it's a small world after all (even in China)

For some awesome reason, I seem to have this ability to make the world a tiny tiny place.

One of my favorite ways is to play the "do you know" game and connect to a person by someone else-i'm pretty great at it if i may say so.

A not so great way is if i were to be talking about someone, then unavoidably they always seemed to be right there

And the greatest way is when you run into people who against ALL odds you shouldn't have.

ex. 1 my cousin in Shanghai

ex. 2 the teachers and one of my students from my Ningbo school in Xiamen at a random temple.

Caroline and i decided to go see the University (where we were surprise videoed for a birthday party) and then we walked through a temple where you try to get coins into the statue (behind me in the above picture). I was just being my normal competitive self trying to get the highest, when someone groped me into a hug and I could see Caroline so I knew it wasn't her (plus my family isn't really one of the hugging families...)

And who was it?

Angel my coordinator from Ningbo. Against all odds I tell ya.

This Day

This Temple

This EXACT time

5 million people

...i'm just happy i didn't spend more time at the turtle pond

life you're pretty great.

An arranged marriage

Today we yet again went to the tailor where he asked if I had a husband and then offered his apprentice to me. My husband could make all my clothes for me, what could be better?
We're the same age and i'm single, so in his mind it's perfect.
What do you think?
The tailor (whom we have yet to give an English name to) started talking so fast neither of us could catch his Chinese so we called a translator and she said he asked if we would stay and hang out with him. So the apprentice gave us a cold strange drink and after drinking it, very hesitantly though, apprentice brought out the red bull can with three times as much energy as American ones.
Guess we'll see if I can sleep tonight...
So we stayed and watched him sew and he took pictures with us and then we talked about the electronics, some nice girl talk while we sewed.

Mr. Miyagi

After a great Subway Relief Society lunch we went to the fabric market and hung out with Mr. Miyagi and his apprentice while they sewed. We bought some really "nice" Hawaiian fabric and had Mr. Miyagi make the boys surprise matching shirts. He pulled up some chairs and faced the fan directly in front of us while we chatted. Then we ate at Chairman Mao's with the visitor from Utah and took the ferry to Gulong Yu to see the Island with all the lights

on Thursday we go to the market-

A man from Lifetime was visiting so we decided to give him the classy local Xiamen tour and take him down the market and to Zhongshan Lu. I will miss these markets so much- pure entertainment.

ex. Today one of the ducks was making his last attempt at escape and was flying all over and landing in the fish water and getting the sellers all wet, while we sat there laughing so hard and trying to get a picture (fail).

Seconds later his life was ended in front of our eyes. (This is not the entertainment portion) I usually try to avoid these events and move on to animated chopstick sellers.

Earlier in the day we went to the art market, where our best friend hand paints us pictures and sells them to us for pennies pretty much. Seeing as it was hotter than .... he closed the door and turned on the AC (very very kind of him) and he typed in his computer and it translated into English for us and then we used our very small amount of Chinese to chat with said man.

Then we took photos with him and he insisted that we emailed them to him that instant.

Secretly I hope when we bring our family back next week and he's painted a picture of us and has it hanging in the shop.

That would be some serious laughs.

Guest Post: Selina Gomez and Justin Beiber

A beautiful empty beach.

Caroline and I laid out our sheet (since we only have two towels and they don't air dry fast enough to use for non bathing activities), for a normal day at the beach. 

BUT

We forgot that we were celebrities.

The way people stared and took pictures was like it was US Weekly Magazine sneakily taking paparazzi pictures of JB and Selina in Mexico.

and...

I think a crab bit my foot while I was standing in the water.

So it was an awesome day to say the least.

Especially when we topped it off with night badminton-we had to add a harder element because our skill was increasing too rapidly. And then our little hole in the wall dumpling guy who walks around bare foot-wearing a swimsuit-while cooking- and walking around an inch of water on the floor.

Sorry for making you turn the computer, or your head. But it's worth it.

This is my amazing ability at putting sunscreen on.

Just like my mama always said:

Sunscreen works.

Pretty Proud of ourselves

Me and Caroline were up for an adventure so we took a bus over to the new Westin plaza

We decided since we were foreigners, even though we were under dressed they wouldn't mind us seeing the lobby. We literally stood staring at the ceiling taking in the smell, the glorious non Chinese food smell for a solid three minutes. Until the manager came and asked if we were staying there to which we said no, and he then took us on a tour of the entire beauty. Me and Caroline were pretty pleased with ourselves and knew Matt would be jealous until ten minutes later he called and said "Hey on Friday do you want to go on a tour of the Westin," welllll we just did that actually.

Then we walked over to a soccer stadium and found these boys playing soccer with a tennis ball as part of their training. We also found a gymnasium, driving range, soccer field, basketball courts, and tennis courts. 

This is where all the children prodigies go.

Then me and Caroline decided to be domestic and made homemade tortillas with taco meat and salsa.

Matt claims it's one of the best meals he's had of Carolines, so we think we did pretty well for having to use a cup as a rolling pin. The creative thinking i'm learning here is unrivaled by any I tell ya.

The Modern Toilet was our next adventure of the day- where you sit on toilets and eat your food/ice cream out of a toilet or squatter.

Looks appetizing? It was.

Our bathtub banana split

To whom we were high maintenance and had them get an English speaker so we could ask if that was Mocha or Chocolate.

Shout of to Tina Fey's book Bossypants who makes a hilarious reference to this restaurant.

This weekend:

I landed in Xiamen, the Chinese preffered vacation spot, where my brother lives.

 Down a street market

 On Friday I finally got to see Hunger Games, with some of our Chinese friends!

An awesome mango ice Serendipity-but-Chinesey hole in the wall place where we cooled off from this 90 degree 90 percent humidity.

The coolest containers on top of one of the forts at the fortress

I shouldn't have played this, we began the day by dripping with sweat.

A traditional war performance at the fortress

The girls.

We've had a blast all weekend, i'm sad to see Abby and Caitlin go home

I rescued Caitlin's sunglasses after they dropped in the ocean, wave after wave, but I finally got them.

I did leave the seat on the bus very wet, i'm deeply sorry to the unfortunate Chinese who decided to sit down after me.

Moist

Yesterday and today are the only days so far that i've wanted to die because of the heat. Now I know my family makes fun of the word, but MOIST is literally the only word I know that can describe this feeling. You walk outside and you literally feel wet, to the point that a shower is pretty much useless. My hair has reached a new level of big-ness. Everyone is just panting and shiny and the whole no air conditioning thing is pretty awesome my friends. Pretty darn awesome. I hope you notice the sarcasm. Oh well we're off to Shanghai for our last vacation! I hope your weekend is fun, and involves less sweating. Gross.

Questioning Teacha

I finished testing my kids today and most passed with A's except a few who tried to have students sneak behind me or jump up and down and try to sneak the answer through the window. I know all the tricks people. I was asking one of the students if a pen and pencil were the same or different and he said "No" so then I showed him my shoes were the same and he said "no," so naturally I gave up and moved onto the next question. "How old are you?" "I'm fine sanks, and you?" Now don't question my teaching ability based on these two examples. The rest passed with flying colors and one girl explained to me that she is a twin, but he family only had enough money to send one of them to school so she got to come here.

In ILP we did a cake walk, except stickers were substituted for the cakes. Since the kids really don't know any music other than Justin Bieber, I decided to enlighten them to N'Sync. They for the most part loved dancing to them, but Tina took my Ipod and said "Teacha I want" so I was waiting for what she would put on and what did she put on? She put on Butterfly Kisses, the most popular wedding song in history. So we did our cake walk to that serenading song while the other kids yelled that they didn't like it.

Short Notices

Five minutes before I left to teach ELE, I answered the phone and found out that this week would be our last week of ELE. This is just one example out of many of the Chinese and their short notices (other examples include us getting five minutes notice before moving TWO times). So naturally we were all pretty sad, except one girl who cheered, but not only was it the last day but we had to orally test each student. Talk about hating your teacher on the last day. I'm super sad that I didn't get any time to give them a little party for how far they've come. They all tested really well, and I even found out a few are really smart, they just act dumb. Jim and Henry said they were going to cry, since i'm leaving ha I highly doubt that. I'm really going to miss them.

In ELE today I asked a girl where Tina was and she said "her grandpa" and then pointed up. I kind of thought heaven...but wasn't too sure what the Chinese view on afterlife was so I told them I didn't understand. So Tom thoughtfully over-dramatized a heart attack and fell to the floor and then Leo flapped his arms (like an Angel i'm assuming) and then Linda pointed up. So I did the universal sign of death (slitting your throat) and they screamed yes! By this point the whole class was laughing and then I realized how terrible the whole situation was...whoops

A Monday

Today Caitlin was doing rotations and informed me that she killed a spider as big as her hand in the kitchen classroom. So far I haven't been too shocked with the bugs here, there are these flying beetles that scare me, but when I saw this dead spider I wanted to cry. I know that seems dramatic, and it is, BUT this thing was harry and the size of your hand. Not normal. The day just kept going up hill when I was riding one of the girls bikes and ran over a wire and heard all the air immediately leave the tire. Me and Nicole and three Ayi's laughed so hard and then I had to walk it down the street to a mechanic where we said "whoooooosh" and pointed to the tire. He promptly fixed the hole and the tire while a whole group gathered and we were just laughing. Then the man wouldn't let me give him any money. Sweetest man ever.

Good News

     Today one of the kids tied, not 1 but 3 knots in a scarf very tightly around his neck. I noticed when he began pulling the two as hard as he could, not realizing that this was only tightening the knots...so before he became hysterical I ran Home (that's his name) to a different teacher who had long nails. Maybe that's why the Chinese all have one extremely long nail, you never know when it will come in handy.
    In other good news, one of the teachers thought it would be a good idea to tell the kids we are going back to America on the 26th. They all came in crying "no teacha you no go to America" and I tried to explain that I missed my family, but they said "we will miss you!" These next two weeks are going to be hard. Good thing it's Children's Day tomorrow so they will most likely forget about us leaving for a few days.

An (un)successful teaching day

Today I looked over and saw one of the kindergartners with a chair in his hands going to throw it at one of the boys, who was guarded behind one of the girls (real manly men over here). So I took off running and grabbed the chair from his hands and got one of my other students to yell at him in Chinese. For some reason even if the person yelling is only three years older, the kids listen and stay in line, better than if I, their teacher, yell at them. But if I try and speak Chinese it breaks the number one rule of "English Only," That is assuming I could say anything other than rice or tomorrow in Chinese. All this was happening while another little girl, Oprah, tripped herself and would not stop crying for 15 minutes. Let's just say today wasn't my most successful lesson. Oh well there's always tomorrow, and that's the good thing about kids, they let things go so easily, the next day they are just as happy to see you and forget if you got angry with them the day before.

An Extra

So there is this girl we've named "Homeless Tina." She seems to just show up everywhere we are and kisses my arms and my belly (why you ask? I still haven't figured that one out yet). Well today I was just minding my own business teaching my last rotation when in the middle of playing follow the leader, I realized there was an extra student in there. You guessed it. Homeless Tina. So I tried telling her to leave, and then I let Sara tell tell her in Chinese to leave and after a while she just wasn't leaving so I see Jack and Danny each with one of her legs in their hands sliding her out the door. I didn't know whether to laugh or yell...I'm kind of one of those terrible teachers that think the class clowns are funny. She then went to a different teachers class to play-where was she supposed to be?

Three Weeks Left

So I can't figure out this whole picture deal, but I promise to overload this blog with pictures once i'm home. It will be a nice flashback for me, so we both win. I am done teaching in three weeks, I honestly never thought this point in time would come, yet I can still feel the feelings I felt as I stepped off the plane in Shanghai. Time has honestly flown by, just as everyone has said it would. I have grown to absolutely love the Chinese people and their culture, and i'm so excited that I get to take my family around so they can experience it too. Theirs will be a bite sized version while mine was a mouth full. I just love the kids and how far they have come. Like today I we ate blindfolded kids eyes and ate M & Ms and said if we thought they were the same or different color, and somehow we got on the topic of underwear and I told them one of the ILP third graders pulled his pants down and so Henry (my favorite) asked his name and went and found him and yelled at him in Chinese and said teacher "he won't do it again." Things like this just keep me laughing every day. Or when in Nicole's ELE class today one kid decided to play dentist and pulled out two kids teeth, when they were not ready to come out so they had blood dripping down their mouths. I wondered what her lesson was on today as I saw the kids come out of class...It just seems hard to think i'm never going to see these kids again, sometimes I just think about what they are going to grow up to be and where they will be in life. I'm pretty sure they are going to be awesome people.

Help!

Well i've been searching the internet all day and I cannot figure out why my pictures will not show up on the blog. They show up on my post page, but then when viewing my blog they are not there. Soooo if there are any tech people out there puhhlease help me. Thanks!

Some Scorpians and A Summer Palace

Yes that is some scorpians on a stick

Here is your proof everyone. I did it- I ate a scorpian. So next time I see one crawling around, instead of screaming i'll probably just pop it in my mouth.

Natural History Museum

I didn't learn anything being as everything was in Chinese

Old people love dancing in the parks AND it just so happens to be the same dance routine in every park (maybe they're training for a flash dance?)

I can't tell you how much I love street food and the people that make it. They just get the biggest smiles on their faces when we speak Chinese and tell them how good their food is.

Our hostel rooftop view