Picnics

Well, I'm trying to be better about putting stuff up here, so I decided I would write about our weekend. It was actually a pretty good weekend, all things considered. After I wrote on Friday, we had our Chinese lessons with Monica and came back home. I can't really remember what we did that night; I'm pretty sure we just hung out at the apartment, which was fine.

Saturday I got up and went to the market, bought some food, and came back. We cleaned my apartment, which desperately needed it, and had some lunch, went to the store. All sorts of boring things. We ran up to the grocery store that afternoon, but it turns out I didn't need to go after all. One of the English teachers, Joy, called me and invited us to dinner. So we went and met up with her and another English teacher named Peng Guin. Both of them are really young - Guin is probably 22 or 23, and Joy might be a few years older than me. We went to the market with them and bought some food to cook, which was pretty fun, and then we went back to Guin's apartment and started cooking. It turns out that Guin's girlfriend lives next door to Josh, and she came over too, so we ended up having a few people there. And it was so fun! None of the weird awkwardness that we usually feel around Lee, or the poorly-masked irritation that David shows whenever he's around us. Sort of like - and here's the amazing part - they actually wanted to talk to us and be around us.

Well dinner was good, and we came back home and watched some Alias. We had agreed to go on a picnic with Guin and Joy and Haiyen (Guin's girlfriend) on Sunday. So we got up and about 10:30 we met up with them at the school - plus 5 students from some of my classes. We got on a bus, went about 20 minutes outside of town to a river, got onto a tiny, rickety boat, and crossed over to the other side.

We found some rocks, built an impromptu stove, started a fire, and cooked dumplings and noodles. It was so good! I was so impressed at how well the students did with everything. The food was good, the company was good, the scenery was amazing. The whole thing was great. About an hour after we got there, another 8 or 10 students arrived. Now, the interesting thing is that these students only have about 4 hours free every week - on Sunday afternoon. So the students (and teachers) who had gone with us in the morning had had to ask for leave from their classes. They are kept insanely busy, so it was pretty cool that they wanted to go do something with us (with such little spare time.)

After we ate, we walked around and explored. It was really fun, and we had some hilarious moments. One thing is that the students are so eager to give us things. For example, during our brief time on the picnic, I was given a clump of weeds that one girl had pulled out of the ground and washed off, several stones of varying shapes and sizes, a whole bag of bamboo shoots, and several floral arrangements (all made on the spur-of-the-moment.) The two funniest moments of the day, as far as I can remember, were: a) a girl holding out a white, flat rock and saying, "Here, it's a hamburger, you can have it." (I threw it away later) and b) a whole herd of cows eating most of the bamboo shoots that we had gathered while we were playing on the river (everyone was so sad, but it was hilarious to me.) I just asked Josh about his funniest moments and he said hamburger rock and Mr. Peng almost getting crushed by a rock. The last one requires some more explanation. We spent quite a bit of time skipping rocks on the river, which was fun, but Mr. Peng loved to sneak up on people and throw a huge rock into the water by them, thus soaking them. When he went down to the water later, a bunch of students threw rocks near him, splashing him, but one girl threw a huge rock so close that I swear it missed him by about an inch. It was hilarious, mostly because no one seemed that worried by it (except me.)

We ended up having enough bamboo shoots (even after the cow incident) to still take some home and cook them. Oh, one last story - as we were leaving, we saw a cow that was giving birth (and we had the right angle to see all of the "business district.") Anyway, the funny thing is that one girl leaned over to me and, in all seriousness, said, "It's sleeping." It was quite an experience. That night Guin and Haiyen came over, and we peeled and cleaned the bamboo. My first time doing that! Then they showed us how to cook it, which was pretty easy, and we had a really nice dinner.

Well, I'm afraid there's not much more to say. Oh, I can already tell that I'll have some golden stories after this week. Our lesson is on talking about disability, so the students have some hilarious comments. Two that I liked today were: "He can't write because his hand is broken down," and "I think that the worst disability would be not being able to watch T.V." Keep in mind that we'd already covered things like blindness, deafness, paralysis, etc.

Ok, enough for now. I'll let you know if I think of any more funny stories. Oh, and check our pictures, because in the next day or so I promise I'll put up a picture of the mousetrap we bought. I think it was left over from the Cold War.