Mahjong

Last week I celebrated the Dragon Boat Festival with some Chinese friends. The girl on the right is my Chinese tutor. We had a traditional meal that they made. Notice the nine dishes and how they are placed in rows of three. This is the traditional way to eat with your family. After dinner we played Mahjong. It was my first time playing. I really enjoyed it. Now I want to buy my own mahjong set. Everybody in China knows how to play mahjong. Shop owners sit around outside playing mahjong with each other during the day. There are mahjong tea houses all over the place. It is similar to gin rummy, just a little harder.

bubble tea

in my last post, i mentioned the chocolate milk tea that i had. it looked exactly like this. the brown things on the bottom are sticky, floury, balls that you drink with the tea. Once I had finished my tea, Grant had a great time using the leftover "bubbles" as spit wads. They seriously stick to anything they are spit at.

fun day at floraland

This McDonald's is opening up right across the street from our school. I think it is going to open on the 22nd. It is the first free-standing/drive-through McDonald's in Chengdu. We are all excited for it to open. We'll all be fatter teachers next year :)

Today I met up with some of our students at a fun park called Floraland. I took the 703 bus to get there. It took about 35 minutes from school to Floraland on the bus. We had a great day. The park was really fun and beautiful. It was like a small rendition of Disney World. There were different "countries" that you could visit. Two of the girls and I tried to tandem bike around. We were hilarious. The bike didn't have brakes that worked, or very reliable steering. It took us a long time to figure out how to ride together. We kept falling off and running into things (and nearly people many many times) Because we couldn't stop or steer, we just kept yelling and beeping at people to get out of our way.

As foreigners, we constantly have people coming up to us asking for our picture, or just taking it without asking. All day long, there were people taking pictures of us. This is very normal, and we kind of get used to it, although sometimes it does get kind of annoying.

Unfortunately, the park didn't have any yummy hamburger places or tacos or great icecream shops (you know, parks in America always have great food). I did have some pretty good spicy beef rice noodles, chocolate milk tea with these funny little flour balls that sit at the bottom of your cup, yummy fair popcorn (that doesn't taste anything like popcorn in America, but is still yummy), and a few other yummy snacks. It's funny how your taste buds adjust to the country you live in.

more prego pics

Yesterday I went downtown and met up with some of our highschool girls. We had such a great time shopping and talking. They talked me into buying the pink sundress pictured above :). Yeah for girl time.

It is cool and rainy today. So nice. The dogs hate peeing out in the rain, so I have to make sure to send them out every once in a while or they will sneakily pee in the house.

Everything else is going well. I can feel the baby moving nearly every day now, especially after dinner. I love it!!! I love being pregnant.

memories from last summer

A year ago from today, we were spending our first week back in America for the summer. I can't believe that it has already been a year. This year went by so quickly. It's crazy to think that in just 5 more months, we will have a new little baby in our family. So crazy!!!

The power was out today from 8-5. This is a fairly common occurrence. I think the city turns off power in different parts of the city to save on energy. Fortunately, it was a nice day. I'm glad that our stove is gas, otherwise I would have to eat cold food all day. :)

Last night I went to a new little restaurant down the street. It is a chicken/icecream restaurant. The chicken kind of tastes like KFC. The icecream didn't taste too bad, probably because I have been in China for 3 years. Probably the average American wouldn't like it. Not very much like American icecream. :) Also, it came with cherry tomato halves on it. Chinese people eat cherry tomatoes as we would eat strawberries. On their icecream, cake, etc. I'm still not used to that, so I just pick the tomatoes off. :)

another Chinese cultural story

Yesterday afternoon some workers came to install another air con in our guest/soon-to-be baby room. (quick note: buildings in Chengdu don't have any kind of central heat/air or anything...just big cement blocks; so if you want hot or cold, you have to buy air cons to put in each room which help keep it hot in the winter and cool in the summer) Okay, so the workers came to install the air con. There are two different types of air cons, one which hangs on the wall (think Motel 6) and a bigger one (about the size of a skinny fridge) which sits in a corner in a room. They were installing the wall one.
The workers arrived about 4:30 and were working on it for three hours. I thought it would be fun to list some the differences between home improvement workers in china vs. america.
1) The workers don't have a work van, they either come on foot or on their bikes carrying their tools either in a basket, in their hands, or strapped down in some other fashion.
2) They don't bring ladders with them, so they will use whatever in your house looks semi-sturdy to stand on. Chairs, stools, boxes, etc..sometimes stacked on top of each other so they can reach what they are working on. At one point last night, one guy needed to get up high to look at the air con, so they put the front two legs of my dining room chair on top of the bottom half of the air con, the back two legs of the chair were just hanging off the edge. One guy held the back of the chair while the other guy climbed on top to reach what he needed to work on. Think Chinese acrobats stacking chairs. :)
3) At one point, one of the guys was welding metal right in my hallway (that is what the picture above is. You can't see the flame very well in the picture because I had the flash on).

4) Workers will often smoke in your house. Fortunately, they didn't smoke directly in my house last night. Instead they sat in the window and smoked (so that most of the smell would go outside :) (another side note: most men smoke in China)

5) When a worker comes to your house to do something, they will do just what needs to be done and nothing more. For instance, if a pipe needs changed, they will come and rip open your cement wall, fix the pipe, and if your lucky, plaster the hole back up. They don't sandpaper the plaster down, paint, or anything; so now instead of a leaky pipe, you have a nasty looking mess on your wall. (we have this on our living room ceiling from a broken pipe last year) Fortunately, the workers last night didn't have to put any holes in our walls, so everything is pretty much back to normal. (quick funny story: when our friends moved into their apartment last year, there was a leaky pipe. They called the pipe guys to come fix it. When they opened the wall up, they found that the pipe had been "fixed" once before- a towel had been tightly wrapped around the hole. The workers fixed the pipe and then were going to leave without putting the wall back together. I think my friend told them that they needed to fix the wall before they could leave. )

6) This one kind of fits in with number 5. When a worker has finished, they collect their tools and leave...with the mess still in your house. It is not customary for the worker to clean up after themselves. They leave everything for someone else (me, for instance) to clean up. Trash, wall, cement, glass, etc. etc. Another example, if you have someone to come paint your walls, they will paint the walls and then leave with the paint still sitting out, drips on the floors, and so on. Also, they won't cover anything up before they start, so it's important to remember to cover everything and move things that you dont' want to get messy.

7) This is just a funny "lost in translation" story from last night. When the workers were finally done, one of the guys told me that I needed to leave the air con turned on for "shi ba ge xiao shi". "shi ba" mean 18 and "xiao shi" means hours. I was a little surprised that I needed to leave it on for 18 hours. It uses a lot of electricity. One of my Chinese friends was coming over to watch a movie, so I decided to ask her what she thought he had said. She said, "Oh, he said to try it for half an hour". "shi" means both "ten" and "try" in Chinese, depending on the tone. I had heard"shi ba" which means "18", but what he said was "shi ban", "shi" meaning try and "ban" being part of the rest of the sentence "ban ge xiao shi" which means half an hour.

Here are some cute pictures of our "doggy day care"

end of school!!!

Today was our final day of school. Hurray!!! We survived another year. This makes the end of our third year in China. I can't believe how quickly the time has gone by. It is always so hard to say goodbye to students who are returning to their home country. We get really close to our students and then they leave. It is pretty rare that a student is here for 3 or more years. I guess that is the nature of an International school.

Nate and I have a few days together before he leaves for Beijing. We might go to Starbucks in the morning for breakfast. Hopefully on Monday we will meet up with a few of our students to eat lunch and go bowling. Aren't we cool...we bowl for fun. :) :)

It is beautifully sunny today, but very hot. I love when the sun is out, but it is almost too hot to do anything outside, especially since pools don't open here until the Chinese kids are out of school, which is still for a few more weeks.

Jenny left early this morning for America. She heard yesterday that her grandfather had passed away, so she bought a ticket yesterday to try to make it back for the funeral. I am pr*ying that she doesn't have any flights delayed so that she gets there on time.

Well, time to go home and enjoy the rest of our day.