Living abroad, alone, was a real emotional challenge. I decided to face this challenge as any reasonable adult would, by getting a fluffy companion. It took a lot of research to decide what to get, since I had no idea how long I would be in China, and wanted to be able to bring my new friend with me wherever I went next. I came dangerously close to buying a chipmunk before Google convinced me that was way too much work. While looking at things like quarantine times and veterinary paperwork, I discovered that rabbits when personal pets (not lab animals) have pretty much no such restrictions, and so it was decided I would head back to the neighborhood pet shop and plunk down a few kaui for an itty bitty ball of fluff that would hopefully brighten my life. Spoilers: he did.

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Oct 11, 2007 at 9:49pm

I bought a bunny today. It’s very teeny and very cute. I haven’t thought of a name yet, partly cause its impossible to tell at this age which gender it is (if you doubt me, look it up). It is strictly not going to be named Stu (stew), or any other variation of food: fish, human or otherwise. Enjoy the pics!

Oct 15, 2007 at 4:13pm

The bunny is very friendly. It likes to be around me. It hops around my feet when I’m home and paws at my pants until I sit down and let it hop in my lap. It likes to be petted and is very soft. It often falls asleep on me. When feeling active it will hop around the living room and occasionally leaps in the air for no reason. It likes to hang out in my pocket when I go out, which will not last too much longer. It’s very good about using the cage w/ newspaper as a potty. It loves cilantro and bok choy and bananas, but isn’t very fond of the dried food at all. It’s soooo cute. While exploring, it sometimes tries to stand up to see better and will lean so far back it falls over. It doesn’t always make the jump into my lap, but it keeps trying, and sometimes when its washing, it leans so far over trying to reach a spot that it topples. It gets sleepy after eating and sometimes falls asleep before it finishes washing and there are green smudges on its mouth. I’m still having some naming issues, so I’m going to put a poll up.

*The cage I bought was too big for his baby self and he was able to squeeze between the bars on his first night home, so he never did actually live inside it, but I encouraged him to use it as a “home base” of sorts and kept the bedding food, water, and liter pans in or around it. He never did get a proper name, and ended up being The Bunny (capital letters a later addition) for the rest of his days.

Nov 21, 2007 at 2:12pm

I’ve been promising more pics of the bunny forever, and I finally took some, so here we go…

Before and After

As you can see, the bunny has grown up a lot.

Now it likes to chew, especially on my clothes, and especially when I’m wearing them. It also likes to stand on my feet.

Bunny in the kitchen, wants food…

Dec 9, 2007 at 8:49pm

Don’t panic, the bunny is fine, although it came closer to being made a hat today than ever before. The reason I’ve been off line for a while is because the bunny chewed through the power cord of my laptop last night. And when I woke up this morning, I discovered that it also chewed through the Christmas lights. This was the last straw, and I spent my morning rearranging my apartment to create a wall to pen the bunny in the kitchen while I’m gone or asleep, and to remove, lift up or cover EVERY cable elsewhere, to protect them when I let the bunny out while I’m home and awake.

The couch forms the main barrier across the room, and since the back of the couch goes all the way to the floor, it can’t get under the couch from the back. The cage forms the remainder of the barrier with strategically placed cardboard boxes closing any gaps to prevent the bunny from pushing the cage out of the way. This gives the bunny a large space to play in with its food and litter boxes, while keeping it out of the part of the room with most of the electronics (the one outlet in the kitchen is high on the wall and the cord runs to the top of the fridge where the microwave has been returned to).

The living room now has a real table for the computer, the couch, desk and former tv stand guard the outlets in the wall, the main power strip runs from behind the couch to the top of the desk where I can plug in the tv (now living on the desk), the dvd player, and the computer, keeping the power cord WAY off the floor.

Its not the best feng shui, and I have to step over the cage to get into the kitchen, but it is my hope that this new arrangement will permanently protect my cords from being eaten.

As for my power cord, that was a whole other adventure to replace, since there are no Best Buys in Beijing, and I couldn’t exactly hop on the internet to look up a good store to go to.

I went into the city, and asked a taxi driver to take me to a place I could buy computers (hoping that a large computer store would also have spare cords). This conversation was a little tricky for me, since it was all in Chinese, but he took us to a large shop that, like many Chinese shopping centers, was full of many small booths selling goods.

When I went in, I asked the sales people where I could find “Dell”, and they pointed me to a Dell dealer. I showed them the broken part and said I needed one just like it. He told me it would be 850 for an “original” and 350 for a “copy”, so I made sure he understood I needed the exact same thing, but I would take a copy, and he took my money and scooted off, I believe to buy the product from another vendor, and came back with the copy.

I looked at the adapter, but the plug for the wall was Chinese. (Here I should note that while my American electronics will mostly plug into Chinese outlets with no trouble, Chinese shaped plugs will not plug into American outlets, no matter what voltage they can take) So I told him it wasn’t what I wanted, because it wasn’t the same, and he should give me my money back and I would look elsewhere. Now this was great, because the apparent difference between the original and copy was the American style plug, which he tried to tell me, and I insisted I didn’t want to buy what he was holding, so he finally relented and went to get the American model (yay).

So, obviously, I’m back on my computer, working just fine. But that’s pretty much my birthday present to myself, ’cause 350rmb (46 usd) is a big chunk of change to spend all at once (hence the extreme makeover for the apartment, I can’t afford to do that again).

The Christmas lights are only 10 kuai, so its not a big deal, but it means I have to redo the tree for what will now be the third time (sigh).

The joys of owning a pet. I love my bunny, but I’ll take cat-clawed couches over bunny-chewed electronics any day in the future.

Dec 10, 2007 at 10:07am

Well, not really… as it turns out the barrier doesn’t work at all. Although while I was gone, the bunny was content to stay put, once I was home, it worked really hard to get out, and succeeded, I was up till almost 1:30 am trying to fix it, but the bunny just kept jumping over everything I put in place… sigh

At least the furniture rearrangement keeps the wires safe, and the couch barrier means the mess from the kitchen is less visible from the rest of the room.

Dec 29, 2007 at 5:07pm

I finished all my paperwork for school and put the entire pile in a drawer in my desk to keep it nice and safe until it was time to turn it in.

Today, I’m cleaning my living room in preparation for my upcoming trip, and I open this drawer to discover that SOMEHOW just in the last 2 days the bunny has gotten into it and chewed all the paperwork to bits INCLUDING the student’s final exam papers.

My only guess is that there is somehow a small space at the back of the drawer that it was able to squeeze through, but there is something wrong with the world when even the papers IN A DRAWER aren’t safe.

*I went to Seattle for the winter break and left the bunny in the care of some of my students. I came back to a very chewed couch and learned bunnies have separation anxiety.*

Feb 23, 2008 at 12:28pm

It’s Saturday morning here and I’m about halfway unpacked. I’m getting some laundry done and I’ve managed a trip to the store for the basic essentials, food for me and the bunny and new dvds.

The bunny is well, however we’re going to the vet soon anyway because I got a really enthusiastic greeting when I got home and I now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is indeed a boy bunny.

The sofa is not as bad as I’d feared. The hole seems to be underneath the sofa, so the bunny crawls up inside it and vanishes, but the visible damage to the sofa is, while definitely there, not as scary as an actual hole.

* I was so wrong… 

Feb 24, 2008 at 6:43pm

Day 3, and i’m already going insane…

The weather is still evilly cold, especially when the wind blows, so its still hard to make myself go outside for anything non-essential.

The bunny had a little conniption fit and knocked over its litter boxes (not for the first time), so I finally went out and bought a full size covered cat box. The lid is off while it gets adjusted, but the sides are quite high, and its (I hope) too heavy for bunny to overturn. I’ve left the lid on the floor to see what he thinks of it, I’m still not sure if I’ll use it on the box, or just keep it as a bunny hideout elsewhere in the room.

I’m going to try to figure out my new camera this week, too so I can upload some pics of the sofa damage everyone keeps asking about, and of course of the bunny, which has grown more into his ears now.

*One of the more hilarious aspects of owning this bunny that I somehow failed to write about the first time was that I became known at the local pet shop as ‘the weird white lady who thinks her bunny is a cat’. I would return to the shop where I bought him for food and supplies. When he was little, I just used basic washing bowls for litter pans and regular people dishes for his food and water. As he got bigger, he knocked all these over… a lot. When I went in to find a weighted food dish he couldn’t pick up in his mouth and throw around (which he did when unhappy with it’s contents), the pet shop owner was confused, pointing out to me (in Chinese) that this dish was for dogs, and I had a rabbit. ‘Yes, I know’, I said, and tried to explain the issue in my limited Chinese. She laughed a bit and sold me the dishes. When I went back next for the litter box, she was once more perplexed. ‘This is for cats’, she explained, ‘you have a rabbit’. ‘I know’, I said, ‘but he doesn’t use a cage, he uses a litter box.’ ‘Like a cat?’ she exclaimed incredulously? ‘Yes, like a cat’. And she had to get her shop neighbors to come over so she could show them the crazy laobai who taught a rabbit to poop in a box. From then on, whenever I picked up the cedar shavings there, she asked again if he was still using the box like a cat and it cracked her up every time.

Mar 6, 2008 at 5:59pm

I was informed today that my rabbit has a better standard of living than some of my students….

Yeah. Take some time to soak that up.

I was chatting with a couple students after class today. We talked about various things, and when they found out I had a kitchen they were amazed, then even more amazed that I didn’t use it, but preferred to eat out. One asked me if I thought eating out was cheap, and I said, compared to America, of course. But they told me that even 10-20 kuai (2-3$) is a big deal, and too much for them to do!

They asked me what I often did in the afternoons and I mentioned that I sometimes go to the store to get food for the bunny. We got to talking about the bunny, how it lives, what it eats, etc. and I made mention of the fact that the bunny ate fresh vegetables every day, and my students told me that they cannot afford to eat fresh veggies that often, which astounded me, since I usually only spend a couple kuai a day on them.

However, given that the bunny has a room to run around in, its own toys, and plenty of fresh fruit and veggies to eat. They determined that the rabbit has a better standard of living than they do. Which you can imagine, caused me to be more than a little embarrassed. I mean… its one thing to know that I have a higher standard of living (a bigger apt, more discretionary income etc) but to know that my standard of living is so much higher that my PET is better off…

Post by zipwow on Mar 11, 2008 at 2:20pm

On the lifestyle of your students: What kinds of things do they do with their discretionary income? What does an evening’s entertainment cost, or for whatever they’re eating what does that cost? Now I’m curious.

Mar 11, 2008 at 7:59pm

I haven’t quizzed them directly, though perhaps I should. Generally, they’ll do something like play ping pong or basketball in the afternoon if the weather is nice. Also, walking around the “walking streets” seems to be popular, you can just wander around and look at stuff, like window shopping. I am also lead to believe that they play cards in their dorms when its too cold to go out. The school turns the lights off in the dorms at 11pm, so many of them are also trying to get their homework done before that time. And they are made to get up and run around the football field at like 6 or 6:30 in the morning, even though classes don’t start until 8, so they don’t stay up terribly late.

I’ll investigate, but I also have to admit that I think I was talking to some of the lower class kids in this conversation, because others have told me they do some drinking and ktv (like karaoke). But on the whole, they entertain themselves doing whatever free activities the school provides like sports and reading.

As far as food goes, there is a cafeteria on campus that is way cheaper than the restaurants outside it. So they can eat there, though I understand the food is not as good. And I’ve also seen many students buy some of the cheap street food snacks and share it. So something that might cost 2-3 kuai, they’ll split up, so everyone is only paying 1. There are a lot of, what I would consider, substandard snacks, things that are basically a little sugar and flour and a lot of air, but they’re cheap. And of course, they eat a lot more rice than I do. You can buy a bowl of rice that’s between 1.5 and 2 cups (cooked) for 1 kuai, and many poor students just eat rice with some soy sauce on it for most meals, and then can get meat or veggies every so often and in small quantities.

Mar 12, 2008 at 7:55pm

Another slide show, the bunny is getting bigger and bigger…

Mar 19, 2008 at 7:16pm

We went to the vet today.

The appointment was for 9:30am, so I got up at 7 and left around 7:40. Rode the bus for like an hour, I got an English speaking seatmate. I’ll never understand why the Chinese assume that just cause they speak English too, I want to talk to them, they don’t assume everyone who speaks Chinese wants to talk to them. Oh well. Then got a taxi who had to call the clinic to get directions, and drove past it anyway. He was nice enough to turn his meter off while he circled the block to get back to it.

*I do love talking to people when I travel, but living abroad is not the same as a holiday. There are some days I just want to run my errands. 

Checked in and waited about 30 minutes to see the vet. While waiting I let the bunny out of the bag on his leash, and sustained two bruises (from a very impatient and nervous bunny biting) and a handful of scratches (from when a shaved corgi came into the hall).

Got told that the rabbit wouldn’t get worked on till maybe 3, they’d call me when it was ready. I explained I lived 2 hrs away and didn’t have a cell phone, so they said they’d try to move him up to 12:30.

Yes the appointment that the VET himself made was for 930… I have no idea.

He recommended a cafe for me to wait in, which the next taxi couldn’t find, and when he tried to call, no one answered. So I just asked him to take me to the nearest net bar instead. He tried to ditch me by telling me that a place that offered phone service was a net bar, and got very upset when I protested that I couldn’t see a net bar anywhere, having learned the characters for it.

I should point out here that the base fee for a taxi is 10 kuai, and after you’ve gone a distance worth that it goes up, but you never pay less. This guy was trying to get me out of the taxi before we’d even gotten to 11.

He asked a passerby where there was one, and she told him where to go. We found it, and he insisted on driving just enough past it to make the meter go up one more kuai. *sigh*

I got into the net bar with HOURS of waiting, having been told to return at 2pm. I got a computer and hung out online for 3 hrs. Turned out to cost 3 kuai/hr, so I spent about 1.25$ on that. The internet was even slower than here at my apartment, but it gave me something to do.

Went back to the vet at 2 only to be told he just went into surgery. Waited for that, then had to wait another hr for the bunny to wake up enough for the vet to be sure he was ok. Two more hrs of taxi and bus home, and here we are. Safe and sound.

The bunny is still a little woozy, but he’s out of the bag and back on his rug. I have one of those silly collar things for him in case he tries to chew up his wound area, but there are no external stitches and the vet said he should be fine in a day or two.

Interesting note, unlike cats, the bunny didn’t have to not eat before, nor after the procedure. The vet told me the most worrisome thing for bunny health is upset tummies, so one should keep the diet as regular as possible and use very few drugs. Which sadly also means the bunny has no painkillers and won’t have any sedatives when we fly back.

*I shall pause the tail (haha) of the bunny here, with only a few more caveats. It turns out neutering/spaying is about the only vet trip a healthy bunny needs, but they can actually go crazy and damage themselves and others if they are not neutered but also not allowed to mate. There’s something to that “like bunnies” metaphor, I guess. But bunnies are also hard to sedate and medicate so every procedure is rough. It was a relief to get him through the experience, and his mood did stabilize a great deal afterward, returning him to his sweet pre-puberty self. The Letters from China will return to the bunny in a few posts with the dramatic saga of getting him out of the country when it came time for us to go.

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For those wondering about my long silence, I apologize. I went to the Philippines for the Chuseok holidays this year, which was mostly lovely, and have been frantically working on the rough drafts of that trip ever since. Normally, I would be spending the fall enjoying the cool weather and fall festivals, unfortunately, life happened (job hunting, some health stuff, nothing serious) and has been eating up my free time, so not only is it taking longer than I hoped to finish writing, I’m not even getting good photos for the Instagram this season! I promise, I’m writing as much as I can, and thanks for waiting. ❤