My Journal

Labor Day weekend was a changeover weekend for me. After 15 days of hotel living, I finally got to move into my apartment. So from Friday night at 6pm to 7:15pm, I packed up one room, had the porter take one of those large hotel dollies that allows hanging clothes down the middle of the street to the adjacent apartment building and unpacked into my new “home” away from home.

After the adventure to the Great Wall on Saturday, Sunday became the domestic day…and it was quite welcome. My colleague and I headed out to purchase an espresso machine, a quick automatic Tea Pot and some fresh groceries. After 15 days of lunch and dinners at various restaurants, I was ready to try my pots and pans in my new kitchen. We got our appliances and I spent some time at the Carrefour market getting an organic, imported, frozen chicken to make for dinner on Sunday night (quite a challenge in a foreign language).

When I got “home” and defrosted and cut up the chicken, I found more parts than I was used to. The Bare Naked Ladies song One Week sprang into my head…”The Chicken from China, the Chinese Chicken...have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin’..” I thought about cooking all of these parts, but then lopped them off. Purdue Oven Stuffer Roasters have never looked so good.

So after that was done, I decided to use my new washer/dryer combo (this is not one over the other..this is the same machine that does both..no moving clothes) to do laundry for a reasonable price. The instruction manual was translated from Italian to Mandarin to English -- incomprehensible. I tossed it aside and decided to try it on gut instinct. I definitely got the clothes clean, but after 3 hours of “drying”, I took the clothes out and hung them up to dry. This was harder than I thought.