App-lause

I have an iPad and find it to be a very useful tool for my lifestyle. I picked out the top 12 most useful -- for my life -- to tell you about. I'll talk about them starting from the top row, left to right.

1. JESUS FILM MEDIA (free)

I downloaded this app for fast and free. The high-quality videos have turned many hearts towards Jesus, and I am happy that I now have a portable copy -- in the language spoken in the country in which I live! Lots of languages are available. (Though the app download is fast, the actual movie download -- which is also free -- could take half a day, so plan ahead.) The Magdalena movie and four other short videos are also available from this same app.

2. NIV BIBLE

I have several Bible apps, but I like this one the best. You can highlight text in four different colors.

3. E3 (EVANGECUBE)

If you are familiar with the Evangecube, you'll like this app that has the same pictures that briefly tell the story of Jesus and the cross. You can turn on text and voice if you like, or turn them off to tell the story yourself.

4. FLASHONARY

Make your own flash cards as you study Chinese. I wish this app had been around about 17 years ago. It would have saved me hours and hours and made language learning more efficient. It is still helpful to me, though, as I learn new vocabulary.

5. ACCUWEATHER

I have four weather apps, and so far I like this one best. It has unusual but helpful graphics, and all the weather information I need.

6. HEYWIRE

I hate text messages. Receiving text messages doesn't bother me (much), but I detest having to type them out to send them. Heywire helps. It is free, and you can send and receive texts for free (it even works to, from and within foreign countries). What makes it better than typing messages on a phone? The print size. The main thing I like about the iPad is that it is big enough to see without hunting down reading glasses. Heywire text messages work with an Internet connection -- no phone service required.

7. KINDLE

I'm sure everyone has this app, but I use this one a LOT so I had to mention it here. I love not having to load my luggage down with heavy books when I travel. A real Kindle is better than the iPad, in my opinion, because the iPad is too heavy to hold up for long. But I still like the app.

8. EARTHQUAKE LITE

As I type, the most recent earthquake was magnitude 1.6 in Consenza, Italy. There have been 2355 earthquakes worldwide in the past week. This free earthquake app is useful to those traveling around the Pacific Rim of Fire (as I often do), and for the rest of you, it makes you feel smarter when you spout off stats. It does not, however, predict earthquakes! (Can you believe those Italian earthquake scientists were imprisoned for not predicting earthquakes accurately?)

9. FREECELL CARD GAME

I first got addicted to this solitaire game over a decade ago. I refused to download it to my last two computers, because it has a way of taking over my life. But this free app was irresistible, and I am trying hard not to let it become a time waster. It helped kill time on the Pacific flight at the end of August. I think this game is good as a brain exercise too, kind of like crossword puzzles are.

10. BETTY CROCKER COOKBOOK

I have two or three Betty Crocker cookbooks, and find them very easy and user-friendly. So when I found out that I could get a free Betty Crocker Cookbook app, I didn't need much convincing. 

11. ACT PRINTER

If your computer and your iPad are both connected to the same Internet connection,  you can wirelessly transfer computer files to your iPad with this app. Works like a charm.

12. SCANNER PRO

This is one of the few apps I paid for, and it's excellent for scanning receipts and other documents on the go. It does more than just "take a picture" of your document, but it adjusts the layout so that it is saved as a true rectangular shape. It looks like you scanned it flat on a printer/scanner. You can save the scanned documents in different files on your iPad, and you can easily transfer them to your main computer. I have used this one a LOT, although if I am at home, I usually find the flatbed scanner just a bit easier to handle.

What about you? Do you have any useful apps you can recommend to me? 

Wrinkles

Last year I had some button shirts made by a tailor. I have found no tailor who stocks no-wrinkle material, so my shirts were made with regular cotton that wrinkles badly.

But ironing is a pain. I hate it. When I am preparing to go on a trip and have to iron a lot of shirts at once, it just drives me over the edge. I needed a better solution, so I took five button shirts to the dry cleaning shop nearby to see if they could iron them for me.

They had no starch, but they said they would iron all five shirts for the equivalent of $3.00! I was totally excited. I can afford to do this often.

Also, they are fast. I took them in at 5 p.m. one day and they were ready by lunch time the next day. I guess this dry cleaner, which doubles as a liquor and cigarette shop, doesn't have a lot of business.

I went in after lunch the next day, saw the beautifully ironed clothes, and decided I would definitely take my clothes to be ironed more often.

And then, in front of my wide-eyed dumbfounded self, the woman who works there took the shirts off their hangers, wadded them into a ball, and stuffed them into a plastic bag so I could easily carry them home! SHE WADDED UP MY NEWLY IRONED CLOTHES!

Really? Were her brains on leave? Was I having a nightmare? No one does this! She had no malice, she really and truly thought she was helping me. It's been two days and my brain is still reeling. I'm going to have to iron them again before I go on my trip.

Crazier yet? I'm going back there someday. I started a meaningful conversation with the lady who works there, and we all know that matters more than the wrinkles do. 

I'm definitely going to try to train her to leave the shirts on the hangers though -- or at least get her to let me fold them myself.

Tree tunnel

A beautiful crisp, cool fall day in the Middle Kingdom. This is the BEST time of year here!

I've been having lots of trouble with my Internet these past few weeks and sometimes I haven't even been able to open this blog's website! My blogging absence is not intentional, and hopefully the problem will be resolved soon.

PJ's in public

On an average day I see several thousands on the streets, in shops and in my neighborhood. (If you live in a city that only has several thousand people, this may seem hard to believe. Trust me.)

Most of those people are "city" people, and dress the part. Sure, the bicycle repairman, the watermelon vendor and the elderly playing poker at the park downstairs don't spend a lot of time in front of the mirror each morning, but most people dress for success. The young women  are thin, dress to kill and look like fashion models.

Personally, I like wearing high heels if I don't actually have to walk more than 100 steps in them per day, but women here wear them like they were born with them strapped to their feet. Foot binding of other people's feet is no longer allowed, but it is perfectly acceptable to bind your own.

I digress.

In this fashionable city, among the thousands I see, almost every day I see someone walking around in pajamas. It is not terribly common, but it is not terribly unusual either since I see it almost every day.

The PJ's are modest, two-piece, long sleeved shirts with long pajama pants (that MATCH, with teddy bear patterns on them if we are lucky). Some are made from super lightweight material, although the winter versions are padded, and come in bright colors.

People don't wear them to the office or anything like that, but they walk to the veggie market in them, walk their pet in public wearing them and such as that. 

I don't take pictures of people in pajamas, because then they would think that I thought it was weird. Which, of course, I do.

This public PJ wearing doesn't happen all over the Middle Kingdom, as the only place I have noticed it is the province where I now live.

As a "foreigner," I could not get by with doing this without causing a scene, although I'd certainly like to try it some days when Mimi decides she needs to find some grass on which to excuse herself at 5:30 in the morning. 

Closest I can come without causing a kafuffle is to wear a sweatsuit.

She tries SO HARD

It's no big secret that I love my little Mimi to death, and one of the reasons why is because she is just so doggone cute! She tries so hard to pretend she is a person. If I'm talking to someone in my living room, she'll get in the circle, looking back and forth at the persons speaking as if she is a part of the conversation. 

And when she gets in the elevator, she turns around immediately and faces the door of the elevator, just like people do! This little mutt cracks me up.

Dirt

In the early 90s, a woman I know moved to Zambia. (She had to crate four years' worth of toilet paper to take with her, making her journey quite memorable to me.) When she got to Zambia she wrote some newsletters and talked about how it was so much dirtier there than in the USA. This, I could not believe.

I grew up in west Texas where dust storms guaranteed that no one who loved dusting furniture would ever be disappointed for lack of work. Yet I still wondered how anywhere in the world could really be much dirtier than anywhere else.

Then I moved to the Middle Kingdom. And now I know.

When I lived in Bedrock, approximately once a year the sky would be clear and blue. I remember one year it happened in August. People called their friends to rave about the beautiful weather and to make sure their friends hadn't missed seeing it.

The rest of the time, the air was filled with soot. Burning coal served as the main source of energy. A smokestack from the college faculty dining hall pumped black stuff towards my unsealed apartment windows. The water supply was not clean, the streets were covered with inches of thick dust (especially along the edges), and the millions of people who lived there had no place to throw their garbage because no public waste bins were available. Mold grew on and in most buildings. Trash in my building was burned in the chute where it resided, attached to my stairwell. 

(For a refresher of what my first apartment in the Middle Kingdom looked like, check out this post.)

A young local teacher at the university was riding in a van through town with me one day. She breathed in the horrendous exhaust of the traffic, sighed, and said she loved the smell, as it reminded her of her growing up years.

American visitors to Bedrock often commented on the black layer of soot on the insides of their nostrils. 

Ponds and rivers were filled with rotted garbage. I vowed not to eat fish, as I had no way of knowing if my fish had come from such a polluted place.

When I mopped my tile floor or wiped down my furniture, it would be covered in sticky dirt/gunk/coal residue again within half an hour. If I wanted a clean house, it would be a full time job -- I would have no time for teaching or making friends or studying the language. So I learned to live with a little dirt. But the need and desire to clean got overwhelming at times.

So I did something I never thought I would do. I hired a village woman to come clean my house once a week for three hours. At first, I really detested the idea of having a maid-type helper. I feared the locals would think I was too good to clean house, that I thought I was richer and better and of a higher class than them. It would hurt if they thought that, and in fact I do not think I am better than them.

So when the village woman came, I would work alongside her, and within those three hours we would both work non-stop. 

The house would not stay clean for a whole week. I still had to clean it almost every day. But once a week it got really clean, and it was a relief that not everything that got done depended solely on me. 

It cost me $5 per week, and that money allowed the woman to send her two children to junior high and high school, and it allowed them to eat nutritious food. It pulled her out of poverty, and to this day she is one of the most financially stable in her village. I know because I still talk to her on the phone and visit her village when I can, and she has even come to Bamboo Forest to visit me! No one ever had a bad thought about my helper arrangement, because it turns out that no one ever really knew about it. Her previous job was to dig recyclables out of mounds of trash, so she definitely found it as a step up in the work force to do housework.

Now, in Bamboo Forest, I have another helper. Due to the horrendous exchange rate the USD dollar gets here*, the price I pay is higher at $11 per 3-hour stint. Bamboo Forest is one of the most beautiful and clean cities in the nation (now that the  subway construction is completed). It still gets dirtier here than it does in America though, for whatever reasons.

I'm glad to report that the horrible air pollution in Bedrock, which I think had to certainly be among the worst of anywhere in the entire world, improved dramatically around 2004. Newcomers still complained about it, but if they had known what it was before, they would have just shut up.

Lo and behold, I went to India in 2010. It's a bit worse there, so now I have shut up too!

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*When the politicians in the USA complain about the exchange rate with China, they are helping big business who speculate on currency exchanges and helping themselves, but they are HURTING PEOPLE LIKE ME. Don't let 'em fool ya.

And then there was another holiday....

This year it happened that the day after Mid-Autumn Festival was another major holiday, the National Day Holiday, the Middle Kingdom's equivalent to the 4th of July. 

The National Day is just one day, October 1, but everyone gets one week off of work and/or school. 

People here do not get vacations like people in the western world do. The only time they get off of work is when there are national holidays like this. Everyone is off work at the same time -- there is no staggering to it -- so the crowds are always enormous during holiday times.

I decided for the holidays to make a trip to Shanghai. It must have been a great idea, because everyone had it.

This is Nanjing Road pedestrian street in Shanghai. I couldn't get up high enough to take a good picture, but there were people as far as you can see in all directions. I got a kick out of it, took a few pictures, then headed to other parts of town that were less familiar to tourists.

 An outdoor cafe section of town, one of my favorite spots.

Lots of flag-waving was going on. People here love their country, just like people everywhere do.

 Reflections on this building reveal what is across the street.

More outdoor coffee shops/restaurant. It was a beautiful day. I can't believe I was able to buy a train ticket to get to Shanghai, and even more shocked that I was able to catch taxis in Shanghai!