One Month

In the dreaded bathroom--Did I ever mention
how much I miss my pretty yellow bathroom at home?

The irony of the “saga” of the green onion pancakes is that once we got them, all of us—the kids to a lesser degree—got a stomach bug. The kind of bug that makes you stay very close to home and wish that you were at your real home, having your mom feed you warm jello.

I guess we should just be happy that we’ve made it four weeks in China without this kind of thing. It is hard to believe that it actually has been that long and that we still have six more months to go. I have heard that the first month in a new country can seem like an eternity while the subsequent ones fly by. By that standard, the next six months should happen in about six weeks, because the first month seems to have lasted at least half a year. We have experienced a learning curve that practically jumps off the paper and of course we are still learning every day. Take the stomach bug: I brought lots of Imodium, but being naturally averse to taking medicine, I refused to take it all day yesterday, thinking I would get better on my own. Dave took an alternative route by going to the pharmacy with Mr. Song and picking up some Chinese medicine. This is not the cute little packages of various herbs sort of variety, doled out by a wizened doctor. Rather, he got some boxes of stuff all in Chinese, save one word on each. With that one word on one box we found out (via our great friend Google) that Dave had bought an extremely powerful antibiotic that has, among other side effects, diarrhea and cramping listed as probable side effects. We decided that we wouldn’t touch that box with a ten-foot pole. The other box proved a little more tricky to decipher, but with much work Dave found the main ingredient and we are pretty sure it’s a fairly harmless garden variety (no pun intended) herbal medicine. He didn’t take that yesterday, either.

So, after a day of suffering at home, and a fitful night, we woke up to a slightly lessened condition but still in no mood to leave home. We took the plunge: Dave took the Chinese medicine (not the antibiotic) and I took Imodium. What have we learned from this experience? I’m not entirely sure yet. I think that we are probably way too cautious about taking medicine, but then, what is the alternative? In any case, I think it will be a long time before we get green onion pancakes again.