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.
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