Welcome to Da Chong

When I first got here, I was definitely a little in shock.  It is dirty, smelly, and difficult to breathe. Living on the edge of the Da Chong market, I see A LOT of gross meat and animals about to become gross meat (including chickens, cats, dogs, and fish).  There are dead rats on the street, and poop, and a lot of super nice cars which I still don't understand ha ha.  Anyway...it took a while to get used to, but now I love it here. Living in the market means I have fresh fruit, vegetables, and spices literally on my doorstep.  The hole-in-the-wall restaurants serve some of the best food I've ever eaten (usually for less than two U.S. dollars), the vendors and the schoolkids know us and say hello when we pass (sometimes in English, sometimes in Chinese), and we've found our place here.

SO THIS IS HOME...

Da Chong skyline at sunset

buying fruit at the market

our street (and the lovely Rachel)

the view from my window

a glorious (and rare) blue-sky day

color-selects taken from my porch

If you're squeamish, don't look at the rest...

A turtle being chopped to bits

Just a bucket of snakes

The covered section of the market

It's hard to tell, but those are chicken feet

And of course, the dog butcher...If you look closely on the left you can see the skulls (also for sale) and on the right you can see the tails)

I Will Arise and Go Now

The Lake Isle of Innisfree  --William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

In my awesome Literary Analysis class last year (which I hated at the time, but looking back it was one of the best classes I've taken) we studied this poem and after pulling it apart for a while we decided that the speaker of the poem is kind of pathetic.  He talks all about going to Innisfree, but never actually does it. The theme of our class was characters who are trapped by physical, social, or mental circumstances, and I really took to heart the idea that people are largely held back by their own fears. So when I was walking around the streets of Shanghai and saw this sign...

I got really excited! Because yes, I had talked about traveling and seeing the world but then I had actually gotten up and done it.  I had made it to Innisfree!

China has been quite the adventure so far!  I finally got a proxy server so now I can blog while I am here and I'll be throwing it back to all my favorite moments in the past month and a half.  And I still have two and a half months left! Woot!

On the Verge

Well I'm back from a glorious summer in Wyoming thanks to all my lovely roomies at the Love Shack and all my awesome co-workers too!

It was also fun to have my family up for a visit right before it was time to come home. We had a "blast", as is apparent from this picture at Old Faithful in the pouring rain...

And now I am ready to head off on my next big adventure. I'm flying to china in just a few hours from now and I am so excited!!!!

I won't be able to blog or get on FB while I'm there so if you want to contact me, my email is jo8what@hotmail.com.   A final thought on this blog for the next few months is perfectly summed up in this e-card:



So here goes nothing!

Just a Little H20

Wow.  The summer heat has finally hit, and it's almost too hot to sit with the laptop and write this. Clearly, I need to just invest in a fan, but when the apartment (which unfortunately has no AC) gets too hot there are plenty of ways to stay cool.

This last Saturday I started the day paddle-boarding on String Lake with Sam and Hannah.  (Thanks Sam for letting us use your board!)  Then went straight to canoeing with Hannah, Meredith, and Becky.  (Thank you Meredith!) and then went tubing down flat creek. We ended the night with hot-tubbing and a small rain-storm.  Yeah, I got a little wet.  Today I'm sun-burnt and exhausted, but it sure was a fun day!

Dipping in the Skinny...and other adventures

Well, I finally did it. I went skinny dipping. And boy was it fun!

Yesterday was my day off, which I started off by sleeping late and making a legit breakfast for once (steel cut oats with banana and brown sugar topping--yum) and then going on a long walk/run around the National Elk Refuge.  I ended up at a historic site, the Miller House (or "the first trophy house of Jackson"), which was built around the turn of the century. This nice elderly couple gave me a tour and then lent me their binoculars to look at the coyotes out on the refuge land.  My favorite part of the tour was learning about Robert Miller's wife, Grace Green, who was the first woman mayor of Jackson (and had an all-woman town council) before most of the country even gave women the right to vote. Way cool!  I'm not really psyched about the idea of the doing the research required for a legit piece of historical fiction, but if I ever write one, it's going to be about those five women.

Later in the day, I got some ice-cream with Stacy (it was her birthday), watched the town shoot-out (which--between you and me--isn't that interesting), and visited the park.  Then, I went with my roommates Sam and Stacy to find a moose out on the Moose-Wilson road.  Lo and Behold, we found a Mama moose and her adorable baby! It was so cool to just watch them eating and walking along.

But what am I rambling on about? The important part of the day was when the rest of my roomies finally got off work and we were able to celebrate Stacy's birthday the right way--in our birthday suits!  We drove out to the Kelly warm spring, stripped down, and with much shrieking and hollering waded into the tepid water.  The pond might not seem like much.  It's usually full of bison pies, tadpoles, and moss and I doubt it gets deeper than seven feet in the middle.  However, last night it was pretty magical.  The moon was just bright enough that we could see around us and still have a great view of the stars and the water was perfect.  I've always wanted to go skinny dipping and I couldn't have planned a better night, place, or group of ladies to do it with.  Now I can check it off my bucket list.  Huzzah!

Lucky Enough

We have this sign at the store that reads "If you're lucky enough to be in the mountains, you're lucky enough" and that's really how I feel everyday up here.  Here are some pictures of some of my recent adventures in and around Jackson Hole:

Okay, so this one is actually in Rexburg.  Jayme, Stacy and I went to a bonfire, and when I say bonfire I don't mean a little weanie-roast bonfire.  No no no. If you'd have tried to roast a hot dog on this fire you would have almost certainly lost a limb...or all of them.

I went exploring on a day off and found the coolest old cabins just chillin'  out there, no signs or fences or anything.

But, since I'd just been warned by this sign that "there is no guarantee of your safety in bear country" and I was all alone, I thought it best to not stay long ha ha.

The next fun adventure? River rafting with Teniele!  Don't we look cool in our Star Trek  wet-suits?

We met these lovely ladies, Chris and Angel (or "Chris Angel" as they were known, just as we were "Captain and Tennille") on the bus.  It was the four of us and a whole troop of boy-scouts from AF.  They were hilarious.


And the best part? It was free! Yay for River-guide friends!

Over-night camping trip in Curtis Canyon with my work buddies!

Taylor and I after a chilly night.  (Which we both spent in a truck. We are true outdoorsmen. Ahem. Women.)

The JTC campfire band:  Dawn and Taylor on vocals, me on the uke and  Patrick our harmonica and guitarist.

Finally, this morning a few of us woke up at 5 a.m. to catch the sunrise on Mormon Row.

Sam. Shooting those sunrise pics like a boss.

The iconic barn on Mormon Row

Me and the barn, embracing our Mormonism.

Oh look, the Tetons.


I live here next to these amazing mountains and that's pretty dang lucky I think.  Signing out!

(Photo cred to the lovely Teniele Anderson and myself)

Lessons from Jackson Part 1

Things I have learned thus far:

1. I honestly should have let my dad teach me about tools.  I at least know how to recognize a "Philips" screwdriver head, but who knew there were different sizes? Or that an electric drill can put a screw in AND take it out AND often has a built in light? I feel like a complete idiot whenever someone needs me to use or find a tool in the cluttered shipping room.  (Luckily for me, Rosemary, who is fifty-something and much more tool-savvy, can help me out.)

2. What goes around comes around. The other day I had to find a spot for four-boxes worth of packing foam in the tiny shipping room.  After bumping into counters and scraping my arms on misplaced tools I finally just shoved it all in the back, resolving that if it was a nuisance to someone back there, at least it wouldn't be me.  Guess who had to go search for a tool at the very back of the shipping room the next day? That's karma for you.  Of course, it goes the other way too.  In a spare moment, I put size stickers on the huge wall of folded shirts to make the dreaded "shirt-list" easier the next day.  Turns out that the next day, I was put on shirt-list duty, and the project only took five hours instead of six.

3. When life gives you lemons... okay, okay, I know.  Enough with the cliches! But I don't know how else to phrase this one.  How about: when your stove doesn't work right, make s'mores? nhmmmmeh. The point is, one of our stove burners doesn't work at all.  The one next to it works too well and burns everything we try to cook.  However, we have learned the beauty of roasting s'mores over the stove and that one unnaturally-hot burner creates the perfect "bed of coals" for making delicious hot s'mos!

4. It's great to have friends in the hotel business. Jackson is very much centered around the out-of-doors activities, and so when it is rainy and cold outside there are pretty much only two options for social activity: watch a movie...or go hot-tubbing. We went hot-tubbing at a hotel last night, and when the night guard came to close it up, it was one of the guys in our ward.  We still had to leave but he sent us over to the place next door that was open later and said he'd let a friend that worked there know we were coming.  (That one ended up being out of order, but still! Pretty awesome.)