Yum

American Betty Crocker Brownies...they are the BEST thing ever.
Who woulda thought I'd love them so much?
Ask my dad, I've told him before that I prefer other desserts over brownies.
But no, while in China after three months of rice, veggies, and more rice...
yes, they are the BEST thing ever.

 

Today I went over to the school for our short morning class at ten a.m. to find out that our two hour afternoon class was cancelled…
That’s how quick the schedule changes and how last minute you find out about it.
So then we spent the afternoon relaxing and found out AT 4:30 (when we should have been in class already for an hour) that they needed us to be at the school teaching, our students finished their fire drill early and were ready for class. Haha.
We just go with the flow here!

So for our Family Home Evening tonight we ventured out into our little neck of the woods, well neighborhood, and did a picture scavenger hunt.
We decided we’d split up into our “families” and take a picture with something from A to Z.
It ended up being a blast, I was running around with Ashley, Sierra, and Sydney trying to come up with anything that would count.
We took a lot of fun pictures and don’t worry, our fam totally won!

 

Random China Quirks

So today was just like any other Sunday with sacrament, a great Sunday school lesson, grilled cheese sandwich for lunch (that part actually isn't like any other Sunday here in China but it is at home :) ), afternoon nap, scripture study, dinner in the cafeteria, and an evening stroll around the neighborhood with Sierra and Aimee. When we got back we had some delicious brownies we made and then Aimee, Sierra, and Emily H. came over and we planned pretty much the rest of our Chinese lives. We decided since we only have a little over a month left that we need to do something fun, crazy, or adventurous every day before we go home and we have a pretty good calendar going. You'll just have to wait until each of those things happen to find out what they are!


I do have to say though that there are some things in China that are not very common in the states...some "Random China Quirks" that we find interesting. Here is a list of a few:

1. Men grow out their fingernails...(We don't know if this is because they think it looks good or if they are just being lazy but so many guys do it and its not just a little long, they are long!)

2. No raspberries?-We found out this week that Vivi has no idea what a raspberry is and haven't ever seen them anywhere. They aren't in China as far as I'm concerned because nothing is flavored to be raspberry like so many things in the states are.

3. If you stick your chopsticks straight up in your rice it means death and is extremely offensive.

4. The number 4 symbolizes death-because of this we don't live on the fourth floor we live on 3B and of course the foreign teachers teach on the fourth floor, the whole floor is just for us! It is a bad sign if your phone number or license plate has a 4 in it, they are very superstitious with that number.

5. When they bring you food at a restaurant it is served family style with a turn table in the middle of the table. It is impolite if you don't finish most of the food on your plate that you dish up but not necessarily if you finish all the food in the big dishes they bring it in.

6. In the province we live in the dishes at restaurants are sealed together in plastic to show you that they are clean. This is only at sit down restaurants but after you open your dishes you are supposed to pour tea into them to sanitize them and then there is an empty bowl you pour it into. Weird? I know.

7. Anything is considered a taxi-There are men sitting on street corners on their scooters/motorcycles or even motorcycles with carts attached on the back that are just waiting for anyone who needs a ride!

8. The laundry hung out to dry in front of people's businesses, yep right on the sidewalk for everyone to see underwear and all.

9. You DON'T sit on the curb-if you are tired of standing you squat

10. White skin is beautiful so everyone, even men sometimes, use umbrellas to stay out of the sun...I've even seen people shimmy against the wall to stay out of a five foot patch of sunlight. Oh, and even whiting commercials with masks to make your skin whiter.

11. Face masks, taking your temperature to go into school, to go through customs...they are freaked about the swine flu but yet this brings me to my next one...

12. No soap in 90% of public bathrooms

13. Where's the milk? We haven't found much milk unless you want soy milk from off the shelf

14. Fruit markets are where the good fruit is at not necessarily the drug stores

15. No cold drinks anywhere-they serve most drinks room temperature, especially water

16. Our kitchen is on the back porch...what? haha :) We love it anyways

17. Weird ice cream flavors-corn, green bean, red bean, you name it...that's one of the things on our list that we have to try before we leave!

18. It's now 70 degrees here, the perfect temperature if you ask me...no, all our kids and their Chinese teachers think its freezing so they have their long sleeve uniform shirts on with jackets and maybe even a long sleeve shirt underneath while I'm still in a skirt and t-shirt. They think we're crazy haha.

19. I've seen kindergarten teachers take their kids to their apartment with them because their parents haven't come to pick them up yet...

20. Discipline-lets just say it's much different here

21. School schedule-Our kids are in school from 7 a.m. until after 9 p.m. they get served all their meals and get an hour or so nap time in the middle of the day but I'd sure hope so with how long they are in
class for.

22. There are little three year olds that sleep at the school without their mommies

23. You have to wave down a waitress when you want to order, pay, or ask a question

24. Some buses have girls on them that take your money and give you a ticket instead of just putting your money in the box

25. Doesn't matter if there's a double yellow line...you drive on either side of the road!

26. FOUR grown men/women on ONE scooter, that takes talent I tell ya

27. Trains...I don't want to talk about those

28. Babies with their split crotch pants haha

29. Once again, women wear jackets on their arms (so they have it on their front instead of the back) in the BLAZING heat while riding their scooters so they don't get tan

30. And finally, squatters...you just never get used to them haha (for those of you who haven't experienced them, they are holes in the ground to go to the bathroom in instead of a seat to sit on) BUT Chinese people are SO used to them that you'll see footprints on the seats of western toilets because they don't know how to NOT squat.

Yep, thats all folks.

Extra Americans and more Tae Kwon Do fun

So this week was quite the eventful one with Jared, one of the ILP directors here, to see how we're doing a little after mid-semester. They go around to all of the schools in China, Russia, and Ukraine for mid-semester visits each semester, which is a ton if you ask me! It was fun to have him here though. We got some advise on ways we can improve our teaching for the kids benefit and got to go out to dinner with our entire group, Megan's group, Jared, Steve, and a few of the Chinese teachers and the headmasters of our two schools. We had our own private room in the restaurant which is actually pretty common in the restaurants I've been in here in China but we filled that room, that is for sure.
I have to say though...wasn't my most favorite meal here. Everything was extremely spicy. It was almost unbearable to eat any of it. I'm not sure if the headmaster ordered specific things or how that restaurant works but they didn't give us a menu they just started bringing out dishes and it's family style so everyone just takes whatever they want. Well dish after dish it was all spicy! Spicy noodles, spicy green beans, spicy this, spicy that haha. And it wasn't just that I didn't prefer the taste...it was the fact that my lips and entire mouth were on fire! We ended up going to a supermarket after and getting a couple snacks to tide us over because we weren't full. We felt bad that we left so much food but there were a few spicy food lovers on our table that were able to make it look a little more picked over.
But, the best part of the day was the ending when Jared brought out his bag of GOODIES. We had a questionare we filled out over email a few weeks ago and one of the questions was which American candy do you miss most right now. Well, I haven't eaten candy the past few months ever since me and Skyler decided we didn't want to eat any of it so I said what I would really love were some of those Grandma cookies that come in a two pack in vending machines. You'll never guess it...he brought me home made cookies from America! Everyone that didn't put a candy bar got reese's, then there were snickers, butterfingers, starbursts, swedish fish, but no...I got cookies! It seriously made my week that he or his wife or whoever went out of their way to get me cookies instead of candy. I loved it!
After that the weekend was finally underway, I slept in Friday morning until my kindergarten ELE class that I have for 20 minutes three times a week. It is usually an insane class because I am only with them for such a short amount of time that it isn't really possible to reward them and discipline them with tokens and strikes like the normal kindergarten classes. But, this Friday went pretty good! I was able to keep them entertained by a book for an entire 15 minutes and then I pulled out a "shaker" from my bag which was a toilet paper roll, beads, and taped shut but I tell ya they loved it. And I got almost every single one of them to say, "I want to shake it". Haha it was pretty cute.
We ventured across town to Subway for some American food for once and enjoyed that for dinner. Afterwards we headed back to our school for Tae Kwon Do. Our instructor has a performance coming up that he wanted all of us to perform in. Megan's whole group is doing it and he wanted ours to too, well Shantel made sure with everyone that they didn't want to and had Gloria tell him that. Ashley volunteered to do it but he wasn't too happy that the rest of us didn't want to. Well...Emily and I offered to do it because he really wanted us to. So, instead of having the normal class with everyone else, the three of us learned this Tae Kwon Do dance sequence. Oh...and he wants me to do a round off with five back handsprings at the performance! Yep...don't worry, I'll just bust them out after years of not doing any haha. I did 4 at the practice but was scared of running into the wall so I haven't done 5 yet but he was pretty excited about that. The performance is supposed to be Thanksgiving weekend and we're going to be in Beijing next weekend so I don't really know when we're going to get to practice but supposedly this performance is going to be on national TV but who knows!
Other than that we had a pretty relaxing day after practice Friday and Saturday. We played some games, What If and a drawing game like What If and then watched the Prestige. It was a fun weekend but we just can't wait until the next!

Halloowweeeennn China Style!

This weekend has been quite the eventful one! I was thinking that Halloween was going to be so boring and lame compared to being in the US for it but boy, was I wrong.
It started off Thursday in class because my kids don't have class with us on Fridays. So all of us teachers were wearing our costumes, I myself was a stylin' pirate. We had class, which actually ended up being a little more insane than it should have been...it was also Parents Day! So a bunch of parents were sitting in the back of the classroom evaluating our teaching even though most of them probably don't know much English themselves. Well, Gen and I had the kids sing some songs for them and then do their dance because their Chinese Teacher, Leah, told us to. We then split into our separate classrooms and did a Halloween word search. My kids did a great job with it and were talking up a storm just like they should. Hopefully their parents were impressed but I'm not sure because I don't speak Chinese so I didn't even talk to them! For the last 15 minutes we took them around to all the other classrooms for trick or treating and oh, were they excited for that. They LOVED getting a bunch of candy! We had fun even with the parents making me nervous in the back of the classroom.
The next day was spent in the kindergarten decorating from lunch until dinner. We hung up decorations our 2nd graders had made from our classrooms upstairs, painted haunted houses on the mirrors, hung our hilarious tombstones, made a huge spider, and made a haunted house for everyone to go through. It took forever and everyone was exhausted but it turned out awesome. When all the guests arrived we started off the party like the Chinese like to with of course...a performance! We did the "Hannah Montana Hoedown Throwdown" and the ILP kindergarten kids did their "Ghostbusters" and "Disturbia" dances. After everyone showed off their costumes on the red carpet they trick or treated to us through the front doors and trampled into the haunted house with the lights on and without us there to escort them through it! It was pretty hilarious because we had to make them all leave so we could turn off the lights, resituate everything, and get in our hiding places to scare them. The haunted house ended up being a success though and we scared adults and kids all around.
The next day we had to be at the Bond Kindergarten at 10:30, which is the school some ILP teachers that live up the street from us teach at. We had our Kung Fu lessons which were awesome besides the fact that it was Halloween and I was almost dying from heat exhaustion it was so hot outside. I mean come on, Halloween...it's usually impossible to not bundle up because it's so cold. Well that is not the case in southern China on Halloween! You can be sure about that. It was noon while we were having our practice outside and I was seriously dying of the heat. Mind you, I was in my awesome new Kung Fu outfit that added to the heat, but still!
After that we decorated the entire day making the dance room a haunted house which was much more elaborate than ours since they would be having a lot more people attending. The party began the same way as the night before with a performance in which we did the "Hoedown Throwdown" yet again. Lets just say we can't get enough of Hannah Montana! Then we had trick or treating around the building in various classrooms. Emily P., Christy, and I were supposed to be helping conduct the store to give out prizes but the Chinese teachers had it all taken care of and didn't speak any English so we got to go help out in the haunted house. It was a blast scaring everyone. By the end I was lying on the floor under the dance bar 15 ft. after the entrance with a cloak draped over my legs so I was really hidden. I popped out and scared so many people! It was awesome hahaha. We had fun. Their party even had cake and cookies at the end which was a treat after a long day of being at the school decorating.
It ended up being a weekend to remember. Since one was at Bond and the other was for the kindergarten kids of our school I only ended up seeing two of my 2nd graders. But, I wasn't expecting to see any of them so it was a treat to see them. They are so adorable. I love my kids and all the kindergarten kids I know and teach ELE classes for! One of my kids was there because her mom is the kindergarten principal and the other has a little sister in the class Em, Sierra, and Aimee teach so it was fun to find that out. I got the most adorable picture with Emmy trying to get her to smile for the camera. She didn't want to take a picture but then she made it up to me the next night at the Bond party by asking me to get a pic with her and her mom. Only problem was I didn't have a camera on me at the time! It's okay though, I still love that little girl!! :)