Dear friends,
Sonia and Jackie seem to be managing just fine. Some university girl students they met invited them to their campus to meet some of their friends. She said that a young man in a store befriended them and is coming over tomorrow so they can help him with his English. She writes: Everyone looks at us -- we haven't seen another "white" person since we arrived so guess we are quite an oddity. It'
s really funny -- some giggle and others look curious and some look friendly but
everyone looks at us -- a very strange feeling, actually.
"We are having trouble with food though -- every single thing is different except cabbage and broccoli in the vegetable stuff. We make out okay with fruit but
meals are a real problem. They don't have fresh milk, butter or cheese like we
get and there's no jams or peanut butters or anything, to put on bread or toast.
We put liquid honey on as that is all that is here. They use rice of course allthe time and some funny noodles and vegetables that look like noodles. We don'
t know how to cook a nice Chinese meal but I guess we'll figure something out sooner or later. I had iced tea and ice cream for lunch. My second one. I was
afraid to have the spaghetti as it had tomato paste in the sauce. We're thinking we'll eat our lunch out a lot as it doesn't cost much and that will be our main meal."
(You need to remember that Sonia is about 75 years old, and her sister is somewhere about the same age, so they are quite daring to have travelled so far, and probably need to be careful of what they eat. I guess Sonia can't eat tomatoes, maybe they are too acidic for her.)
"So we're keeping busy -- everything is so different I can't begin to tell you -
-I guess it's the same with every country.
"I guess Dad (her husband, she called him that as this is also to her children,)
told you our plane from Vancouver left really late and consequently we missed our flight to Xiamen. What a commotion! We had the great luck to actually meet
somebody we knew, and who spoke Chinese, and he really helped us in getting another ticket to Xiamen in place of the first one --I don't know why it was such a
problem but it took forever and we ended up leaving the airport after midnight and getting to a hotel at 1:30 a.m. only to be picked up again at 4:00 am to go back to the airport to catch the plane at 10:30 a.m. What sense is that!! I hate to think of 'the airports scenario' again in 2 months."
"I'm going to copy and paste this letter tos everyone individually as it won't go as a group. I tried this morning."
She doesn't even mention jet-lag! I'm astonished. Well, they seem to be doing
just fine so far. Sonia is one of my best friends. :-))
Warmly, Mary
