invented pizza and Italians only perfected it, the Chinese really have no bragging rights in the pizza business.  So that brings us back to Chinese.  It has taken a month, but we have found 2 great places, besides our kitchens, to get food.  It took time to find these places because there are a million little shops everywhere that sell food.  But we were on a mission to find a place with not only good food but, honest owners, reasonably healthy (ie. not dripping in oil), and at good prices.  One of our places is the noodle place.  It is a run by a nice Muslim couple.  A big pro about going to a Muslim place is that there is no wondering what meat it is: white meat is always chicken and red meat is beef, since there will never be pork.  Also, they are great with sign language.  We normally get the food to go and when we couldn’t say it we mimed it and they got it, a rarity in China.  So now when we go in they ask us if we want to eat in or take out, all through sign language! And they are so friendly!! Plus, they make the noodles by hand, and it is so awesome to see, they got a kick out how excited the 4 of were to see them do this.  And the last deciding factor on if this place became a favorite was the price: great prices for good portion sizes, and they always put in a lot of veggies (or as my UK friends say, lots of veg). Our second favorite place is actually somewhere we have spent 3 weeks hunting down.  My first week here, Leann (Shishi’s husband) brought home this wonderful chicken, and would only tell us it came from across the street.  So we have been checking out the shops and stands across the street but never found it, but whenever we would look about half the shops would be closed.  So Tuesday we went out on another scouting trip and God must have known how much we wanted this chicken because we followed our noses (and the rare wonderful scents) and found our chicken shop…enter the harp playing angels as a light shines upon the shop.  It is a solely chicken place and so well priced we were ecstatic, 1 kilo of chicken for 21 Yuan (about $4).  We have been twice so far.  The chicken paired with stand bough veggies and rice or a yummy bread bun, is the perfect dinner! That is what Abigael and I had tonight minus the rice or bread buns, so great!
Here is a video of the awesome noodle maker:

Next sense: hearing.  There is a constant pollution of honking.  Even at 6am, it is there.  They use car horns not to be safe, but just to let everyone (drivers and pedestrians alike) know that they are there and driving crazy.  The driving reminds me of the quote by Henry Morgan: “A careful driver is one who honks his horn when he goes through a red light.”  It’s absolutely terrifying to bike around all of it.  There are also random yells of “Hello” which are always found to have come from a very smiley Chinese man.  But it is fun to hear and they are always so happy when we smile and say hello back.  There is also random music that floats through my windows on weekend mornings, around 6/7am.  It would be annoying but since weekends are my early days it’s a nice wake up.  There must be a group that dances nearby but I have never seen them. But it is nice Chinese music.  Walking around at night we have seen a group who does this slow karate dance in front of some shops to similar music, but I have yet to find the morning group, they must be gone by the time I bike to work. 

Sight: Here in Cangzhou, the dominant visual features are tall, plain buildings, millions of people (4 million to be more precise) and smog.  But after a while you see past that and notice the beautiful lights that line the streets at night, the rare more traditional Chinese decorated shop, bare bottomed babies, and on occasion the cute rabid dog.  Let me explain about the bare bottomed babies.  About 75% of the babies here don’t wear anything to cover their bottoms or fronts.  I don’t know why, but diapers are not used to much.  We still have not figured out why the busses, subways and streets are not covered in baby poop, but even though most of the babies are bare I have never seen anything plop out.  Abigael theorizes that someone just holds them over a toilet every 30 min or so and they can go on command…but we think that is a little too weird to ask the parents at work, so we are answerless.  When we were in Beijing Abigael and I could not stop staring at the totally open baby sitting with his grandmother.  He was moving up and down and just wiggling everywhere, giving everyone on the subway a good view of what he’s got going on.  And all we could talk about was why on earth would grandma sit the baby’s butt on her clean outfit…what if you pooped.  And then why don’t the people standing the wet zone move out of the way just in case…I would have.  But even on a 15 min ride, the baby was good. 

Ok the last sense is touch, but as I try my best to not touch everything, so as not to contract anything unwanted and waste my antibacterial wipes, I will not be describing how Cangzhou feels.  But All in all my 1^st month here has been educational and fun.