Not A Clue...

Seriously...no idea. We just walked out our front door yesterday & there was this big styrofoam dragon being painted over with what looked like yellow icing. Not a clue what it was for or where it was going or why it was being done, but for some reason they chose to do it in front of our apartment complex. We've gotten to the point in our stay here where we just don't ask questions anymore, though this time mostly due to the fact that we haven't yet learned how to ask, "Why are you painting a large styrofoam dragon with yellow icing?"

We just smiled, took a few pictures, then went on our way and by the time we returned it had vanished.

Our Thanks

This Thanksgiving we feel we have a lot to be thankful for...so we thought we'd do the second-grader type thing and compile a list of all of our thankfuls:

First and foremost, we're thankful for our Father & his Son. He's called us to a remote place where everything else in our lives seems very different except Him.

We're thankful for our families & friends of course. Though we haven't seen their beautiful faces in a few months they are the most special people to us on the planet. We miss you and we hope you ate a lot of Thanksgiving goodness on our behalf!!


We're thankful for eachother. We're so thankful for this time in our lives. If we were in the U.S. we'd each have our own job to get up and go to each day, but here our job is the same and we get to spend almost every hour of every day together. It's been the best thing for our marriage; going through culture shock together.

We're thankful that this Thanksgiving we were able to eat Turkey! After tracking one down in our recent nearby city trip we found a hotel here in town with an oven big enough to fit it in so that we had some turkey to eat in celebration of Thanksgiving day.

We're thankful for our teammates here who made it truly feel like Thanksgiving. It felt so much like thanksgiving that when we went outside to go home we were shocked to still be here!

We're thankful for the men who dig through our trash every day because it reminds us not to be wasteful.

We're thankful that we found real fresh cow's milk at Fu Mart! Makes cereal so much better!

We're thankful for our teachers because learning the language on our own would be soooo much harder!

We're thankful for our pr supporters back home because we know that the reason good things are happening here is because of their petitions!

We're thankful that the postal system does work (even though it took over three months to get one airmailed letter.) But most of the mail does come on time!

We're thankful for the water man who so promptly brings us clean water when we call him, even when we accidentally call him on his day off.

We could probably go on and on about things that we're thankful for...but we won't.
Hope your Thanksgiving was as fun as ours! Tell us what your thankful for!

Dian Fei

Yesterday from noon until approximately 5 p.m. (we're not quite sure because we were checking out new Christmas decor at Fu Mart) our apartment had no electricity. In several countries through out the world that's really common...and it might have seemed usual to us if just previous to the outage a lady hadn't shown up at our door. We received a knock at our door just after noon by a lady who apparently knew nothing else to say except, "Dian Fei!" repeatedly. We didn't have a clue what she was talking about until she stepped over to our breaker box, unlocked it, and shut off all our electricity. At this point we naturally assumed she shut off our electricity because we missed paying our bill this month. Before you go off on us and call us irresponsible let me explain how the "billing" system works over here (to the best of my knowledge.) We pay our phone bill between the 5th and the 12th of every month, the electricity bill between the 10th and 20th, gas bill is paid whenever the lady shows up at our door...which in the past is around 9 p.m. at night on a Sunday, heating is paid 4 months at a time and should have been turned on yesterday yet still we're without heat, and then there's water...well I really have no idea how we pay water. You can't pay them early, likewise you can't pay them late. (or I guess you can if they show up at your door and shut everything off) Well apparently we missed paying our electricity bill, maybe you can see why we might get confused though, and they showed up and shut it off. Instead of letting us pay her she made Brandon run down to the office and pay up at which point they told him that they'd promptly turn it back on within the next three days. Luckily we have a friend that knows all the bill paying words who informed them that we'd prefer it if they could turn it on a little sooner. So around 5 p.m. yesterday we returned to a home with electricity.

Coastal City

This past weekend we took a short vacation to a nearby coastal city to relax a little from language learning and to eat some American food. It was a much needed vacation & and a long overdue visit to Starbucks. Despite how beautiful the city is, our favorite part was the eating! We visited Pizza Hut, Starbucks, & Haagan Dazs all in one day! It was truly a spectacular day! This city makes our city seem so small & country-ish. There are a lot more foreigners there because it is one of the biggest port cities in China. Plus it is growing and expanding so much because it is playing a big part of the 2008 Olympics. The sailing competitions will be held in this city & there are signs & posters everywhere in the city preparing people for the upcoming event. Our hotel was very close to the beach front boardwalk so we had easy access to some very pretty sights. We took several pictures while we were there so get ready for another picture + caption blog.

Here's Brandon enjoying his Haagan Dazs ice cream!

The Pizza Hut we went to was the nicest Pizza Hut we've ever been in. They carried all sorts of pizza including some not so tasty sounding ones with corn on top. Luckily they had the "American Special" with cheese & pepperoni.

And now just to go along with all the hype all over the city, we're posting what apparently is a new symbol of the Olympics. He's everywhere...billboards, taxis, grocery stores, commercials, and he's even been inserted into the sidewalks lining the launch point for the sailing competition.

This is the pier for the launch point. It might be hard to see but there are flags lining the pier the extend even further to the left of numerous countries...unfortunately we couldn't go all the way out there because there is so much under construction getting ready for it all!

Old City Streets

On Saturday we visited another district of our city which has some incredible sights. There is a section of the city with some really old "really china" looking streets. It was so pretty and it felt like we really stepped back in time. Time to overload you with pictures again.

This is a lady in the silk market:

The entrance to the Old Streets:

And then we were serenaded...

And then Brandon got to talk with them for awhile...

And then I asked this guy if I could take his picture, he asked "how many?" So I told him just the one...and he gave a little smile: