after four weeks

I’ve been in Beijing for four weeks now. just over.  It continues to feel more like home as days pass.  Bus routes begin to make sense, the layout of the city becomes clearer, the subway easily navagatable, teaching falls into a rhythm.  It’s easy to walk down a street and have no idea what is hidden behind the facades of buildings; our street for example has slowly revealed itself to us.  Being in a foreign country makes you realize how many subconcious signs and hints you use to navagate a place on an everyday basis. When those reliable clues are taken away everything becomes unknown.  And as is so often the case in china, things end up being the opposite of what you expect.  If the candy looks sweet, it often turns out to be salty.  and since when is candy salty?  i once thought a piece of candy in brightly wrapped foil was a strange chocolate when i oppened it, only to discover it was some sort of dried meat product when i tried to chew it.  meat candy?  Our street, or any street i guess, is the same.  Aaron can actually read a lot of chinese characters these days, but there are still so many that we often don’t know what signs mean.  i am basically illiterate here.  So something as simple as finding the grocery store rumored to be right on our street turned out to be a process.  We eventually found it by going into an entry way off the street past rows of bicycles, down a long dimly-lit tiled hallway with some old broken furniture and a strong stench of urine from the bathrooms, past the back entrance to a restaurant and down a stairway to the nice, well-lit, modern grocery store in the basement.  and that wasn’t the back entrance or anything; it’s just how you get to the grocery store.  we also found a huge, crowded, fruit and vegetable market very near our apartment behind a cement wall, beyond a vacant lot area, in a large non-descript pole barn type building. If we hadn’t wandered back there we never would have known it was there.  it would be fun to be magically able to read chinese for a day and go around my neighborhood and the city.  i’m sure most of what seems so mysterious and cryptic to me is actually easily navagatable if you can read the signs, but i think even then there would still be the cultural barrier. (i.e. you could read the candy wrapper that says it’s meat candy, but you still wouldn’t expect meat candy).   or pigeon soup.