Some of you may be wondering…

Matt and Angel are so far away in China. What could I send them to let them know I care?

Cards, notes, emails are nice and always very appreciated!

But there are also some physical comforts we’re missing here (or thinking we should have brought, if only we had realized how much we’d use them/want them here).

So if you have the hankering to send us a care package as a birthday/Christmas/anytime gift, here are some items we miss or can’t find here:

-Legit chocolate

I miss real dark chocolate. (photo by cubicgarden, flickr.com)

We’re not talking your run-of-the-mill, high-fructose-corn-syrup-milk-chocolate nonsense. (We can find that here, but it is outrageously expensive…a small box of Dove chocolate is over 100 yuan. To put that in perspective, we usually spend less than 10 yuan each on our entire meal at the school cafeteria.) No, what I miss is genuine, dark chocolate, like the bars that cost $3 US a piece, but are so rich that I eat one piece a week and the entire bar lasts for more than a month. (See http://chocolatebar.com/products.php?product=3oz.-Organic-Dark-Chocolate for an example.) I thought I’d be able to find chocolate at least at a Western store here, but if I do ever find some legit chocolate, I’m sure it will cost half a year’s salary for me. So unfortunately, in China, it looks like chocolate is out of the question…unless you send some

-Totally Insane Card Game

This is a game our friends from college introduced to us. The great thing about this game is you can play with an unlimited number of people, which is helpful when you have a dozen students over and they want to play a game. Apparently, Chinese students are enamored with Uno. The Totally Insane Card Game is very similar to Uno…but, well, a lot less boring. So this would be a great game to introduce to our students and keep ourselves more entertained than endless rounds of Uno would do. You can find the game online: http://www.totallyinsanecardgame.com/ and even have it shipped directly to our address in China! Unfortunately, it’s also outside of our teacher salary budget, so we don’t get Totally Insane without your help.

-Granola

Another thing we have not found yet is granola (though I suppose we could make it if we had the time and equipment….which we don’t). We’ve found some American cereal and granola in a couple of the larger supermarkets that are further away from where we live. But again, they are remarkably expensive and unattainable for us. It seems we need an expat salary to get expat goods (like granola).

And that is all! We managed to fit all of our other expensive Western goods into our suitcases or find suitable alternatives here. (Or at least we’re pretty sure we will find them some day.)

Now it’s time to go finish our lesson plans while we listen to the firecrackers outside! (It’s Mid-Autumn Festival here, so apparently, it’s the perfect opportunity to light off firecrackers.)