“Do they sell aluminum foil and cinnamon in hell? ….No, they sell MSG”

After promising her students that she would make 50 cookies, Anna and I met up to buy the ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies.  Not knowing how to say certain ingredients in Chinese we looked up the words on Google translate and wrote them down. We arrived at the supermarket and went to the back in hopes of finding sugar. Anna grabbed a packet of what seemed to be crystallized sugar that read, “Lotus Flower” and had Chinese characters underneath it. Next, Anna joyously asked a woman to assist us in finding baking powder and vanilla extract. After showing the woman our Google translate words, ever so sure of herself-absolute no hesitation , walked to the other side, bent down and happily gave us a small, hard bag that read, “Instant drying yeast”. I looked at Anna and told her that it wasn’t what we needed, but being hopeful, she grabbed it and put it with her other odd ball collection of ingredients. As we’re walking to the cashier I read Anna’s mind about needing aluminum foil. What should have been like a half an hour run to the supermarket, turned out to be a 3 hour quest to find aluminum foil. We hit every convenience store, and we just kept finding the one thing we didn’t need- plastic wrap. The whole time, we were waiting on Sarah to meet up with us and grab dinner, but she wasn’t answering her phone. So not only did we have to find this damn aluminum foil, we had a missing volunteer whose phone was off and was supposed to be with us 3 hours ago. We went back to Anna’s apartment in hopes that Sarah would be waiting there. 2 Minutes after we walk in, Sarah knocks on the door.

 My first question to her was, “How do you say aluminum foil in Chinese??”  She looks it up on her phone and it says, “Lubo”. For fuck’s sake, such a simple word for such a complicated item. Now for the rest of the service in China, that will be the one word I will always remember. The three of us went out to get something to eat, and Anna was still convinced that there would be aluminum foil in a random convenience store, but she had no such luck. It was just odd to us that it was hiding, or no one knew what we were talking about when we kept saying lubo. It’s as if it was hidden in a magical tunnel, like it was some kind of prized item that no one could have. It reminded me how I could never find cinnamon when I wanted to make ginger tea. I followed all of Anna’s steps, and wrote down what it was in Chinese. I even had a duel language, visual dictionary to show the people and they looked at me like I was making it up. My mother’s friend sent me a package last semester and in it was a cinnamon packet because word got around I couldn’t find any in China. The aluminum foil must be where the cinnamon is hidden, it just has to be. After giving up, Anna derived a plan to mix the cookie batter in a rice bowl and cook them on a dumpling steamer. On top of that, a brilliant idea came to mind to bake them over the stove, as the other ones were cooking in a small toaster oven. This made perfect sense, because after all, hard boiling eggs and making popcorn in a tea kettle totally worked out just fine the other day. I trusted her instincts. It was turning out pretty well, and looked like delicious cookies that even smelt like cookie dough.  All of a sudden I hear, “fuck, shit, fuck omg, fuck” Sarah and I both looked at each other and ran to the kitchen.  We both tried a small piece of the grilled cookie and simultaneously spit it out like it was venom. 

Sarah picked up the sugar package that said “Lotus Flower” and read the characters underneath. “You poured a whole package of MSG!!”  

Me: “I told you it was odd it had ‘lotus flower’ on it!”

Anna: “Yea but I saw a ‘lotus flower sugar’ on it too”

Me: “So why didn’t you get that instead?”

Anna: “The other one was cheaper”

Me: “Well, that’s what you get for being cheap” ]

Anna: “Yea, a cancer cookie. It always felt brown to me, I thought MSG was brown.”

 If sugar was MSG, what was baking soda?? Anna looked over to Sarah and asked, “Can you tell me if this is baking soda?”, as she threw the packet over to Sarah. Sarah looked at the package, leaned back and then pulled herself up again, and as she tried forming sentences, she started to laugh with each word. “This is instant drying yeast, it says it right here in clear English.” After Anna sent her students a text saying she didn’t make the cookies, a student responds, “It’s ok, we know you tried your best. Thanks so much.” Under her breath she whispers, “My best was trying to kill them… and I failed.”

That package is hanging on her wall now, with a note that says “Never, ever buy this  ever again”

…Yet another brilliant evening with Lanzhou’s finest response volunteers. I enjoy every moment of it. If I ever feel shitty, I’ll just keep this conversation in my pocket and pull it out when I need a good hard laugh and the world will be just right again. 

The Police Station

I was sitting on a bed in an office, belonging to one of the police man , looking around. The room was cold with dirty walls, two wooden desks facing each other and two beds next to each other on the parallel wall. I felt like I was in an episode of Dexter and that was his secret hiding spot where he  kills and then goes to sleep, satisfied. To my left was a chair. It was a 20^th century torture chair with hands and legs chains. My friend and I both looked at each other with disbelief and we only had one thought in mind, “Take a picture!” My friend pulled out his phone and aimed it at the chair. The police man was trying to spit out an English word, when he finally said “forbidden”. My friend didn't listen and just kept aiming his phone on the chair until he got a clear picture. Without a care in the world, the police man just kept writing things down. At this point we had waited 40 minutes for a man from the foreign affairs department to come. 

Richard finally showed up. He was the only one who was able to speak English. He knew Peace Corps and my Waiban, Zhou. He pointed at my friend and said, “You know me!” My friend was a bit confused, when Richard interrupted and stated that he came to Lanzhou University last year to do an orientation on safety and policy to all the foreigners. Then, he also told me he knew me and we had met before at the Gansu Foreign Provincial Day. He started to work for Peace Corps about 6 years ago and his first case was the stabbing of the American-Asian volunteer in Lanzhou. More men started trickling in just to see the two foreign sitting ducks and were curious to speak to us, except for one guy. He was the chief officer of the police station. When he asked Richard a question in Chinese, my friend laughed at the comment when I asked him to translate. The chief officer said, “If she can’t speak Chinese how the hell is she teaching English?” In which I told my friend to translate, “In my first two months in China, I learned how to bargain, buy my own shit, ask for directions, and tell people what I do, where I’m from,  what my parents do and what I like. You've been learning English since you were 5 and can’t speak one word of it. How the hell are you not ashamed of yourself?” Just kidding, I wish he told him that! At that point I was just fed up with the whole situation and starving that I wanted to walk out.  Richard got off the phone with Zhou, and apparently told him to come. When I asked why, he told me that it would be better if Zhou got here to go over the documents. 

We were moved to another room across the hall where another man was sitting, but he actually looked like a police man. There we were the six of us sitting and staring at each other for yet another hour waiting for Zhou. They were asking me questions about where, how and why it happened. Not word for word, the guy was writing it down. In between lines they would state comments based off of assumptions. For example, “Oh, the two of you were on a date, well it’s a memorable one now!”, “It’s a good thing your boyfriend was there to translate, he can teach you Chinese” , “The two of you look like you match as a couple”. Then after all the paper work was done, I had to stamp with my index finger and red ink on the lines of each statement, including the one where “I’m with my boyfriend”. To piss me off, my friend was joking around that it’s official, and I even fingered it. To make matters worse, my Waiban finally showed up only to take me back home. This poor man was called in the middle of the night to get to the police station that’s so out of his way just to pick me up and safely bring me back home. He looked at me and my friend and said, “When you said you were with a friend that spoke Chinese really well, I thought it was Sarah”. Then I had to tell him that I couldn’t go home because we still had to meet our friends that we were supposed to see 3 and a half hours ago. When we got to his car, I finally got to meet his fiance (which let’s face it, was probably not the happiest woman in the world). He gave us a ride to where our friends were, and we finally arrived at the bar that we then left from 20 minutes later because it was closing.

So, what was it exactly that happened to me that I had to spend 3.5 hours in the police station, you ask?

My wallet was stolen. My Chinese debit card, my American debit card and cash is all gone.  If there is one thing you must know about China it’s that if your belongings are stolen or lost, save the tears and move on because there is no Chinese person with a soul that will give it back to you.

Yesterday was Women’s Day- a big deal for Russians. A good friend wanted to hang out and just take me out on a friendly dinner. Despite the fact that I spent all day at home, there was something in my gut telling me not to go. However, I brushed it off and just decided to go. I took a taxi to meet up at Lanzhou University. Apparently I have a tendency to lose my cell phones in the taxis by not checking twice before getting out. I didn’t want the same thing happening to my money so I took out 20 yuan, put it on my lap, closed the wallet and put it back in my purse and zipped it up. I had the 20 yuan in my hand ready to pay. When we arrived to my stop I handed the 20 yuan, got change, put it in my pocket and walked out as another person was getting in. I was waiting to cross the street and I finally got to the other side and we took a bus from there. When I sat down I opened up my purse and noticed my wallet was missing. We got off at one of the stops where there was a police station nearby. My friend knows Chinese very well and was translating for me about what happened. The guy suggested going to the main bus terminal and looking at the cameras to see if someone stole it. How that would exactly help, is beyond me. The person already must have gotten off by the time we got to main bus terminal, and you can’t really track anyone down in China unless that person is a foreigner. We go there anyway, and a woman calls the police for us in order to report the theft. A car finally comes. On the outside it definitely looks like a police car, but when I get in it looks like a regular car. There are no bars to separate the front and the back; however, all taxis in Lanzhou have those bars. 

The guy driving is dressed in casual wear -a red sweater and jeans. I turn to my friend and say, “Can this man be trusted,?”, he responds with a, “Well right now people are seeing 2 foreigners in a police car, and they are probably thinking,  ‘can they be trusted?’ so basically, we’re screwed’ "

So lesson of the day, if you have a gut feeling to not leave your house- follow it!