Brown rice and a rice cooker

Last Monday I returned to Shanghai after having spent more than a week away with my project group in Ningbo, Beilun and Anji. It was wonderful to come back to a familiar city and to a cozy apartment, which in the given context truly feels like home. In order to maintain sanity we chose to take the day off on Tuesday. I slept in and awoke to the warmth of the sun shining in through my window. A couple loads of laundry and a few phone calls later I headed out to run some errands around town. It’s so nice to have a rhythm.

Side-track regarding phone calls:
Two weeks ago my friend Anna told me about a discovery she had made. Since I now have experienced the brilliance of the concept, so I thought I would share it. Rebtel is a way for people to call internationally from their phones/cell phones by only paying local fees plus a very small international fee, which is paid over the Internet. Rates differ from country to country but generally they are quite low, challenging any international calling card or plan out there.

Usually I make my international calls from Skype. However doing this requires that I have an Internet connection with sufficient bandwidth and of course a functioning computer. Lately this has been challenge within itself. With Rebtel I am able to make calls from my cell phone anywhere, anytime for very little money. Not a bad deal if you ask me.

So how does it work? You log into Rebtel.com. You add contacts. Then a local number from your area (in my case, Shanghai) is generated that represents your contact’s phone number. So when I now call my boyfriend Ethan in the States for instance, I dial a Shanghai phone number instead and Rebtel connects me to him. To add to the glory of it all, they hooked me up with 310 free minutes just for signing up. I haven’t paid anything other than the small local fees yet. Plus there are special promotions popping up all the time. Ok I guess I have blabbed about this for long enough. If you want to know more, take a look at their webpage and give it a try.

So as I was saying, after more than month, I have finally found some sort of everyday rhythm. The first couple weeks in Shanghai I lived in a hotel. Now I have an apartment. In the beginning I went from one place to another not having a clue where they were positioned in relation to each other. Now I have a general overview of the city. The first month was about wearing clothes for as long as humanly possible. Now that I have a washing machine (and have a translated key for what the Chinese characters on the buttons mean), I can wash laundry at my leisure. Ahh luxury!

I’ve discovered that the taxi drivers aren’t necessarily frustrated when you give them an address; they just want to make sure that they know exactly where to bring you. I’ve found the pure joy in having small conversations on the street- from the ones I have with the flower seller to the family who has the vegetable stand around the corner. I have brown rice in my kitchen. And a rice cooker. And that just makes me happy.

This week we are going to work on our projects like mad wo/men. We have one week off for Easter Vacation (March 14th - 23rd) and after that we just have one week before we have to present our final products.

My little rest and relaxation will be taking place in Taiwan this time around. Caleb Portnoy (from Wellfleet) has been living out there for quite a while and I’m taking him up on his invitation for a visit. It’s great that so many of my friends and family are spread around this globe so that no matter where I am...I always tend to have someone nearby. (Right now I have Bags in Taiwan, my cousin Zack in Hong Kong, Tristan in South Korea and Katy heading to Bali). For better or worse, it sure is a globalized world we are living in!

Zai jian!
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Where's Taiwan?

Taiwan is that orange island east of China


I'll be flying in to Kaohsiung (Taiwan's second largest city) and then heading east to Taitung where Caleb is living.