All Things Good: from Puppies to Fries

With the help of google maps, we found this Confucian temple just about 20 minutes away from our apartment (located right near the new mall we discovered this week). So on Friday we decided to go explore it. 

The temple was completely empty save for one lady that was sitting on the ground off to the side. It was cool to explore it alone. We think they are in the middle of renovating it, because there was weird construction stuff all over; so maybe we weren't actually supposed to be in there. Woops. All well.

I would like to say that this picture is of the temple,
but really it's of Tom being attractive. Whew. Lucky me.

 

At the temple we found this tiny puppy. He was so so tiny and adorable and scared of us. We followed him around for like twenty minutes and when we got close to him he started wimpering so loudly, so we decided to leave him alone.

 When we walked out of the temple there were some old guys chillin' across the street that motioned for us to come over and talk to them. This happens all of the time. People always want to know where we're from and what we're doing here and stuff. When we tell them we can't speak Chinese (in Chinese, of course), they always respond with something like, "Yes you can! You can speak Chinese! You just spoke Chinese!" Or at least that's what we think they're saying.

Then we wandered into the building where we parked our scooter and discovered that it was an electronics store. When we say electronics store, I don't mean that it was like a Best Buy. It was actually like a multi-floor maze of small kiosks where people sell all sorts of small electronics. Tom was kind of in heaven. There was a young Chinese guy there who excitedly used his little English to help us find what we were looking for. We really appreciated his help.

For dinner we scooted over to McDonald's to see if it's anything like it is in The States. The menu was pretty similar, with a few differences. Most of the "burgers" were chicken, and they only had two hamburgers. The real burgers came with two of the small patties that they use for dollar burgers in America. So, the burger we got to share was still a McDonald's burger (not too thrilling when you've got other options), but it was a burger nonetheless! Our first burger since we got here. Mmmm. Also, the fries were delicious (that's to be expected). We also got this caramel mcflurry thing, but it actually tasted like bubblegum.

A Whole New World



From the back seat of the scoot scoot.

This week we discovered a whole new part of Cangzhou. We were beginning to think that Tong Tian was the only place to shop and hang out in Cangzhou, until we found the Cangzhou shopping mall. Woohoo. It's like a smaller version of the silk and pearl markets in Beijing. How exciting. Everything is so much cheaper than at Tong Tian (because everything is a knock-off) and you can haggle like crazy. It's all about the dramatic "what's your best price?" situation, where you're constantly threatening to walk away while the seller lowers their prices. Tom loves it. He loves it so much, in fact, that we went back to this new shopping/downtown area 3 times this week.

The first time we went, Susan took us there on a little scooter tour. I think she got a crack out of our excitement. In this area, there's not only this shopping mall, but there are like 3 other malls (but they have real brand expensive things), many buffets (including a pizza buffet!), a McDonald's, a KFC, and a Pizza Hut that's opening on October first! So many great things. At the end of our scoot-tour, we went to a restaurant with Susan and had her order, since she knows what's good. We thought it was pretty funny when she hesitantly suggested that we get 50 dumplings to share among the three of us. We acted surprised and she said, "Is that enough?" Haha. We told her that was a lot of dumplings and she was surprised. We ended up getting the 50 dumplings and it was the perfect amount. They also brought out the water that the dumplings were cooked in. Susan explained that a lot of people like to drink that water because it helps digest the dumplings. Interesting.



These parking lots exist all over. You pay a lady 1 yuan and she makes sure your scooter doesn't get stolen.



When we went back on Saturday, there was this wedding expo thing going on. The music was mighty loud.



A Call for Recipes

Okay, family, friends, and other readers, I have a favor to ask of you, particularly those of you with nifty kitchen skills. We love the food here, and we've made some really tasty things since we got here, but I can't help but linger over  recipes that I see on Pinterest for home-baked bread, cookies, casseroles, and other delicious-looking things. Nonetheless, our resources are a bit different here from what's available back in The States, and I need to find recipes/ideas that will work with what we have. So, the favor I ask of you is to send me (email me or just comment here on the blog) any tried and true recipes that will work given the following circumstances:

• We have one electric stove burner, and that's pretty much it; no oven, microwave, rice cooker, slow cooker, etc. We have one wok, which functions nicely as either a pan or a pot. We may buy another pot or pan, but the wok has suited us well thus far.
• Milk is available, though it's not the same as in the states (much sweeter), plus more pricey, but we still use a cup of it here or there. Other dairy products are basically nowhere to be found. Oh but we have found butter (or some kind of butter type margarine stuff), but it is super expensive.
• Right now is harvest season in Cangzhou, so many fruits and vegetables are widely available and very fresh.
• We haven't bought any meat because it doesn't come packaged the same way as in America, and we're not sure what we have to do to make it "safe" to eat.
• I am convinced that baking products exist here, because we've eaten baked goods, but we've had a heck of a time looking for them. By baking products I mean things like baking soda, cocoa, and vanilla extract. I'm not going to give up the search, but for now we don't have those things.
• We haven't seen any canned foods.
• The seasonings we have are salt, cinnamon, sugar, Italian seasoning, chicken bouillon, and chili powder.

Oh, and the more "homey" the recipe, the better. Like I said, we are loving the Chinese food here, but would really love a taste of America (and let's be honest, Mexico, too).

Hungry?

Saturday, September 15

We got an early start and headed over to the market across the street to buy some food and look for a jacket. The usual chaos was happening over there. 

This is the market that pops up in the middle of the street every morning.
You can see our apartment ment building on the left.



This is one of 4 big square buildings where different kinds of food are sold.



The building where the meat is sold is the scariest.

We even saw some kids practicing kung fu or karate or something like that at the market. We were also approached by a teenager and asked for our QQ number (which is like MSN Messenger, but wildly popular in China). Unfortunately, we couldn't remember it on the spot. We could have been automatic buddies. All well.

This Walmart billboard is right next to our school.
The funny thing is that there is no Walmart in Cangzhou.

This Super 8 is a hotel/restaurant combo. The restaurant is Chinese food, and I don't think Super 8 has anything to do with India, so we're not sure why it has this architecture.

This is the view of the kindergarten from the street.

Walking through the market wore us out, so we made crepes when we got home. Scrumdidliumptious. Then we went out to continue our quest for jackets and scarves before it gets too cold. We had a bit of luck, and I found a nice scarf and Tom got a really snuggly sweater. Referring to the sweater, he said, "it doesn't even make sense why this is so soft!" While we were buying the sweater, one of my students and his mom came up to us. It was one of my Lovely Babies. He's so cute and well-behaved. It was fun to see him out and about, riding on the back of his mom's scooter. Note that scooters are family vehicles here. People ride around on them with mom, dad, baby, and a kid or two all piled on. Anyway, the Lovely Baby was holding a yummy-looking crispy bread thing that looked like it was filled with meat, so we set out to find such a thing. We thought we found it, and bought one, but turns out ours was filled with spinach stuff and an egg. Not too tasty. While we ate it, we got some of the most intense and non-friendly stares we've experienced here. Tom even confronted them by awkwardly staring back and waving while saying "Hello. Ni hao." Nothing. They just looked the other way and pretended nothing happened. It was pretty awkward. I don't think we'll be going back to that place.

We went home and had a nap, and then Tom called in for the priesthood session of district conference. Tom says that he feels the spirit pretty strong over here and it's really neat to be able to have church events from all across the country. After priesthood session finished, we quickly ran across the street to grab some ingredients for this yummy homemade tomato zucchini medley that I made.



Just as this finished cooking, the adult session of district conference began. It was a great session. We were able to hear all of the speakers really clearly (which isn't usually the case with church) and the talks they gave were really inspiring. 

Police and Donkey Meat

Friday, September 14

After our early morning reading classes, we came back to our apartment, where there was apparently some construction going on above us. Bleh, the noise was awful awful. Susan called us in the midst of the noises and told us we needed to go with her to the police station to get our residency permits. So we scooted there with her (she has a scoot scoot, too) and spent basically all morning there. I missed teaching my third grade class and we missed lunch. Apparently there was something wrong with the electronic copy of some documents or something that had to be fixed in another office. After waiting for a couple of hours, we decided to just go back to the school and go back later to finish. On our way back, we picked up some delicious waffle cone type things from a street vendor. Yum. Since we missed the cafeteria lunch, Susan treated us to a specialized cuisine for lunch: donkey meat. It was actually quite delicious. It came served in crispy pita-type-things. We also got some soup that had little donkey meat-filled dumplings and baby shrimps in it. Tom ate most of the soup because I had a hard time with the baby shrimps looking at me; they still had eyes. The meat really just tasted like extra-tasty beef. Yum.

 



You may not be able to tell, but everything in this picture is tiny.
Tiny loaf of bread; tiny jam; tiny peanut butter. I love tiny things.

After our nap, tom taught grade 6 while I prepared a tiny peanut butter and jelly sandwich for Susan. We delivered the sandwich, realized that it was too late to go back to the police station to finish our business there, and scooted out for a hot date.

On our hot date we shopped around and ate at a restaurant. We got kung pow chicken and shredded potatoes. It was so yummy, but we ordered way too much food and had to take the potatoes home for leftovers.

Hot Pot with the Governors

Thursday, September 13

It is so fun to play with ("teach") the kindergarten kids, but it is a little frustrating that they're just so dang young that they don't understand a thing I say. They don't even understand when the teachers speak to them in Chinese sometimes. Like I've said, I think half of my job here with the little ones is to get them used to the sight of a foreigner and the sounds of English. There is one girl in my Smile Baby class that still bursts out into tears whenever she sees me or Tom, and simply starts wailing if we get within 10 feet of her. I guess we're pretty terrifying.

After teaching kindy classes, we headed over to the cafeteria for lunch. On our way, we said hi to Mr. Zhang, who was standing outside of his private kitchen messing with a little stove-looking thing called a "hot pot." He insisted that we join him for lunch along with some people from the government. What an interesting experience. We watched him prepare the hot pot for about twenty minutes. It was basically just a stove thing that kept water super hot once it got going, and is an ancient Chinese way of cooking. You put the hot pot in the middle of the table and it functions the same way as a fondue pot. You throw in what food you want, and a few minutes later take it out and put it in your bowl of sesame seed sauce and eat it. Before any of the other guests got there, Mr. Zhang threw in a bag of very very fresh (still alive) shrimp. While those cooked, the guests started arriving. Including us and Mr. Zhang, there were 10 of us. All of the guests were people who work for various auxiliaries of the local government (including the foreign affairs bureau) and the China Communist Party. Most of them knew a few English words that they would throw out here and there, but mostly they tried to speak to us in Chinese. Luckily, Mr. Zhang functioned as a great translator. Once everybody got seated and comfy, the drinks came out. Everybody had a tiny tea cup as well as a glass for the liquor (vodka, I think) or beer. This is when they first got a crack out of us. Mr. Zhang explained to them that we didn't drink liquor, and they clearly thought that was pretty strange. After using our one water bottle to participate in the many many toasts that were given (when we ran out of water, they filled our bottle with boiling water) , some people motioned for us to use our tea cups to toast. When we lifted them up and put them straight down without drinking they, very apparently, felt quite awkward that we were breaking such a simple toasting etiquette. We reminded Mr. Zhang that we don't drink tea and he passed along the message in Chinese. They sure thought that was weird too. So they started asking questions about where we were from and the "beliefs" of America. When we told them we were from Utah they all started chatting and laughing. Mr. Zhang informed us that some were questioning why we had multiple wives and gave all of our money to the church. How interesting; I felt like a bit of a spectacle. We explained simply that we gave 10% of our money to the church, and that we don't have multiple wives. They didn't seem to believe us. Then when they asked about the beliefs of America, we weren't really sure what they meant. We eventually gave them the answer of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Mr. Zhang said that he agrees, and that is a good basic belief. All the while, the hot pot food was keeping us busy. There were many things to throw into the hot pot, including lettuce, spinach, mushrooms, cabbage, tofu, noodles, potatoes, but most of all there was mutton. We'd never had mutton before, and I imagine it's probably quite tasty if prepared over a fire or something, but boiled mutton simply is not my thing. Tom liked it well enough. I thought it was like boiled bacon. How appetizing. Each person had a bowl of this extremely strong sesame seed sauce to mix all of their food in. Tom liked that too; it wasn't really doin' it for me. So I mostly stuck to the spinach and mushrooms and tofu. At one point, Tom was given a shrimp and a lady gave him a step by step tutorial on how to take it apart to eat it. When I was given this same opportunity, I had to put the shrimp down to cool down (it was so so hot) and then "forgot" about it. Woops. There was another type of shrimp that we were given too, which you didn't have to take apart. The man sitting next to me guided Tom and me through eating the section between the head and tail in one easy bite. Overall, it was a really fun and insightful experience.

Because lunch was a bit of a long endeavor, we had to skip our nap and go straight into teaching our primary classes. Thursdays are fun because at the end of the day we get to team-teach English Club (the one where all the smartest kids get together and play games). This week was for the younger kids, grades 1-3. We had a lot of fun playing alphabet and name games.

For dinner we simply had to go back to the place we ate at the night before to get another one of what we call "china burritos." So delicious. This time, I got some breaded fish or something in mine, and Tom got some chicken in his. Mmmm.

Another Birthday Week

Monday, September 10

On top of being Mama Nelson's birthday, Monday was also "Teacher Day." Tom dressed up real nice for the occassion. After our regular teach/lunch/nap/teach schedule, we decided to go back to that place that had cheap delicious dumplings for dinner. We got a couple baskets of dumplings (of course) and some fried rice. Yum. A nearby high school must have just let out, because the streets and restaurants were packed with kids wearing matching jackets and such. After a lot of staring, giggling, and whispering, a few of the students worked up the courage to try out their English skills on us. They asked us the usual questions: "Where are you from? What's your name? Do you like China?" and told Tom the usual, "Your nose is big," and "Your girlfriend is very beautiful." Aw, gee, thanks guys. It's always fun to talk to the teenagers because they know more than most people's "hello" and "America!"

Then we headed over to Tong Tian to buy some groceries. We were thrilled when we found some peanut butter and jam next to the bread section. The peanut butter is pretty expensive here, and the biggest container we could find was tiny. But we were thrilled nonetheless. When we got home we got to have a nice little chat with the birthday girl before going to sleep early in preparation for our early start the next day.

Tuesday, September 11

Has it been 11 years since the 9/11 attacks? Wow, that seems crazy. I was in fifth grade when that happened. God bless America!

Anyway, we woke up early and hopped on a bus headed to Shijianzhuang, the capitol of Hebei province. We got there three hours later and headed straight to the medical travel clinic place to get our physical examinations done - this was just to verify that we are indeed healthy enough to work in China and we aren't going to spread any freaky diseases here. Whew, I tell you what, what an experience. First of all, we couldn't eat breakfast that morning (for the blood tests), so we were already a little on edge. The first thing they did was handed us our own empty blood-sample tubes and open-top cup (looks like the scoop you'd pull out a drink-mix container) for a pee sample. After promptly taking our blood samples, they sent us down a hallway full of side (torture experiment) rooms for the rest of the examination. Keep in mind, nobody caused us any pain, but when they shoved us into separate rooms and gave us ultrasounds as the first test, we were pretty confused. The awkwardness was only accentuated by the language barrier. Then they did a few normal tests: weight, height, vision, electro-shock therapy.. you know, the normal things. For the electro-shock therapy, they used a little jelly, some suction cups all over our chests, and strong metal clamps on our wrists and ankles to check for some kind of health problem; it was never explained to us. After a slightly strange x-ray experience, we finally filled up the tiny cups we'd been carrying around, and we were finished. Through all of this, we managed to see the first Americans we've seen since we left Beijing. There were three of them going through the same medical examination that we were doing there, and it was refreshing to easily make small talk with a few people again.

After finishing the medical exam, we had to wait for about 4 hours to get our results back, so we had some time to kill. We ate lunch at a place called "Kung Fu Rice" or something, and they used Bruce Lee as the mascot on their label. It was delicious, even though the soup looked like a very small E.T. had been boiled up inside of it. Then we walked around at the local clothing stores in search of a jacket for me (Alicia), but had no luck. So we spent like two hours talking to Susan about American holidays while sitting in the upper floor of a KFC. Then we went back to the travel clinic to get our results, and headed over to the Foreign Expert Bureau to get our Foreign Expert Certificates. When we got there, it looked like they were packing everything up to move or something and some kind of commotion happened between Susan and the people packing up. We're still not really sure what the situation was, but we turned around and headed back home. On the bus ride home, Tom enjoyed watching a movie about a crime scene investigation, even though it was in Chinese, because he used his vast knowledge of action movie plots to understand what was going on. As soon as we got off the bus back in Cangzhou, we were attacked by an onslaught of taxi drivers who wanted our business. We didn't realize until 30 seconds into it that they were taxi drivers, so the first few approaches were fairly scary. Luckily, Susan took care of us (as she always does), and we got home safe and sound.

Wednesday, September 12



Wednesdays are nice because we are done with classes by 11:15. So we each did a reading class this morning, and then taught our kindy kids before having dumplings for lunch at the school cafeteria. That's the other reason we like Wednesdays: dumplings for lunch. 

 

They love Tom & Jerry here.


After our long nap, we scooted over to a park a few blocks away from our apartment. The park was really pretty and peaceful. We heard some interesting music coming from one corner of the park so we headed in that direction and found the musicians. These instruments were pretty nifty. One of them was like a bagpipe meets organ instrument. They tried to chat with us, and we used what little Chinese we know to work with 'em, but eventually they just played us a song instead. It was great. Some people even stopped on the side of the street and watched.  

Tom is an iron lion, too.

The park continued across the street, where "The Iron Lion" is located. This "Iron Lion" is a replica of an iron cast statue that was made in 953 AD. The original one is in a different part of Cangzhou, and is one of the things that the city is famous for. It's had structural problems for the past several years though, so they made this replica and put it in a park that is closer to the downtown area in 2008.



At the park, there were these neat little dove hotels.

 


There were tons of these two-tone flowers; they came in all sorts of color combinations.



Not only were the flowers gorgeous, but they
also smelled like root beer. Literally. It was amazing.

On the way back from the park, we stopped at a couple of street vendors for dinner. The first guy gave us a kabob thing of barbecued tofu-wrapped veggies for free. It was delicious.



This is a really common way that street vendors cook.
We ate some of those tofu-wrapped things on the right.

 Then we got this Chinese burrito type thing for only 5 yuan. It was neat - we just chose our fillings and she cooked them right in front of us. The jalapeno pepper I put in there was pretty big, so I thought it wouldn't be very spicy (that's how it works, right?), but it wasn't seeded at all, so it ended up being quite spicy. It was still so yummy though. After drinking a milk packet I was fine. We'll definitely be eating this again.

Birthday Weekend

Saturday, September 8

We took our first real day off to go back to the People's Park. This time, we didn't have to walk down any creepy alleyways, we just scooted on the main road. The park is beautiful. We already described it a little from going there on Wednesday, but it's just really cool. I imagine it's kind of like a little Central Park (though I've never been there) in that while you're there you can feel like you're in the middle of nature and far away from everything, but if you get on to a hill or near the edge of the park you can see tall buildings just across the street. There's a small lake in the park with an island in the middle that has bridges leading to it. In the center of the island there are several trails leading up the hill to a pagoda. Going up that little hill on a steep trail in the middle of the trees reminded us of being back at home in the mountains for just a minute. The greenery was very dense and pretty, but it's a little bit wierd because there are ferns and pine trees groing right next to each other, which doesn't seem like a very natural combination.

When we got back out to our scooter, we were happy to find that it wasn't stolen, but was safely being watched by a nice old lady. Through a series of rough communications, we discovered that as a favor to us, she had been watching our scooter, and in return, was asking for 1 Yuan. We had no way of disproving her claim, because our scooter was still there, so we paid her the money and laughed about it.

As we scooted along through the city looking for something to eat, we found a little restaurant at a side alley they we recognized as a place that would probably sell us dumplings. They have a bunch of dumpling trays stacked together being steamed to deliciousness. We ordered one tray, which comes with 9 dumplings, and were very satisfied. We were even more satisfied when we found out that 9 dumplings only cost 4 Yuan. That's like $0.64. Boo Yah. We made a plan to go back to that place.

We stopped at the market just across from our apartments on the way home and did a cruise-around looking for a gift that we could give to Susan for her birthday. We found lots of interesting things, including very cheap shoes and blankets and such, but nothing that was birthday-worthy. Susan called us while we were there and needed us to come back and send her an email of the article we just wrote, so we bought some bananas and a pear and headed home.

After eating some cold pizza, we heard from Susan that our diplomas had arrived so we were very relieved to know that. We still needed to find a gift for Susan so we scooted back to Tong Tian to look for some English Disney DVD's that we could give to her. It was so difficult to get the natives to understand that a DVD was NOT a DVD player. After asking about 10 people, we finally found the DVD store and all the movies were Chinese movies without a lick of English. So we bagged that idea, and will probably resort to downloading movies from the internet. As it turns out, downloading movies in China is not illegal!

As we were walking around Tong Tian, Alicia heard a song by Ingrid Michaelson playing from one of the stores and got a little homesick, but mostly excited that there was something familiar from home. At that moment I decided that buying a ukulele should move up on the priority list. Maybe after we get paid. We stopped at this food vendor right in the middle of the parking lot there and bought a shishkabob of tiny eggs on a stick. It was only 2 Yuan and looked really interesting.

We looked desperately for a new restaurant to try on the way home, but all of the BBQ-lookin' places looked like they only had one thing they were cooking. As we were checking one of the places out, a Chinese girl in her 20's came running over and busted out some good English skills in an effort to help us; we must have looked like we were very confused I guess. They sat us down in the big spotlight so everyone driving by could see they had westerners eating at their restaurant. We ordered two big bowls of fried rice. Everyone else at the restaurant was eating mutton. They had little burners in the middle of the tables that kept a rotisserie of mutton hot while everyone picked meat off with thier chopsticks. It looked like fun but we think it was very expensive, like maybe 100 Yuan a person. Ours was 10 Yuan together. Yummy. Plus, Alicia just loves fried rice.

Sunday, September 9

Church on Sunday was full of technical difficulties. President Britton handled it very well, but about 15 minutes of the first hour was just trying to get all the lines of the conference call to be muted correctly. As you listen, you can tell if your line is muted or not, and our line happened to not be muted during the speakers talks. So anyways, right in the middle of his talk, explosions from fireworks started going off really close to our apartment building. This has happened before, and we think it is the construction companies doing something weird, but we have no idea why. These explosions were especially loud, and since our line was unmuted, the guy speaking stopped for a second and said, "I think I can hear explosions...". We decided to  hang up and call back once the explosions stopped. It was kind of funny, but also probably just satan's ploy to interrupt our virtual sacrament meeting.

We made a small bowl of pasta stuff that Alicia found at the store. It was a nice treat because it reminded us of a tradiational meal that we would have at home. Just as we were settling down for an afternoon nap, the power in our whole apartment went out. We just went to sleep and waited to see if it would turn back on sometime soon. A few hours later, we decided to do some investigating and found that everyone else in the building still had power. We called Susan and found out that they power company shut our power off because there was no more money left in our account. They quickly called the power company and put some more money in the account, and the power was back on within the hour. Everything is pre-paid here!

We spent the rest of the night eating a couple packs of super Chinese Ramen and making a completely homemade card and packaging for Susan's birthday gift. We ended up buying her socks with teddy bears, and a hair pin that was cute. The package was an envelope made from foamy material that we use for teaching supplies. It turned out very cute considering we had so little to make it. 

Birthday Week

Tuesday, September 4

After I got home from teaching my first early morning reading class (the kids read out loud in unison for 20 minutes in English every morning), Tom finally woke up from his benedryl-induced sleep. His hives were all gone, so that was good. We taught some kindy classes, chatted with the Mama and Papa Russell about sending us some documents (what a headache! Thanks again for doing that!), and then ate lunch at the cafeteria. Afterward, we went to the market across the street to buy soup and cookie ingredients. After teaching our afternoon classes we made the first real homemade food since we got here. The soup wasn't what I'd planned - I was going for like a chicken/black bean tortilla soup, but ended up with a vegetable stew type thing. But it was still delicious. And of course I made way too much of it, so we ate it for every meal possible for the rest of the week.

 

Wednesday, September 5

After we got back from our early morning reading classes, we talked to the Russell clan and heard back that Mama Des had been at the post office literally all day getting our diplomas and certificates mailed off to China. We were very grateful for all their effort. We may not have been able to stay in China if it wasn't for their help in finding and sending those documents.

Each new day in the Kindergarten is an adventure. I (Tom) always teach a lesson at 9:20, to either my Happy Babies or my Super Babies. (They are the oldest in the kindergarten.) I spent some time that day with the Happies figuring out their names, helping them write them down, and taking a picture of them holding their names. They are some dang cute pictures. I'll post a couple here. One of my favorites is Micheal. He is so much smaller than the others, but is just as smart. I have to coach him a little, because he is very timid, but he has this cute little face with one of his eyes more squinty than the other. 

Outside with the Supers, I played the usual round of head, shoulder, knees, and toes, and then tried to teach them a few new vocabulary words with a racing game to test their retention. It was okay, but hard to keep their attention when they are outside. I need to think of outdoor games that are more captivating. The kids listen to the Chinese teachers really well, because they can understand them. But when we try to discipline them we can't, because they don't understand everything we are saying. It's a whole new challenge to teaching little kids.

Alicia teaches the Smile Babies and the Lovely Babies. The Smiles are the youngest in the kindergarten, and are barely learning Mandarin. Alicia's job is to basically let the kids have some exposure to her and hopefully teach them something here and there. When she walked into her Smile Babies today, there was a little boy who was venting to Alicia for about 30 seconds straight into her face. The trouble was that it was all in Chinese, and Alicia had no idea what he was saying. I tell you what: angry little kids speaking Chinese are very cute. The other Chinese teachers were giggling about the whole situation, and it turns out that he was explaining to Alicia that he couldn't do the head, shoulders, knees, and toes song. He wanted her to teach him. He kept saying, "Lao Shi (Sher), Loa Shi!, bu hui bu hui, yi, er, san, si" (Teacher, Teacher! I can't, I can't! One, Two, Three, Four, while pointing to different parts of his body), and that's all we could understand. After venting to Alicia with no avail, he saw me sitting over in the corner of the room and came walking over to me, starting to vent about the same thing. It was one of the cutest things we've seen. He just really wanted some help with the head, shoulders, knees and toes song.

Turns out, Wednesdays are going to be our favorite day in the lunchroom: dumplings. They have vegetable and meat dumplings, and they are good! We quickly decided that we liked the meat dumplings the best and learned the word in Chinese so we could ask for those the next week.

We took our regular nap and because it was a Wednesday, and we don't teach in the afternoon, we slept a little longer than usual. When we woke up we decided to go to the park that we saw on google maps. We called Susan in an effort to find a bus route that might take us close to their, and struggled to understand her directions to the bus stop. She doesn't use North, East, South, and West, so the "go left, then left" directions are pretty hard to follow. We ended up just walking over and around the block to get to "The People's Park". It was fun to see all of the little shops along the way. I don't really know how these little shops survive. They have tiny little areas where they live and sleep, and charge very small amounts for their services. I wonder to myself if small shops like this would exist in America if we were governed in a similar fashion to China. In America, people are fighting to keep the "mom and pop" stores alive, and to regulate the corporate giants. In China, nearly every store is a "mom and pop" store, and there are very few corporate giants. It's interesting to see how hard people will fight for your business, because the next 10 shops on the street will sell the exact same thing to you, for the exact same price. For that reason, we are happy to not speak the language sometimes, so we feel justified in ignoring their sales pitches. Anyways, we were pleasantly surprised at how open and beautiful the People's Park was. It has tons of trees and sidewalks, with bridges that cross over onto an island in the middle of a lake. We did not have very much time to look around before we ran into Bing.

As we were walking down the sidewalk, we noticed that a large white duck was walking along in front of a group of people. Per usual, I shouted something in English as we walked past, assuming they probably wouldn't understand what I was saying. I said, "Is that your duck?" To our surprise, a man immediately responded and said, "Yes, that is my duck." As it turns out, this duck belonged to an Asian man who just happened to speak English more fluently than anyone we'd met. He was excited to talk to us, and immediately recognized that Utah is the state that has a basketball team called the Jazz. We learned that he lived in the UK for 7 years and had a very thick British accent. It was pretty entertaining to hear an Asian speak English with a major British twist. He was in Cangzhou visiting family, but has a pregnant wife in Australia that he was going to visit soon. A lot of our conversation revolved around religion. He told us how he converted to Christianity while in the UK, and then converted his parents and mother's family when they came to visit him there. It was pretty cool. This was the first major experience in China where I really wanted to talk details about religion, but I knew that I am supposed to avoid it at all costs. He was interested in telling us about his church and it was interesting being the one being proselyted to for once. He pried a couple of times to figure out what denomination of Christianity that we were, but we stayed sealed, and just called it a branch of Christianity. He invited to come to church with him, and gave us his phone number for when he comes back to China with his wife and child in February. This is when we found out that his name was Bing. It was funny because he was wearing a shirt with the "bing" company logo on it.

After saying goodbye to Bing, it was getting dark, and we headed right back home. We took a side road because it looked like it might cut through the block and give us a shortcut to our apartment building. The first half of the shortcut was great! We walked through a small night market, bought some bananas and a delicious pear, and continued walking down that road. It started getting smaller and smaller, and stinkier and darker and scarier as we walked. Alicia made me pick up the pace, and only after running into a dead end did I finally admit that it was a bad idea to take the shortcut. We never felt like we were in danger, but we didn't want any chance of it. We soon found the main road, and got back to our apartment safely. This experience is another reason that helped us decide to get a scooter: no need for late night scary stinky shortcuts.

Thursday, September 6

I went to do some morning reading with the primary kids, and Alicia went to the Kindergarten upon Susan's request. I came back from reading and Alicia had come right back from the Kindergarten because no one knew why she was there or what she was supposed to be helping with. There is a major communication barrier because everything we know and hear comes from Susan, and sometimes she doesn't understand exactly what people are asking for. It's like a real life version of playing the "telephone" game.

That morning we had a great skype conversation with Mama and Papa Nelson. It was great to see them and that they are doing well. After teaching the kindergarten that morning, eating lunch, and taking our nap, we taught grades 1 and 5. The grade 1 kids are a little bit challenging to teach because there are nearly 40 of them and they speak almost no English. I sit at the back and wait for Alicia to ask me to be her assistant. Teaching grade 5 is a lot better because they understand most of what I say, but there are nearly 40 of them as well, and it's hard to keep them from running up to me and hugging me and saying "I love you". It's very flattering, but distracting to the lesson.

We had a quick meeting with Mr. Zhang where he gave us some teaching advice and an assignment to write an article for the newspaper on Teacher Appreciation Day in America. Then we conducted English Club. This is basically where the smartest kids from each class come to the club and we play games with them. It was a lot of fun. English Club switches back and forth weekly between the younger (grades 1-3, those that Alicia teaches) and older (grades 4-6, those that Tom teaches) kids. This week was the older kids. We were able to play games with them that most of our students wouldn't normally understand, so it was a lot of fun to use those games to review vocab that most of them knew pretty well. 

Soon after English Club ended, Susan called us and asked if we wanted her to take us to buy a scooter. It took a few important minutes of rationalizing, but Alicia could tell that I really just wanted to get one, aside from the fact that it would be helpful in a few big ways. So we ran down to meet Susan, jumped in a taxi, stopped at the bank to withdraw some money, and hurried over to the scooter shop. I'm sure there are many scooter shops in Cangzhou, but this is the same one where Susan bought hers just recently. Her brother-in-law knows the owner too, and he was there at the shop when we arrived to help us do the bartering. We took about 10 minutes to look over the options that were there and decided on a blue one. It was on promotion for 1880, but then Susan's brother in law talked him down to 1800 (Yuan, that is). They started setting the scooter up and charging the battery. Unfortunately they were having a problem getting the battery to fit in the blue scooter, so we picked a different one. Alicia wanted one with color so we went with magenta. A little girly, but still pretty snazzy. We thanked Susan and her brother-in-law for being such a huge help and left with our new purchase. It came with a free lock and driving poncho too!

 I was so excited to start scootin' around like the rest of the natives. We scooted on over to Tong Tian, and bought some groceries before heading home. I let Alicia try her hand at driving on the way back, and after 5 minutes, she was sold that buying the scooter was a good idea. It was a lot of fun. Thanks Alicia, for the birthday gift.

Friday, September 7

My birthday in China was better than I could have imagined it. I was prepared to have a simple birthday without as much of the normal excitement as I would have at home. Alicia went above and beyond and made me some homemade crepe/pancake action that was really delicious! She knows the key to my heart. Well somehow, the word spread that it was my birthday and I got a text message and a gift from Susan, a special song by the third graders (thanks to Alicia), and a super fancy cake and huge bouquet of flowers from the school. It even came with a king hat, cute little serving plates, and tiny forks. The king hat was just a little small, but was lucky enough to not only say Happy Birthday with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, but Merry Christmas as well! We think that in China, they use Christmas decorations for everything because its the most prevalent piece of western culture that they know about. Susan gave me these cute Chinese bobbleheads of a couple dressed in traditional ancient wedding attire. They are really fun. The cake was double-layer white cake with whip-cream like frosting. It was decorated with kiwis, cherries, and peaches around the edges, and trimmed with white chocolate shavings. Alicia and I ate the whole thing in 3 days.  

 An amazing thing happened when I was carrying all of my birthday goodies back to our apartment from the school. I've got my cake in my right hand, and this huge thing of flowers in my left.... and a butterfly came and landed in the bouquet of flowers!! Fate was truly smiling on me for my birthday.

We don't teach kindergarten on Fridays, but I taught 6th grade, and Alicia taught 3rd. After my last class, I set to work writing a 1000 word article about Teacher Appreciation Day in America for Mr. Zhang. He asked us to write about it because Pioneer School was being highlighted in some national education newspaper. We felt a bit of pressure to do a good job, but hello, have you ever tried to write 1000 words about Teacher Appreciation Day? So that took a little while, but thank goodness for the internet, because we barely even remember celebrating teacher day in America.

After we got that printed off and gave it to Susan to translate, we played a few minutes of basketball with the students before heading off to my birthday dinner at e-Pizza!

Scoot Scoot! We were pretty skeptical about the authenticity of the food at e-Pizza, but decided that we would never find out until we tried. The actual food wasn't at all like it was in the pictures on the menu, but it was still decently good. We paid about twenty bucks in USD, which would be normal in America, but here that is enough to feed us for two weeks. So we had a good time, laughed about their efforts to replicate western pizza, which included ketchup and salsa type stuff as dipping sauces, and went on our way.

BBQ Chicken? Eh... Nice Try. Peanuts are not chicken, and sweet and sour is not BBQ sauce. Oh, and catdog sausages are not beef. All in all, still pretty tasty.

We shopped around and explored a little on the way home, and when we returned, Alicia prepared my birthday cake with the candles that were also included in my birthday package from the school. It was really fun, and delicious.

Monday, September 3

Monday, September 3

We started this morning off early with the kindergarten opening ceremony. After a few quick speeches were given, and a dance was performed by the other kindergarten teachers, Tom gave the speech that he prepared the night before. It was pretty simple, just stated that we are happy to be here from America and welcomed the parents and students. He did a great job. After the opening ceremony ended, we went off to teach our first kindergarten classes. This was pretty interesting because most of the kids were pretty shy, and I think most of them were quite scared of us because we look so different. Since then, they've gotten more used to us and gotten a little less shy, but a few of them still burst out in tears whenever they see us. After kindy classes, we ate some lunch and taught at the primary school. Tom taught grades 4 and 6, and I taught grade 2. This was also interesting because we really had no idea what level they were at and what we were supposed to teach, so we basically just threw together on-the-spot lessons. This was actually the case for pretty much the whole week.

After classes, we went over to Tong tian (the shopping area) and looked for cookie ingredients for Tom's birthday. Even after using the words in Chinese and talking to the people at the bakery and the regular grocery store, we couldn't find baking soda, cocoa, or vanilla extract, so that's going to make things hard. We'll hunt them down eventually. While we were at Tong tian, we went to the KFC there (they're all over the place here, there are two in the same parking lot of tong tian). The food was so so much more expensive than other food here, so we just got one chicken piece to share and some fries. The KFC here is not really like the KFC in America. It's like a conglomeration of all fast food in the States. They have the regular KFC chicken and mashed potatoes, but they also have fries, burrito-looking things, chicken burger things, even star-shaped nuggets like at Carl's Jr. It's pretty interesting. Anyway, the chicken and fries were pretty tasty, just so expensive that we didn't want to get more food. We're not so sure that we'll be going back to KFC here in China, because when we got home Tom had crazy hives all over. We're not sure what exactly caused the hives, but Tom suspects it could have been the fried chicken because he thinks he had a similar reaction to eating fried chicken while he was on his mission. Who knows. Luckily we had some benedryl-type stuff, which he took, and then slept for 12 hours straight. When we woke up the next day, he was all better. In the meantime, I cooked beans so we could have homemade soup the next day. I was pretty excited about the beans because I thought they were black beans and we could have like a Mexican soup, but when I cooked them they ended up being black soybeans. Still delicious, but not Mexican.

The Birthday Mama

Today is my mother's 50th birthday. Woops, I'm supposed to tell you that she just turned 30. Anyway, she looks great for her age, doesn't she?



Clan Nelson, minus one. What an attractive family!

 Well, since I'm not too close to home for this birthday, I thought I'd tell the world how much I love her from over here in China. Let me tell you about how nifty she is. (Ooh, "nifty fifty"... this is going to be a good year.)

My mom has raised four great kids that love her dearly. She's put herself last and done everything possible to raise a happy family for 30 years. 30 years! That's a long time. She's been a PTA mom, soccer mom, dance mom, gymnastics mom, basketball mom, teacher-helper mom, primary-talks mom, hold-your-hand-at-the-doctor's mom, and many more mommy-mom things. And through her being there for me over the past 21 years, I have learned countless lessons from her; here are just a few:

• Don't fit the mold - be unique.
• Love everybody. Period.
• Accept everybody, especially those who are not accepted by others.
• Laugh at yourself. (She is an especially good example of this.)
• Have faith that God is taking care of you.
• Don't take life too seriously; God has a sense of humor.
• Never, ever disrespect your parents or elders.
• Serve those around you, and you will learn to love them.
• Some rules are made to be "bent," at least a little.
• ALWAYS show gratitude.

Mom never sat me down and made me memorize these lessons, she taught me through example. She is a fantastic example of each of the above principles, and I can remember specific times in my life when I've seen this through her actions.

Laugh at yourself. My mom is a master at laughing at herself. She served in the Young Women's auxiliary of the Church for something like 15 years, and she was always well-loved by "her girls," as she would call them. You simply cannot get through 15 years of girls' camp without laughing at yourself.

Have faith that God is taking care of you. My mother has experienced many trials throughout her life, of many types. Because she was blessed with an empathetic soul, she has endured not only her own trials, but those of the people she loves as well. Recently she faced a pretty big trial in her life, head-on, and with full faith. I have never been more proud of her. She taught me what it meant to completely turn your life over to the Lord, and allow Him to do His will. Her faith has made her an incredibly strong woman, and facing this trial with such faith made her even stronger. I have always known that my mother has unwavering faith. Is she perfect? Heavens no. Does she like to bend the rules? Sometimes. Does she have faith in her Savior, Jesus Christ? Yes. Definitely. Always.

Don't take life too seriously; God has a sense of humor. As I said, my mom is great at laughing at herself. She's also great at laughing at other people (in a loving way, of course). My mom is quite a tease, especially when it comes to her children. This is what happens when Ted Solomon is your father. Though each of us kids now has a bit of a complex about something (Celest has a mouse voice; Aaron has a huge head; I have Dumbo ears; Serena has a "Solomon" forehead), I am grateful that my mom taught us to laugh at ourselves and not take life too seriously. Because of this, I can handle the teasing that my father-in-law dishes out regularly (and dish it back every once in a while). Good thing I was prepared for that.

I guess what I'm getting to is this: I love my mom. She has always been my best friend (well, now she's a close second to Mr. Thomas). But more than a best friend, she's been my MOM - the person that has comforted me through whatever big or little trials a person can face in the first twenty-one years of life; the person that has taught me how to be a productive member of society; the person that taught me how to love and build relationships; the person that taught me to enjoy simple pleasures and keep on smiling. She's given me everything: life, love, companionship. Heck, she even found the best husband in the world for me. For all of this, and so much more, I want to say THANK YOU!  I'll never be able to express my love and gratitude enough to you, Mom. You are super duper nifty fifty. Happy birthday.