so lucy let us know yesterday that thursday night we were actually going to have dinner with the government... um what? well i thought that it was us american teachers and a couple of others from our kindergarten school and in a room with some government officials. i thought it was going to be a little dinner party and just kind of awkward. yea. turned out to be totally what i did NOT expect. but. it . was. awesome.
so we get to this restaurant and its this huge bangquet room with dozens and dozens of round tables full of people! there was probably around 200 people there. turned out to be more of a banquet for the teachers of guzhen sponsored by the government. even though there were plenty of people there, rest assured we were noticed. yea, we definately were noticed when we walked in. we sit at a table with our head mistress of our school we teach at. it was pretty neat. the table next to us was full of the kitchen people and we waved to our chef (who is pretty much our friend now). there were teachers, police officers (including the guards for our apartment and the school who waved to us when they saw us) and of course government officials (but they were at the tables at the front of the room on a raised up platform type space. it was definately an experience. so we're sitting and waiting for the food to be served and for pre-dinner apetizers we had nuts (whole ones to be cracked), coconut flavored nuts (which i'm pretty much addicted to now) and sunflower seeds (flavored in the only way we've figured out to describe it, china). there was tea, a bottle of hard liquer, a bottle of wine, a bottle of orange shasta and a bottle of coca cola for each table on a huge rotating serving platter on the table. we of course drank the coca cola and had two more bottles brought over. the best part: the food. afterwards lucy explained that she does not like guangzhou food, she likes wherever she's from food better. her taste is more flavors and spice and they mainly eat chicken, pork and beef, and guangzhou, she said, is about health? but after i tell you what we ate you will def be as confused as we were. in order we recieved the platters on our rotating serving circle:
duck (and they are polite enough to put the cooked head on the plate too)
shrimp (whole, i'm really good at peeling of the head and tail, some of the little guys even had some pinchers on them. this was good with some garlic butter sauce they had)
crocodile (they were polite enough to cut it into pieces but left the scales on. lucy says you eat the scales if they're soft, not if they're hard.. they were all hard)
donkey. yes. donkey. i ate donkey. (its really tough)
chicken soup (more of a broth)
pidgeon wings (which again, they were nice enough to leave the cooked head on the plate. chantelle almost murdered me when i picked one up and had it talk to her and then had it visit her on her plate. haha)
fish balls (looked like meat balls made of sausage)(these were really good!)
corn and cashew mixture (i pretty much downed 3 little soup bowls of this stuff)
some vegetable that looked like celery but was not
some vegetable that the closest we can describe it to is a potato, it was not good)
pork ribs (the normalest dish we had, and yes, normalest is a word)
somewhere in there we got a bowl of white rice (gasp! what a shocker)
then these sticky rice like circle things filled with some goop that tasted good
wierd shaped noodles that seemed to be in a soup of corn-syrup-ish stuff? idk it was too sweet, but not good sweet
and then to finish the night of, orange slices and grape tomotoes.
haha. oh china. so turns out doesnt matter what kind of meat it is, i pretty much think its s'all good. yea it was wierd, but i tried everything and pretty much loved it all, yes even the donkey and pidgeon wing. i didnt scarf it down, i had my bite, enjoyed it, then moved on to the next dish.
the most humorous thing of the night was that i gagged and had to spit out only 2 things into a napkind. one was i accidentally mistook a whole garlic glove for a water chestnut. not pleasant. and then there was a really really bitter cabbage/kale like vegetable that invoked my gagging reflex. so of all the things to spit up, those were the two. it made me laugh.
okay now for the highlights.
so there are just tables and tables of old chinese men (like 40's and 50's) and we see them all just staring at us, callie had one wink and wave haha. so we're sitting and enjoying our meal and lucy says that we're going to go up to the government and toast them (more like etique for inviting us and so forth). ha. okay so we walk up to their table (past about 10 other tables) and EVERYONE is watching us and they see where we're going and one table breaks out in applause and then another and another and so forth til we are all just laughing nervously and our faces are beet red. so we greet the Governor of Guzhen and some other official and they thank us for helping with the education in Guzhen and we shake their hands and we toast. it was pretty neat. and of course walking back was a treat with thousands of eyes on us. lol.
then throughout the night everyone's smoking (makes me appreciate the clean air laws in american a whole lot) and of course everyone's getting their own amount of alcohol in them. haha. so we see periodically throughout the night a table of men would stand up and they'd do a shot. it was pretty funny because we just got to see all of these people just get drunk. our guard (drunk) came over and toasted our health (we joined in with our coca cola), our driver (head mistress's husband actually) came over and toasted us with a bunch of his buddies. Some guy SOOO drunk started talking to callie. it was pretty hillarious. and then everybody seemed to leave all at once (we figured out it was because the food was done and they stopped serving alcohol, go figure) so our table just so happened to be on the way towards the exit. so we have everyone just walking by our table either staring at us or giving us a "hello" or "goodbye". we figured out that when people see us they love to use their american phrases they know on us, just because they can. so get hello's everywhere. we figured out we're going to come back to america and feel severly attention deprived. so everyone (drunk as the dickens) is stumbling out saying random stuff to us as they pass and we smile and chuckle and give them a good ol american "hello" right back. its pretty entertaining. then we're just waiting for our bus to come back (one from the school drove us, its more of a van) and three police officers come up to us, and yes they are also very very very very very drunk and they say something to lucy and lucy says "they want to know if you want to karaoke with them" haha. we just kind of laugh and politely decline. it was funny because the headmistress very subtely was telling us to say no. we told them that we dont drink and we dont want to hang out with a bunch of drunk people, but another time, sure! (ha, yea.. right..) it was just amusing because they kept asking and the head mistress had to politely but firmly try and get them to leave.
so thank you guzhen (.. government?) for a very very enjoyable night. def one we'll remember.
and we leave for Sanya, Hainan tomorrow (pretty much china's hawaii) and then Guilin. we'll be gone for a little less than 2 weeks. be ready because you know there will be pictures, stories and the like. :) adu.
Today was our last day with the kindergarten winter camp. tomorrow we go back to the elementary school. but oh my gosh was it hard leaving those kids. we'll still have mike and karen during regular season but angel and tim we don't know if they'll be part of ILP, and they are probably 2 of my top two favorite kids.. okay for the stories. so we start off each day with opening where we go over the weather and names and sing songs. songs is the best part and especially with these kids. they knew 5 little monkeys and we've done it before with the kids but this group was funny. we got to the "along came mr. alligator...quiet as can be" and instead of them staying and singing they scatter. and hide under the tables. its hilarious but we have to round them back up every time (5 times to be exact, for every monkey). okay so the new girl angel, is one of the cutest girls we teach. one reason angel is one of my favorites she is such a cute little dancer we'd sing "teasing mr. alligator, you cant catch me" and in the hokey poky she dances so cute just swinging her hips away. i love it. oh and they love the hokey poky just to get to the part where they get to put their "back side" in. lol. karen especially loves that part. (5 little monkeys and hokey poky in the videos below) the other new kid that i L.O.V.E. love is tim. he's my little buddy. he's the one i was trying to teach how to wink the other day and today i taught him how to pound. he's way cute and i just love him to death. and yesterday there were some suspicions that tim and angel were an item and we're pretty sure they are. and it is the cutest thing ever. we'd be sitting and doing opening or just doing the activity and tim would just have his arm around angel. or mike would sit in angel's chair and tim would shove him off and glare at him and have angel sit down. i love it. and if it wasnt any cuter today we went through emotions. i would do one and have them mimic it. so i did "i'm angry!" with an angry face on and they'd shout back "i'm angry" but of course with a little smirk on their faces. and then angel and tim look at each other and say "i'm angry!" and each other and put their heads together and just smile. (i had them do it for me to record so it's one of the videos below). okay and today we had to go over kleenex's and what we use them for because stinker little karen was being gross. they all have runny noses because its been cold but karen has been the worst. so if we see that she has a stuffy nose we'll hand her a kleenex and then she'll just blow her nose and it will literally explode all over her face. its DISGUSTING. and we've caught her multiple times picking her nose and eating them. its gross. we send her to the naughty chair if she does, maybe it will sink in one of these times. oh and i caught her almost wiping a booger on angel and i had to yell and say "KAREN! NO. We do NOT do that." oh karen... what a cute little headache you will always be to us. um.. yea i think those are the good stories of the day.. its sad because i've only spent 2 days with angel and tim but i still wanted to cry when they said goodbye. i'm not even going to think about whats going to happen in 5 months. but i love tim and angel and i sooo hope that they're in the program for the rest of the semester. everythings awesome otherwise. we're just counting down the days (4) for our vacation to Sanya (90 degree weather!!) because we are sick of wearing 4 layers constantly around the house. china's awesome. aaaaaaaaaand i love it :)
(sorry, due to complications the hokey poky video wouldnt load but as soon as i can i'll get it up) and this post is a day late. sorry! but enjoy!
so during this winter camp there are two schools and two different sets of kids. Last week chantelle and me and two other teachers went over to the primary school and taught one set of kids in the morning and another set of kids in the afternoon. They are older than what we were used to but its was nice. With any age group they have their pros and cons. But this week Chantelle and I are at the kindergarten (our original school) with two kids from our original before winter camp set of kids, mike, the quiet chubby kid and karen the screecher drama queen who we figured out resembles a koala bear. haha. its true. and now we have 2 other kids a girl named angel (one of the cutest yet) and tim (a rambunctious little fellow who i found out really likes to be called tim tim). so we teach the same four kids morning and afternoon today and tomorrow and then we'll finish out the rest of the week back at the primary school. shorts of the day: karen first of all wore a scarf today and it kept falling off and each time gave her a panic attack followed by scream-crying. that was fun. until lucy took her scarf away and she really had a fit but had her cry then came back to the group and forgot all about it. she also, i've noticed, likes to pick her nose and eat it. which is pretty much just the biggest gross factor. and today she had a lot of boogers in her nose, one she kept breathing in and out (i know, gross right?). so chantelle brings over a kleenex for her and karen just takes it and blows her nose as hard as she can and boogers just go ALL OVER her face. it was disgusting. but just wait, then she starts licking her face! and i'm telling her "no karen! gross! no!" and trying to wipe it up before she licks anymore. it was just gusting. and mike today was just being weird. when i had him before this winter camp he was just really shy and didnt want to participate or do anything and he'd just mumble along the english. but today he was off in mikeland just humming away to himself, finding little pieces of paper to fidget with. i had to snap my fingers a couple times to bring him into reality. so little tim. ha. oh tim. so i figured out that he is one cool kid. like we can joke around with him but he still pays attention. We were doing opening and he looked at me and smiled so i winked at him and thought nothing of it. but then i look at him a couple second later and he's squinting and holding one eye down with his finger. it was so cute. so the whole afternoon session i would look at him and wink. we really hope he's in the ilp program after this winter camp. def one of my favorites. oh and funny story of the day. so chantelle and i got done teaching in the morning and we get done at 10:40 so we go up to get our lunchpales to bring them down to the kitchen and we drop them off and go back to the elevator (we live on the 7th floor) and there was no way there was enough time for the elevator to go anywhere. we get to it and it says its on floor one and right before i got to press the up button it says that its headed up. so i think it went up a foot before it came back down. and it opens up and there's some lady in it!?!? there was no way it could've gone anywhere. it said it was on the first floor the entire time. so this crazy old magical appearing lady walks out kind of chuckling and just says over and over "oh! ni hoa, ni hoa!". chantelle and me get in the elevator and we're just like um.. there was no way this elevator went anywhere! and we just busted up laughing because i'm pretty sure that lady just aparated out of nowhere. oh china.. okay and to explain the pictures. so we teach at a kindergarten and not all the classrooms were like this but the one we use to teach in for this week is specialized for the little little guys. its cute, but terribly inconvenient when all that is there is little sized tables and chairs. but we go into the bathroom and there lined up are the tiniest toilets and tinest urinals i have ever seen!! it was too cute chantelle and me couldnt resist not getting a picture. i mean i knew i was going to feel big going to china...but not this big ;) enjoy
(and the video is of our alarm clock? haha. no. not funny. seriously it pounds nonstop it wakes us up, it keeps us awake and it literally shakes our building like we can see the room shake. dont worry mom, i'm sure the building is stable ;)
so today it rained. like poured. and poured and kept raining. pretty much got soaked on the way to and from school. but it was okay. the only thing that was really sad was i remembered i brought rain boots AFTER i was already at school in the afternoon... sad face.. but the streets here are really bad so there was puddle after puddle that just screamed "JUMP IN ME!!" it was so hard to resist the temptation.
the kids were a lot better today compared to yesterday . yesterday was just plain awful. i swear all of them had the devil in them and there was no way to get it out of them. so today was a lot better.. plus its friday so you know today is automatically better.
so now its winter break until the end of next week but then spring festival begins (chinese new year) which lasts another 2 weeks. (chinese kids dont know how lucky they are). and so us teachers have from the 1st to 15th off. SWEET. so we were planning on making this our adventure up to beijing. only one thing, this is like the worst traveling season because EVERYONE is trying to get up north. yea so yesterday was a big headache trying to figure everything out. and now we're not going to beijing until april. so now we leave the second of february to first go to Sanya, Hainan (Sawn-ya, High-Non). Which is pretty much china hawaii, except way better. Its like a resort vacation area with ridiculously nice beaches and best thing ITS HOT THERE!! like lows of 75 and highs in the high 80's!! so we'll stay there for 5 days. things to do in Sanya include beaches, scuba diving and MONKEY ISLAND and more. so we're way psyched. next we're going to go to Guilin (Gway-leen). This is a high tourist province in China. This is where a bunch of pretty china landscape is found. like we'll take river tours and go exploring mud caves and the such. so its not our originally planned beijing trip but it should be pretty legit. and you know i'll have TONS of pictures. so dont you fret :)
ps. if any of you have any questions or just want to contact me one on one my email is tay07009@byui.edu. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT ME ANYTIME and about anything!! seriously. i'd love hearing from you :) :)
pps. so its pretty much freezing out here and our apartments doesn't have working heat so our apartment actually gets colder than outside. we wear multiple layers at night (sometimes up to 5) so i went to the store and bought some rice and filled one of my socks with it. and you just heat it in the microwave for a couple of minutes and now you've got your own personal warmer. and so to not get cold at night i snuggle up to it and we joked that it was kind of like a stuffed animal. well... i got bored.. and chantelle and me joked about drawing eyes on our socks...
so its winter here in guzhen? its not snowy or anything, they actually dont get snow at all here. but its been pretty cold here. like all the time. and we dont have heaters. so sometimes its colder in our apartment than it is outside. (but dont worry i fixed that by buying some rice and making myself a good ol rice sock).
so for the kids its actually winter break for them. they have two weeks off.. but of course we dont. instead we do a winter teaching camp. four of us go over to an elementary school and teach from 9-11:30 in the morning and go back and teach a different set of kids from 2:30-5. now these kids we teach for the next two weeks are totally different from our regular ILP kids. They are older which made for some good challenges for us. we kind of had to reconfigure lesson plans seeing as we made them for 6 year olds not 10-11 yr olds. but our 6 year olds actually can speak better and understand more, because they've already had a semester of ILP. So this has just been a whole different experience all together. It's a tad more challenging but its good for me. and of course there are some CUTE kids! they are a little more clever and act up a bit more but they are still way way fun.
funny story of the day:
it happened in chantelle's class. So theres a kid named luke thats like a year older than the rest of the kids and lets just say he gets in a little bit of trouble and he knows exactly what he's doing. but he's way smart and really a good kid. so chantelle was working on greetings, like saying "Hi my name is_______" "It's nice to meet you" well chantelle told luke "It's nice to meet you too." and he just gives her the strangest look and says, "It's nice to..meet you... one?" haha so she had to explain what "two" and "to" were. she didnt go into "too" because she didnt want to confuse the poor child. but it was funny.
and random item of the day. so there's things that happen here that just make me laugh out loud. well we're walking home from school today and theres a construction site right across from our apartments that we walk by everyday. Theres an entry way and then the rest is fenced off. but we're walking home today and we look and theres just a random chicken standing in the middle of the entrance. just standing there, not a care in the world. thats the first chicken i've seen just walking around, there arent wild chickens here or anything. so it just gave us a good laugh.
oh and we got a whole little fish today for lunch.. and you know, it wasnt half bad.
(picture of boys and girls standing against a wall: left to right: vicky, alice (cutest and smartest of them all), cody (one of my favorites), joe and lance) (picture of boys and girls sitting-in the front left to right: cody, tony-in the back: mary and jackie who are siblings) (picture of girls sitting-front left to right: Sally, Bailey-in the back: Amy and Nikki)
tuesday was chantelle and our head teacher callie's birthday. all they wanted to do was go out to eat and maybe get a pedicure. only another girl in our group mentioned that she wanted to go karaoke, but she was the only one. chantelle and callie and me really really did NOT want to go.. but lucy already reserved a room, so whatever we'll make it fun.
first we ate out at jack and the magic pea. and i got thai roasted chicken and it was REALLY REALLY GOOD. and lucy always orders hot papaya milk because its her favorite and so now its pretty much my favorite. its way way good. its way good hot and even warm and cold.
then we headed to the karaoke place which we're still not totally sold on, especially when lucy told us it was going to be a 30 minute walk... but yea.. we had fun.....like alot... which makes it even worse that we complained about it so much...
its way different though. when we say karaoke we dont mean go to a bar where a bunch of crazy drunk people go up and try and sing some songs. no no no. that is not how they do it in china. china karaoke pretty much kicks america's butt. you reserve a room and of course there's the way way nice rooms but we got the cheaper one.
we walk in and you get your own room which is couches on the wall and tables and then a tv screen and a computer where you pick the songs from. we had two microphones and you just sing with your little group. its way sweet. and included in the price of the room you get a bunch of food included. so we got watermelon slices, cashews, pistachios, these good deep fried dough things you dip in sweetened condensed milk, french fries (ha), aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand chicken feet.
yes. i ate chicken feet.
and you know what it really wasnt that bad. it was just gross, because it was the foot.. of a chicken..
another thing that made it happy was that lucy AND gary came along!! gary is so much fun. and they ordered two beautiful cakes from the bakery. they are also much better than crappy american cakes. they were topped in fruit and had a really good light frosting. it was way good :) and of course karaoke was a blast. chantelle and me did beauty and the beast duet. and later chantelle did an awesome rendition of "Memory"
oh and it was pretty much hilarious when gary sang and he picked this song and the chorus was "Amani Nakupenda, Nakupenda, We We" we all joined in and it was just pretty much hillarious. (that's what the video's of)
oh funny story. so near the end we're just laughing, singing and eating cake and callie takes her fork and kind of flings it with frosting on it and it sticks so she goes "oh it doesnt fling off." so as a joke she does it at me. well this time it flung. right in my eye socket. hahah i thought i had frosting in my eye and everyone was laughing SO hard even lucy's chinese man friend who came to give us a ride home.. so again, china sends laughter to the chinese people :) i do what i can
we travelled to shengen to an international branch. it was held at a very nice couples house. but we get there and this is just like fake china. its this really nice neighborhood where a bunch of rich white people live. its pretty much a place where they can say they live in china but they dont really live in china. they don't know what real china is. they have real toilets and regular food and americanized grocery stores to go to. it was pretty much a joke. but it was really really pretty and we will really appreciate visiting there.
okay so to get there it takes 2 and a half hours. so we woke up at 5am got ready and walked to a hotel which is about 10 minutes from our apartment and then we stuffed 6 people into a cab that should really only hold 4. the taxi took us to xiaolan (sh-ow lawn) school. we rented what i thought was going to be a bus but it was two vans and that took us straight to the branch's house. number one i hate chinese driving. the drivers are crazy. and i'm pretty sure we get inches within hitting SOO many people. i just try not to pay attention. so we get there and turns out we're an hour early. so we look and see that its a pretty sweet neighborhood and its actually sunny!! so we just took a walk around the hill and there are butterflies everywhere! it was so cool. so i want to take a picture of one so i see one on a bush and i sneak up on it. and its letting me get SO close!! so then i'm thinking hey, i wonder if i can catch it. so a callie and the other school's teacher watches me as i sneak up on it and i grab it aaaaaaaaaaaand its dead. saddest slash funniest thing.. but mostly sad. but i got the two other girls to laugh..at my expence but oh well... lol
the people in the branch are really really nice. its full of nice couples with younger children, and i think there's one Chinese family. and afterwards they held a linger longer (which is a get to know you with refreshments) best part was that it was american food!! it was so good and the people are some of the nicest people. we def love that house and best part about it, its has real toilets!! we almost cried when we saw them. the people just laughed, we felt like such poor ragamuffin teachers.. having to use squatters and eat fish head.. the branch wants us to come at least once a month but we're going to try and make it every other week just because transportation costs about 20 u.s. dollars... so we'll see. but we know how important and seriously blessed we are that we have a branch to go to! we never thought that that'd be the case so we know how lucky we are to have it.
side story we were waiting for our vans to come so we took a walk around rich hill and found this quaint little fountain park. it really is a beautiful area and i found dr. pepper!! all i've seen is coke but since so many americans live around the area they have stores just full of imported stuff you wouldnt find at regular chinese stores. it's ridic.
so everything in the middle of the day was pretty much just perfect but the ride home was a different story. since we woke up at 5am i was a tad tired so i tried to sleep but dumb crazy driver kept me from that. and then we get to the other school where the vans drop us off and now we have to find a way back to the school. we have the address on a piece of paper so we're on this busy street and finally catch a taxi's attention and he wanted too much so we tried another lady that wanted us to 50 yuan for 5 people but we had 6 and we have to travel in 3's so she still wanted 50 for 3 people so we just took it because we all were kind of at the end of our ropes. well i went in the first taxi and this lady takes us through this run down part of town and then just starts driving around and we're pretty sure she's lost, we think she called somebody for directions and she's asking us stuff and we cant understand her. so finally we get home. and the other people get home and their driver used a meter and it was less than 30 yuan. so yea.. taxis are cheap. they know we're american so they try and charge us more.
oh! good news! so callie our head teacher has been to china twice already before this time and one of her friends gave her a chinese name. her's is baimeigui (white flower). and chantelle had a chinese room mate last semester that told her her name actually sounds like a chinese word xiang tao (shawn tow) which means sweet peach. so we told lucy she has to give us chinese names. well she said i already have one zhu tou (pig head) but i told her i wanted a real one. so she asked what i like and i said stars. so my new name is xiao shing shing (shoaw sheeng sheeng) it means little star :)
but comes to find out lucy told us that it also means orangutan (she didn't know what the word was and had to look it up and she couldn't pronounce orangutan it was cute) but yea it doesn't depend on whether i say it right. it just means the same thing. so we'll see by people's face expressions whether they think it means little star or orangutan. i'm just going to forever be just one big chinese joke. i am jessica no longer for the next 6 months i am xiao shing shing, the little star :)
(ps. to explain some of the pictures, on the drive back we passed this building that had these statues coming out of it! it was weird, ones flying horses the other is like tritan? idk. it was just neat. so i took a picture. and then the sun was a beautiful red, from the pollution but we just try and forget that part.. the picture doesnt show it well but it was this deep reddish color. and it just looked like this perfect circle sitting in the sky. it looked fake but it was pretty)
so i thought that my saturday was just going to be enjoying a day of nothing.. so i'm sitting on the couch and its about 7:45 and callie comes in and says that if we want to Lucy will take us to this cafe. Lucy had told us about this cafe because there's a man who owns a lamborghini that goes there all the time, so we've wanted to go for forever. so we leave at 8 and its right next to the 5 star hotel, thats right next to the supermarket we always go to. it's called jack and the magic pea and its actually a sweet little place. it has a certain starbucks-esque to it. It was loungy but also a restuarant. They have alllll sorts of drinks from coffee to tea to papaya milk (lucy's favorite, she gets it everytime) and frios (i'll explain those in a bit). and for food they have everything from toast, to french fries to sandwiches to shark fin soup to ribs and duck chin. its actually a very very upscale place. but because its china everything is SOO cheap and makes me love it even more. so i get a strawberry frio which is like a strawberry ice blended drink and a chicken sandwich and it only cost me 26 yuan, which is roughly 3 and a half dollars. see what i mean? awesome. okay but the best part of the whole outing was near the end a couple walks in, a chinese woman and a white man and they sit at the booth behind us. so callie turns around and just starts talking to them. callie i've come to find out is just a people person. whoever she meets she automatically becomes friends with them and its like they've known each other for forever. she knows exactly what to say and doesnt make the conversation awkward and she's way funny and just welcoming i guess. idk but she's become my hero. so she's still talking to this couple and she's a tranlator and he's from Naples ITALY!! he's about 60 he said and not married to the chinese lady but he had that gorgeous italian accent. mmhmm. he's here on business for his company Mito. but somehow in the whole thing the lady got callie's number because they're coming back in march for business and if they call us up we're going back and having drinks with them and the lady gave callie a plush eeyore? i'm telling you i dont know how she does it. but the lady seemed so happy to talk to us and she was way interested that we were all volunteer english teachers.
its outings like this that just make me love china even more.
today was our first saturday which was nice because we got to sleep in. so i got a good 11 and a half hours of sleep :)
but then i go out to the living room and people had brought up lunch and we open it up and hey.. its fish head again. aaaaaawesome. you know the song fish heads, fish heads, roley poley fish heads, fish heads, fish heads eat them up yum.. in the morning roley poley fish heads in the evening in my soup.
yea that's my new theme song to my life.
down here in southern china its not really cold like snowing or anything but its definitely cold. aaaand we dont seem to have working heaters in our apartment. at all. so every night we wake up a couple times just because we're so cold. but i found the solution to not getting cold at night. two pairs of socks, long pajamas with long sweats over them, a tank top, a long sleeve shirt, a short sleeve shirt, sweatshirt with hood on, columbia fleece and blankets over my head. haha. and yesterday our other room mates went shopping for a heater. (we considered it but pretty soon its going to be really hot and muggy that its just not worth it) but this girl lorenda walks out into the living room where chantelle, callie and me were sitting and just says, "i reeeaaally like my space heater." we just said yea.... but seriously. how mean. thats like walking next to a starving person and eating a hamburger and saying out loud, "mmm this tastes sooo good." being cold has just made us a little bitter.. but we're still nice people i swear.
today we're going to go explore more of guzhen. and clean our apartment. yay...?
then tomorrow we're really excited because we thought for church we were just going to have our own little lessons just in our apartment but actually there's an international branch like 3 hours away and the branch president has called us and really wants us to come out there at least once a month. we have to pay for transportation and they said if that's too much that they'll help us out. so our school and the xiaolan school (they're like half and hour away) are going to go in on a bus which for round trip it will be like 12 dollars U.S. to go. which really isnt that bad. church starts at 10 so we'll have to leave at like 6am so its a good thing we can sleep on the bus...
oh and i brought rechargable batteries and i tried charging them one night and the light turned on like they were charging but i came out in the morning and they were just sitting next to the power strip.. uncharged. so i tried plugging them in again and they wont charge. so for now i dont have the resources to take pictures but as soon as possible i'm going to take pictures of the apartment and the school and kids and put them up :) :)
For school today we are supposed to have this theatre room, which is pretty much a room with a stage. But everyday so far it’s been locked so we’ve just used a little classroom. Well today we got Lucy to unlock it for us. So we go in and the floor is just these huge tiles but in the middle of the room they are all raised up along the crack. Well we try and sit the kids down and all of a sudden we heard a huge crack. And poor Karen, one of the chubbier kids, had stepped on a bad spot and cracked the tile. We feel bad but we’re all like, well of course it’s Karen who cracked it right. Pretty soon we had all accidentally stepped on spots and pretty soon like 4 of the tiles had some pretty good sized cracks in them. We totally just busted up the floor. So we’re thinking maybe that was why the door was locked… woops. (picture of karen, which the head teacher from last semester told us she reminds her of a koala bear, which made us crack up because thats all we see now when we see her)
Okay so then we had our first Chinese lesson with Lucy today!! It was so much fun. I love Lucy SOOO much. She is so pretty and way funny. We are so lucky to have her and we are so lucky for everything she does for us. We’re sitting in the apartment with her and I was thinking about how much I’m going to miss her when I have to leave, and I’ve only been here for a month. That makes me think about after 6 months how bad it’s going to be to leave here and the people and especially the children!! I love them so much. I’ve known them for less than a week but I feel like I know them so well and already love them SOO much. Callie said something during one of our training. She always tells how “oh my gosh you guys the kids are going to be so amazing” “oh my gosh, you guys this is going to be so fun”, it’s funny. But she told us that what these kids have really is just like unconditional for us. I mean we can be strict with them and we can get mad at them but at the end of the day they just plain love us. I don’t know how to explain it, and it just makes us love them back that much more. Okay so during Mandarin lesson Lucy just wrote out like the pinyin (Chinese put into English with accents and such) consonants and vowels and sounds. Then she wrote out simple everyday sayings and then some dialogue that we went over. And in it was asking what your name was and saying my name is ____. So our head teacher Callie has been to China twice already, this is her third time. She was a teacher and then a head teacher and this is her second time being a head teacher. So she knows a little Chinese, not as much as you’d think but she knows some stuff. So she whispers to me, “Say wo jiao (my name is) zhu tou” (pronounced: woh jow jew toe). So I say, “Hey Lucy! Wo jiao zhu tou.” Right away Lucy just busts up laughing. And I turn to Callie and say, “What did you make me say!?!?” And Callie and Lucy are just cracking up. And we’re all laughing but nobody will tell us. So I’m like, “Lucy. What did Callie make me say.” Lucy, still laughing, says, “You said my name is Pig Head.” It was pretty much hilarious and Lucy wouldn’t stop laughing. We told Lucy to give us Chinese names and Lucy says that that can be mine. I asked her if I should go up to random Chinese people that I see and tell them “Wo jiao zhu tou” and so now Lucy thinks I’m funny, but ridiculous. And I really want to just go up to people and say it matter of factly that my name is Pig Head. I wanted to tell you guys that my name was zhu tou and it actually meant like beautiful sun or something but I couldn’t not tell the real story. So that was pretty great.
So Chantelle and I were going to make a trip to the store and Callie came along with us. And we decided that we just really didn’t want to put up with china food tonight. Because for lunch we had fish again, not the head thank goodness! But it was just not good and even the kale underneath the fish tasted like fish. So we figured out we’d go to KFC for the first time (its right next to the grocery store). China KFC is way different than America KFC. All of their stuff is chicken sandwiches and fish sandwiches. It’s weird, but good? It was crazy busy too. We just sat there and talked for a bit. Something different about China, at fast food restaurants the workers deal with your trays if you take your own tray and throw away your food its like an insult to the workers. It was a good time we sat there a while and just laughed and talked. But then we come home and some of the other girls had gone to Dong Dong again (the fast food restaurant) and we of course went to KFC but Jay had stayed home. So we see her dinner from the school on the table and we’re like oh was it any good? And she says it was alright but when she went down the chef saw her and said, “Oh I was waited for you! I made you guys something special!” (He speaks a little English. He asked her where the rest of us were and she said we went to KFC. So now we feel like total jerk heads. So we’re going to make him a card or bake him a brownie or something.
oh and today were just hanging out and callie always go on and on about these really really good looking chinese pop singers. So today we were just jamming out to the music. which pretty much made me laugh because Callie looooves these boys and one song was a girl and boy duet and Callie was singing the girl part and lucy the boy part. It cracked me up because Callie knows everything about these boys Wang Lee Hom actually grew up in New York and has a masters and speaks perfect english. So i looked these boys up.. and hey you know what, they aint too bad looking. (boy in white, wang lee hom; boy in black pan wei bo
Okay so my batteries died on me today for my camera but I’m going to take pictures of our apartment and the school and hopefully the kids. And I’ll write a little each day just about the regular happening and stuff that goes on here in China. One thing for sure I thought Idaho drivers were crazy at BYU-I, no. You don’t know crazy until you’ve been to China. Okay everyone either has bicycles, mopeds, junkie cars or really nice cars, but mostly mopeds. And honking is totally different here. Everyone just drives everywhere. They all just fit in and people somehow just weave through the traffic on the sidewalks. But honking is for “hey I’m on your left” “hey I’m coming up behind you and passing you” “hey you’re not Chinese/Americans!” (We get that one a lot) or just honking for the sake of honking. And construction, which is everywhere, involves bamboo, a lot of bamboo. It makes me laugh. which is pretty much what chantelle and i have figured out. That's all we can do with china, just laugh it off. because there is no way we would get through some of these experiences if we couldnt just laugh it all off.
okay so i write my journal just on my computer and naturally i've been writing about china. and i was going to try and write different things from there on here. but i think i'm just going to copy and paste. so i'm sorry if its a bit random and disorganized... oh and its a bit long, but it wont always be :) enjoy!
So I think I’m starting to get a hang of how things are here in Guzhen. We wake up around 7 or 7:30 (either by alarm or by banging construction) and get ready to go to school. We drop off our lunch pales (which are actually like 3 metal bowls stacked on eachother, one has the main dish, the other rice and the bottom soup) and grab breakfast from the kitchen and then we head upstairs to the ILP (international language program) classrooms. We have opening with the kids which includes talking about the weather and singing a few songs and such. Then we split up into classes. I team teach with a girl named Megan which is ironic? This week I’m in charge of games. The first day we played duck, duck goose and today we played a matching picture memory game. I’m getting more a hang of it but I’m worried about doing the other subjects just because I don’t think I’ll be able to come up with new ideas for EVERY DAY. The program is an English immersion program where we really just interact with the kids instead of having text books and stuff like that. I'm teaching primary age (about 6 yrs old) so they are just learning basic speaking for now. Okay so yesterday was kind of hectic just because it was our first day teaching and we didn’t know anything about the kids and we just had to get used to everything. But I still think it went okay. Today was a lot better though. Then after we taught Chantelle, Lorenda and I went to the bank to exchange our U.S. money and then the supermarket to pick up a few more things. First of all it was our first day without Lucy so we were kind of guessing on how to get everywhere but we got around just fine. The bank was pretty much just one big fat headache. We get there are just plain clueless on what to do. We probably should’ve asked Lucy what to do or should’ve brought her with us. We pick the line everyone is standing in and are waiting for about an hour. That consisted of number everyone looking at us, especially when we first walked in. And then there was this Chinese man that was yelling and at first we thought he was just talking loud cause then some people were laughing but by the end we think he was just frustrated mad. I thought it was funny just because we couldn’t tell. Then the line finally moved and we got up to the counter and the lady tells us we’re in the wrong line, great. So we go to the other shorter line and we get up to the front after about another half hour and the guy of course does not speak English but somehow some lady took our passports and went and made copies of them and then we had to fill out all of this paperwork and it was just really long. Lorenda was filling stuff out and Chantelle and I tried to get paperwork from some lady that the guy pointed us to but she pointed us back to the guy. It was just frustrated but we laughed the whole time because that’s all we could do. And there was a good looking guard there, but I think I only thought he was good looking because he looked like Chow Yun Fat. He cracked us up because he was standing inside and then he goes over picks up this fatty night stick and just goes outside and just swings it around and hits it against his palm. It made me laugh because that’s probably what I’d do. So then we head to the supermarket. Chantelle and I were mainly looking for a blow-dryer and I was looking for a straightener. I picked up some good American junk food on the way. It was funny trying to find a blow dryer because they didn’t have them in the main part. Which it is seriously another headache because stuff is sort of organized together but it’s really not. So we go upstairs and all we see is shoes and purses and wallets and we’re like great, this isn’t going to work. Then a shoe sales lady comes up and says hello. Of course she only speaks very little English and we soon found our selves back downstairs at the help desk where another lady directed us back upstairs to a hidden electronic/appliance department we totally didn’t see before. We soon found blow-dryers and it was funny because we pointed to one we wanted because we didn’t see boxes or anything. So they lady takes it and plugs it in and shows us that it works. So we nod and we’re trying to tell her we want to buy it. Well soon enough there’s like 5 salespeople around us and one guy speaks English and I say “we want to buy this one.” He just gave me about the blankest look anyone could give and after about a minute he goes “you want this one…?” and I say yes. So he tells the others we wanted to buy it (in Chinese) and they all laugh along with us because that was just plain hilarious. Then the lady takes one out of the box and plugs it in and shows us that it works and we nod to show, yes, we want it. So then she write us a ticket thing which we have to take to a desk and pay there and then she brings it to us. The whole thing just made us laugh because it was WAY more than we thought we’d have to go through just to get a dumb blow dryer. And I didn’t get a straightener because it was too expensive. So then we get that meet up with Lorenda and go to the bakery that is right next door. I AM IN LOVE WITH CHINESE BAKERIES!! They are the most wonderful thing ever. I love them forever and ever amen. They have such good breads and little baked treats. They have a different taste to them but they are SOOO good. So we buy some stuff there, like filled up a tray because that’s how much good stuff there is. So I get to the register and the total came to 18 Yuan and again we give the Chinese people a good laugh, again. I tried to pay for it with a 100 Yuan bill. The lady laughs at me and grabs a bunch of money and just takes 20 dollars and gives me the rest back. Then Chantelle tried to pay 12 Yuan with a 50 Yuan bill. So we gave them a good laugh. Oh p.s. 18 Yuan is about $2.50 U.S. so I got 2 loaves of bread and about 7 other baked goods. You can probably get just one loaf of bread in U.S. for that much. That is why I love China. Okay so I forgot to write about this. So the first day we came we drove on a bus and dropped the other two schools off and then switched to a bus that brought us to Guzhen. There we met Gary who works for bond institute. He is way funny I like him a lot. So he dropped us off and that night we went over to the Bond Language office which is right in town right by a park. We sat there for a while; we got to use the internet there. And we also met Lucy who actually lives with us. Our apartment has five girls total. Megan, Lorenda and J share a room and Chantelle and I got the other room. They are very nice apartments. We have a dining room with mini-fridge and microwave then a tiny hallway like room with a sink and dishes which also leads to a mini-porch where our washer is. We have a living room with two desk that we use as tables, two couches and a TV we have yet to use. Callie, our head teacher lives with Lucy and also Jaime another teacher who just got here yesterday. It is so nice having Lucy (who is Chinese) because she’s the one that showed us around town and she helps us with sooo much. We love her and are so thankful for everything she does for us. She really does take such good care of us. Lucy also works at Bond as an English teacher to Chinese adults, and she will be our mandarin teacher. So the first night we just hung out with Gary and Lucy and another Bond worker named Nina. We all went to a very good Chinese restaurant. We go into a room and sit around a circular table. Gary just asks us kind of what we want to eat but pretty much orders for us, because here they eat family style where you just get dishes of food and eat from each dish. I love it. We had some good stuff; we told Gary he has very good taste. The next day Lucy took us to the supermarket but along the way we stopped at this five star hotel which was GORGEOUS and then there was a seafood restaurant upstairs but next to it was all of these tanks of fish that you pick out to eat. There were some gnarly looking stuff in there and some huge fish. It was neat. Then she took us to the supermarket and then we ate at Dong Dong which is Chinese fast food and Lucy said the teachers from last semester loved it. It was pretty good. Its still family style and its nothing what we would consider “fast food” but it was good nonetheless. Lucy ordered for us because the whole menu was of course in Chinese, but we want to go there a bunch and just point to stuff and see what comes out on our table. Ha-ha. Oh China. Okay so our kids are WAY WAY cute, like way. I love them all to death and it’s only the second day. We have 13 kids in the ILP program which is unusual but we’re hoping for more in April. There are 7 boys: Owen (smart but quiet), Apple (best name/a little rambunctious), Andrew (little bit of mischief), Mike (really shy and chubby), Blake (way cute but tends to wrestle with the other boys), Paul (our martial arts kid slash I think the cutest boy), and Ben (more reserved but mischievous). And 6 girls: Jodie (way cute girl, really smart), Karyn (chubby little screecher/pouter/drama queen), Bree (way cute and smart), Katy (cute and more quiet), Yaya (she puts the tokens in her mouth a lot), and Stella (one of the more difficult ones but still good). My kids are Blake, Owen, Katy and Jodie. And I think I really lucked out with a really good group. These kids are so smart and so clever. It’s amazing really. I’ll tell stories about some of the kids but you really don’t know what they’re like until you meet them. Oh so funny story today. Our classroom door was unlocked so we were waiting outside of the door and some random not ILP Chinese kid runs up to me shows me this picture and just throws it at me and runs away. And it’s like a real picture of some lady that looks like she’s dressed up like a ghost. It was really funny and really random. And cute kid story of the day we went down to get breakfast and on the way back up to the classroom Chantelle and I are walking back to the classroom and a class full of little Chinese kids sees us and one shouts at us “hello!” and soon the whole room is shouting hello at us. It was the cutest thing ever. Okay next funny kid story of the day. This happened to Chantelle. So there’s this kid Andrew who’s one of those kids that’s not bad but doesn’t exactly strive to follow the rules. So they made paper bag puppets and they were drawing on them and Chantelle saw that Andrew was drawing his puppet as a naked lady. So Chantelle totally sees what he is drawing and asks Andrew, “Hey Andrew what are you drawing on your puppet?” and he just looks at her and then at Chantelle’s chest and then just gives her a look and goes, “uh…” Ha-ha. It makes me laugh. So Chantelle tells Andrew that he needs to draw a shirt on his puppet and he just shakes his head and says no so she took it and made the boobs into wheels and then into a car. Ha. So he had a very unique car on the shirt of his puppet. It still cracks me up to think about it. Okay so for meals I always imagined it that we’d have a cafeteria and we’d just get a tray and dish up ourselves. But actually we have these lunch pales that are actually way neat. They are like 3 metal bowls and they are stacked on each other and a handle goes around them. We drop them off to the kitchen for meals and pick them up and eat them at our place for lunch and dinner and breakfast is different, the first day we just had a giant roll bread thing and a packaged bread thing but today we had fried noodles. So after we teach we pick up our lunch pales and come back and eat them and today we lift the lid and there is literally a fish head staring up at us. Stuff keeps happening where I just stop and say to myself, “yea, I’m definitely in China.” I was a lucky one and got a good piece of fish meat with it. None of us went near that fish head. So usually the top bowl is a main dish, the middle one filled with white rice and the third soup. But I’ve learned to stay away from the soup. Its just broth with chunks of stuff that isn’t really edible. The first day it was just chunks of bone and today it was seriously livers floating in it. The soup usually has a rank smell and I can’t even imagine even trying to drink it. But the other two meals we’ve had from the school were good. It’s usually meat with lettuce (we think just cooked in oil). But it’s good. I mean Chantelle and I usually eat some of our bakery stuff with it, but that’s just because the bread is so good. We figured out the best way to describe kind of the texture and kind of the taste of most of the breads and bakery stuff is like shortening cake. But it’s a little bit different. The bread is sweeter but not American kind of sweeter. I really wish I could bring some home. okay ps. i forgot to write about this. okay so before i left i knew Guzhen was a light fixture town. what that meant i wasnt quite sure until i got here. there is store after store of chandelier stores. they are huge and they are gorgeous! most are bigger than me. i'll try and take pictures of them but you couldnt know the beauty unless you see them in real life. but lucy took us into a big one and they had this little pond with these HUGE elephant fish. it was ridic.
okay this was from sunday morning. it was a really bad morning so i woke up and just wrote a venting email. because not everyday in chinese is glorious i spose..
grumpy morning Sunday woes: By no means should I be up right now. We got in yesterday at about 4 pm and then we went around the city and ate at a restaurant and then just came back because we were all exhausted. Everyday we get to come home to awesome wood beds. There is literally no padding on them. Find the nearest wall, knock on it and that’s our bed. Figured out that I will wake up every few hours and I’ll have to re-position myself because whatever side I’m laying on gets soar. So I’ll just have to rotate my body throughout the night. Awesome right? Ha. Okay next. When we got in yesterday we found out our apartments are RIGHT next to a construction site. This is no regular construction. There are these huge metal crusher things. All they do is bang against each other over and over and over and over and over. I think they’re punching a hole in the ground but it just sounds like two metal crushers banging against each other. But they said that they stopped at like 7:30 at night. So we’re like well okay, that’s not bad at all. Whelp, we got to discover that they start at 7:45 in the morning. And of course this woke me up and then I had to go to the bathroom but for the next 6 months is me seeing how long I can hold it because there is no bathroom, at least by western standards. There is a hole in the ground, a “squatter” they call it. It’s like a toilet seat but in the ground. So you can imagine by the name how you use it. For lack of a better word, it is disgusting. There is no way that I am ever going to get used to it. Every time I will have to go to the bathroom I’ll automatically get pissed off just at the fact that my body is making me go to the bathroom. And my lovely room mate’s converter just popped and is now smoking and melting? And she decided to place the nasty smell of burnt plastic right next to me. Okay so with the construction I was fine when I woke up I could probably fall back asleep to it, it has a rhythm so I was fine but then Chantelle woke up and got on her laptop. And there is seriously nothing that irks me more than the sound of typing. So I just lay there and am just pretty much grumpy to max. So now I am sitting on our couches that have 1000 times more cushioning than our beds writing this because there is nothing else I can do. Its 8:48 and I planned on waking up at 10 because today is sleep in day. Big, fat UGH. (the day got better after this.. :) )
sorry this was kind of long :) to be continued :):)
so tuesday we left and thursday we arrived in hong kong. we just plain lost wednesday in flying, which kind of threw us off.
so hong kong was pretty much AMAZING. i'm totally wholly in love with hong kong. the first day we just went around kowloon (which is where we were). idk why but i always thought hong kong was just a big city but its like 4 different parts all split up. so we were in yau ma tei (yow mah teh).
we easily fell into the city routine everyone just walking with only where they needed to get in mind. there were a dozen cool little shops. some with disgusting food just laid out that def had a smell i will not miss.
there are some things here that just make me laugh out loud. one is 7 11's in hong kong are pretty much like starbucks. on one block there's always about 3 of them. it cracks me up. and mcdonalds are everywhere. that's pretty much all i ate there because matthew (our chinese tour guide) told us to enjoy western food while we still could. and it was nice because it was a little bit of america for us to enjoy. so cool things in hong kong. so the first day we just had to ourselves but the next day was our 5 hour tour with matthew, who was way funny.
but before our tour we went and visited big buddha. which they dont lie when they say BIG. and we took the subways. they are way legit. and cheap. something about china EVERYTHING is WAY WAY cheap. its ridic. we're going to come back and feel way ripped off. to get to big buddha we had to take cable cars that went over some water and way way up into the mountains. the scenery was gorgeous. it was neat because the cable cars litrally went up into the clouds. big buddha was WAY sweet. it was a little bit of some stairs to get up there but i def feel as though i had a greater knowledge bestowed upon me by visiting. because as the posters did say we were on our "road to enlightenment" lol. oh and funny story we told matthew we took the cable cars and he kind of laughed and told us that they werent running because the swedish built them really crappily so the hong kong fixed them and just got back up running 2 weeks ago. so he was happy we were alive hahaha.
then on our tour:
we first went to stanley market which was like a market with little shop after little shop. mostly clothes and souvinir things. second we went to aberdeen harbor and a fishing village. there we went on water taxis along this little channel of water and got to see the floating restuarant. then we headed to aberdeen jewelry. we got to see some of jewelers making jewelry and then we got to go to the showcase and look at all of the gorgous jewelry. all the salespeople were so funny. they all would tell you to try stuff on and then tell you that they take visa and you can just charge it. it made us laugh. third on our tour we went up to victoria peak that looks out on all of hong kong. it was a little cloudy but we still got a pretty good view. after that we were left to our own to do what we would like. a group of us went to the waterfront and watched a light show which consisted of a bunch of laser lights on top of huge buildings choreographed to music. it was neat. the water front was also the "avenue of the stars" which is equal to our graumans chinese theatre? so i found out me and jet li's hands are the same size...awesome?.. then.... WE WENT TO THE HONG KONG TEMPLE!!! this was on the top of my list (mostly because of chelsea and erin). and luckily enough it was in kowloon so we SOOOOO lucked out. taking a taxi there was a little sketch but it was way way neat. we met a lady and a couple outside while taking pictures that were americans. the lady lived in singapore with her husband and the couple was there because the husband worked for the consolate. that was by far such a high light of the day. we also found a sweet little bakery around the corner from our hotel which chantelle and me are definatly in love with chinese bakeries. they are soo good. they are def different then anything we've had but there is some gooooood stuff.
yup. those were pretty much the highlights of hong kong.
i'm in guzhen (goo-gen) zhongshan now, alive and thriving. but i'll tell you more about mainland china later. i dont want to bombard my blog with new information all at one time.
