It has come! My three week vacation to Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia is tomorrow!! How do you pack for three weeks?? Well hopefully I have not forgotten anything too important and if I have, hopefully Thailand has it as well. It should be a great trip and I'll take notes so I remember everything to put in my blog when I return :)
Jess's friend Connie was in from Hong Kong visiting for the day. Connie went to Jess's undergrad for four years so she knows all about Western food. She has been missing Mexican food so went to the expat area of town and got some dinner. I ate four tacos! It was delicious.
Mangosteen! Today was a day of firsts. My friend, the guard, gave me one of his mangosteens - I had no idea what it was. It's a fruit with a really hard shell and you have to pressure a hole through to split the outside into two. Inside is something that looks like a bulb of garlic but it is mushy and sweet. It was tasty! After I hung out for a bit I went and met up with Jess and Marie. We went and finally got xitous! A xitou is a massage hair wash. A lot of the girls in our program get them all the time but every time Jess and I try to go something happens. So we finally did it. One of Jess's Chinese friend's from church took us to a place she knew and it was very upscale. It was a fun afternoon. I spent most of my time teaching my hair washer new words in English. The only problem is that China doesn't believe in conditioner the way we do, their hair is just naturally not tangled. Not so much with mine...especially since I haven't had a hair cut in 6 months and my hair is insanely long now. When I got put in the chair to get my hair brushed and blow dried, it was a mess and the guy didn't know what to do with it. It was even funnier that his pinky finger nail kept getting caught in my hair as he was blow drying it. (In China it is a sign of wealthy as a man if you have a really long pinky finger nail) But he got through and finally got my hair under control. Overall it was a fun new experience.
I was traveling home on my good ol' 74 when we tried to turn the corner and realized that a car had crashed into a cement truck in front of us. Don't worry, no one got hurt. They don't believe in bad car crashes here in China, I've only ever seen a few incidents and those have all been minor. Well our bus driver decided he was going to try and get around the accident and get through to keep moving on our way. He failed. He pulled up as far as he could go and then realized we were about to crash into a car parked on our right. So then we were stuck...He opened the door and rolled down his window and started shouting at the guys standing outside to help him try and maneuver our way out. My school was in viewing distance so I just hopped out of the open door and walked the rest of the way.
Four months ago, there was nothing here! Since then they built a huge construction site and created a new road, crazy.
The thing I love most about having a desk in the teacher's office is that many days I arrive to find something strange left for me. Usually it is food, but today it was this note. Sure enough, I opened my closet and there was a stack of dry noodles. I didn't actually destroy the note after reading, but I kept it secret :)
This notebook is my life in China and I always have it on me. It has all of my bus stops listed, directions to everywhere I want to go, it has Chinese symbols written in there, random Chinese words to remember, and anything else I deem as needed. Without it, I would be lost.
Jess and I spent the afternoon at Dongmen. The new thing to see was a orange juice stand that for 8 kuai you could watch them literally squeeze out orange juice, put it in a bottle and serve it to you fresh.
Today we went to DaPeng Fortress. It is out in the middle of nowhere LongGang and actually is right up against the sea. This is the location of the first battle of the Opium Wars. The place was built in the 1300s to protect the sea front. Now it is home to a whole community of people living inside the walls. You pay 15 kuai to get in and you get to walk around the streets of the fortress, passing families doing laundry, cooking dinner, playing with their dogs, etc. It was a little weird but I really enjoyed it. Then there is a little restaurant up at the top of one of the entrance gates where you can see over the tops of the roofs.
Game night! Cliff and I went out to Phill's and joined up with Matt, Marie, Ben, John, Lidia, Lisa and Marissa to have a fun filled time with games! One of Phill's Chinese friends, BeiBei, also joined. We played Settlers! It was great, I miss that game. And then we played a celebrity game and Mafia. BeiBei was very confused with Mafia. We ended with a round of King's Cup. Then Cliff and I were off again to join up with some people at the OCT for evening drinks.
Sorry...I had to take a picture of this eventually. At least once a week I walk past a display outside a restaurant with a dog hanging in the window :(
Ok, sorry, this is a ridiculous picture. But I got home and realized that I hadn't taken a picture yet that day. And this was a pretty momentous day so I felt I should log it somehow. Today was the first day that I uttered out loud that I was thinking of staying for another year. Luckily, I also found out today that two of my closest friends are also planning on staying. Yay!
So the last two weeks that I taught I gave Oral English tests to 500 students. This mostly consisted of me standing outside and having each student come out to me one at a time to answer a few questions. Main questions were - How are you? Why? What are you doing for Winter Holiday? Do you like this school? Why? My favorite answers/situations:
How are you? Good. Why are you good? Because I get to see you!
How are you? I am fine. Why are you fine? Because my English teacher told me that if anyone ever asks you how you are you should say 'I am fine'
-I gave almost everyone 10/10. So I had them all write their names (either English or Chinese spelled out) next to their Chinese characters and had their score next to it. One kid came out, wrote his name and automatically put a 9 next to his name. He realized what he had did and then looked all worried that I wasn't going to change the score until I started laughing.
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