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.

Birthday Weekend Extravaganza

Well, the last couple of days have proved that I really don't know much about China. It all started with me inviting a few people to dinner for Josh's birthday.

Now, a sidenote is that I'm still not sure whether birthdays are really this important in China, or if they think that Americans think birthdays are this important. It might be like their view of cake: Chinese people are convinced that Americans eat large helpings of cake daily, especially for breakfast. Anyway, I'm just not sure, so I can't tell you whether this experience was normal or not.

The important part is that I invited people to dinner for Josh's birthday. Unfortunately, two of the people don't get along, so I had to plan two separate things (one on Saturday and one on Sunday, which brings me to another tangent, the point that only Americans have weekends in China, the other teachers and the students all work 7 days a week, and I think some people resent the fact that Josh and I have two days off every week).

Friday night we just hung out at the apartment. We've been watching "The 4400," which I found on DVD here, and we've been reading a couple of different books, so it was fine. Saturday morning one of the Chinese English teachers came over because he had questions about an exam he had to take (which is apparently part of being a teacher in China). I was told that it was an English exam. When he showed up, it turned out that it was a statistics examination written in English. It took me the better part of 30 minutes to explain that even though I know English, I haven't taken a statistics class in almost 8 years.

Our friend left, determined to find the answers to his exam online (cheating is perfectly acceptable here, it doesn't really have a moral value attached to it). Josh and I spent the rest of the day cleaning, mopping, etc. We had invited the two Canadian girls from another high school over, and so we didn't want to look like slobs. Also, I had to wash all the dishes, because whoever lived here last had just stuck them in the dish sanitizer without washing them (a sanitizer is pretty cool; you wash the dishes by hand, but then throw them in the sanitizer to make sure they're disinfected, because all the dishwashing is done with cold water.) Lots of preparation and work.

Our friend (Lee) came over and we went shopping for all the stuff we needed to cook dinner, and then we met the Canadian girls and went back to our apartment (we hadn't planned for one of the girls to be vegetarian, but she was really nice and I guess there were enough vegetables for her to eat that she wasn't starved). Lee showed us how to cook this great beef dish with garlic and peppers, and we sat down and started eating (note, pictures of all this will be up today I hope).

The food was great. When we finished, we opened up the cake that we had gotten for Josh. It was huge - we still have half of it crammed in our tiny refrigerator. But the best part was the two pandas on top (made by hand out of frosting). Anyway, the cake was very good (for China), and I ate more than my share. We threw in a movie called "A Good Year." Made by Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe as the star. It sounded promising for a romantic comedy. Anyway, it was terribly boring, although it looked well-made at least. The girls and Lee left when it was about half-over, and then Josh and I cleaned up. I ended up reading for a couple of hours and finished Brandon Sanderson's Well of Ascension.

Now, that may sound like a fairly reasonable Birthday Extravaganza - and it was. I was perfectly happy with that. I assumed that Sunday would just be a nice dinner, and then we'd be all done. I had no idea what was in store for us. I'll go ahead and post about Sunday a little later (or maybe tomorrow) because I'm tired of typing.

Side note - After trying to learn the first verse of the Jackson 5's ABC / 123 song, the kids absolutely refused to do it anymore (even though it had been their idea) and insisted on teaching us about China and the Chinese language. I learned about the 4 famous Beauties of China, one of whom was apparently incredibly fat.