Feast your eyes upon...

In an attempt to keep you coming back to our site...we're dedicating this blog solely to pictures, no stories. (not that we've run out of them though!)

Brandon got some new sunglasses. He now prefers to be called Jack Bauer.


Here are our fellow Korean classmates (not all of them though). Our laoshi (teacher) is in the middle in the navy shirt. The guy furthest on the left is the one we think looks like Jackie Chan.

decide for yourself......

mmm hmmmm. We thought you'd agree.

This is one of our friends that does calligraphy. This beautiful piece is now hanging in our apartment. This is is Gal. 2:20-21

This is The Little Man Restaurant. Or at least that's what we call it because we don't know the name in Chinese. It's the closest thing to chinese fast food.

Lo and Behold...the foreign food aisle at Fu Mart. PTL for imported Del Monte Garlic & Herb canned spaghetti sauce.

Two New Arrivals!

First and foremost...
Brandon and I have a new nephew! Audrey now has a little brother Judah to play with. My brother's beautiful wife had him on the twelfth...though technically speaking he arrived on the thirteenth here, so don't think that won't be brought up on every one of his birthdays from here on! We've seen several pictures and he is quite the cutie. At this point I would show you a really cute picture of him but since I've yet to ask his parents if that's ok I don't want to go floating their new baby's picture all over the internet. You know how it is. Stay tuned for further updates on this new and exciting addition!

Second blog worthy update...
We have cheese! Now this may not sound so exciting at first but I assure you, try going six weeks without said sandwich staple and you'd be jumping for joy when Fu Mart started carrying it too. Monterey Jack, Cheddar (mild, tasty, & light), and even American Land O' Lakes individually sliced cheese. Here's how it went down: We were sitting around our apartment saturday afternoon studying chinese (as usual) when we received the call. Our supervisor had just made a quick trip to the local grocery store that is so gracious to carry certain tasty American items. He called to inform us of this new arrival and we literally stopped everything, threw on some shoes, and were out the door in less than five minutes. You have not lived until you have rushed to the grocery store, pushed some chinese children out of the way, fought off the Fu Mart saturday crowd, all to be able to stand in awe at the wonderful sight of cheddar cheese. It was such a glorious occasion that we took the camera...and I think this picture is safe to post, though it's not quite as cute as Judah.

Hopefully the image is clickable, just in case you wanted to enlarge the cheese. You can see the good ole American flag label flying below the Land O Lakes. That's so they know we're all clear about how hard they worked to get that cheese on that shelf. Notice how much cheaper the chinese "cheese" is. (liberal use of the word cheese)

By the way, just joking about that chinese children tid bit. There was no pushing involved...at least no pushing children anyways.

Basketball Differences

Yesterday Phoenix, our friend who treated us to the Chou DouFu, took us to play basketball at some public basketball courts. This place was crazy. There were sixteen half-courts each of which were covered up by a bunch of sweaty chinese men attempting to play basketball. On top of that there were just as many on-lookers who were waiting their turn to play. When we showed up everyone was obviously staring at us because we're whities but also because I don't think they've ever seen a girl play sports in person. It was literally like the circus had come to town because we quickly drew a crowd when we began to play. Phoenix, Brandon, and I were on one team with two other guys. We played five guys, two of which had one too many Tsingtoa beers. (Phoenix told me to "be careful" seven times before we started this mad-house of a game.) So we start playing, and let me assure you, talking smack sounds the same no matter what language you are talking smack in. I was not sure what this one drunk dude was saying, but I knew it wasn't too nice and probably something his mommy wouldn't appreciate. So I shot a three in his face, swooshed it (well it would have made that sound had their been a net) and boy it was all downhill from there. He started calling fouls on us for everything in the world. Well, if you know Brandon and I at all you know that we're just a tad competitive. (I mean we've taken typing tests to see who can type the fastest if that tells you anything.) Luckily before our temper got the better of us, we both noticed something: none of the guys we were playing with were showing any sign of remote frustration whatsoever, and right as we noticed this Phoenix comes to us and says in a slight whisper, "Oh, I am so angry." But by the tone in his voice, the way he said it, and his demeanor when playing we never would have thought he was frustrated. That's when it began to make sense to us...
You see, playing a pick-up game of basketball on street courts in America causes riots and gets people beat up. Things aren't like that here in China. You've probably heard of the ultimate chinese expression: 'saving face.' This term didn't make much sense to me until we played basketball yesterday. These guys weren't getting frustrated, or at least weren't showing their frustration. By slamming down the basketball or throwing an on-court fit would only cause them to lose dignity and respect (amongst the basketball community I guess, I don't know). At least that's what we've chalked it up to anyways. The game was rough that day my friends, but at least we all came away having saved much face!

Of Jackie Chan & Ping Pong

We are official Chinese Language Students! As of today we've sat through four days of classes = 16 hours, 5 teachers, & 9 fellow Korean students.
Our first day of class we were scheduled to take Spoken Chinese and Beginner's Reading; 8 am to 12 pm. Knowing we'd have trouble with the reading course because, well, we don't know any chinese characters, we knew the speaking course would be beneficial so it sounded like an O.K. morning. So we get our classroom, which by the way is in the same building as the Korean student's dorm (interesting tidbit of information for later on in the story...), to discover we are enrolled in Beginner's Chinese with nine Korean students, all of whom speak some english and a lot of Chinese. Since they've been learning characters in their own language for all of their life they've pretty much mastered Chinese characters as well. So of course they along with all of our teachers are baffled that we can't read chinese characters. The first class might have been more beneficial had we not been on the wrong page for the majority of the class time. We just thought we were having trouble following along, only to discover when called upon to read the chinese characters that we were on the wrong page. The Korean's, though really nice and helpful, unfortunately are at the maturity level of a 14 year old so they just point and giggle and ask us if we know Tom Cruise (to which Brandon replied, "Do you know Jackie Chan?") The second class is being taught by a guy who doesn't speak any english, loves to talk about beer and has a tendency to ramble on about stuff we can't understand...but then again sometimes we can't really tell he's rambling because at this point it all sounds like mumbo jumbo. This class is the one that is by far the most pointless for us because it's all about reading characters. For the majority of the class he had the Koreans reading the same paragraph over and over. Then after they read through it 13 times or so he called on one of them to see if he knew it by memory, which of course he did. Then the teacher calls on Brandon to recite it from memory! (I guess it wasn't obvious to the guy that we didn't understand what was going on when we weren't reading it any of the 13 times) So then Brandon laughs and says, "Bu keyi." Meaning = No, I can't. And then in a desperate and pleading voice he looks at the teacher with puppy dog eyes and says, "Look, I just wanna know how to tell the taxi to turn left." And of course at this point all the Koreans just giggle and point.
It's not all that bad though. We do have three classes that will be really helpful and we just don't show up for the other ones because they'd be a waste of time. The Koreans think we're a bunch of slackers. However, we have managed to impress them with our food ordering skills and expertise in Ping Pong. We went out to eat lunch with all of them yesterday during which I mentioned that Brandon was a wrestling state champion. They now prefer to call him "Texas Champion" haha. Then afterwards we went back to their dorm/classroom building to have a little game of Ping Pong. I totally thought we were gonna get smoked, because everyone knows that Asians are killer ping pong players. Lo and behold...we Americans are moving up in the Ping Pong world. I now am the chosen favorite when we play doubles.
It's been an interesting week and we really have learned a lot in just four days. Yesterday I successfully had a 2 minute conversation with a five year old! woohoo!

Ni zhidao Zhongwen ma?

你知道中文马？

Another Food Story

Over the course of the next few months it may seem as though we tell tales often concerning food. As unentertaining as the subject may be, it seems to be at the center of our most adventuresome outings.
Though this food tale doesn't contain a hilarious story, the pictures may be what grabs your attention. While dining in a local restaurant the other day, we simply had no clue as to what we might should order. Thinking surely that this was a safe idea, we asked the waitress to just serve us whatever she likes. She told us of a tasty chicken dish and we said, "Sure that'll be fine." This, my friends, was no ordinary chicken dish. Served right on top of the big bowl of chicken parts and potatoes was the following item. If you were ever wondering what a boiled chicken foot might look like, well there you go. It's declawed of course. Needless to say, it somewhat ruined our appetite for anything else that this delicatessen might have in store. I'm not sure we'll ever return there. But before we left we saw the cutest person in all of China.

She brought her mom over to us, pointed at us, and in what she must have thought was a whisper said, "Mommy, look foreigners." (in Chinese of course) Then her mom knelt and did her best to explain what we were, meanwhile, Brandon snapped this picture.
Deciding we couldn't handle anymore local food for the day, we gave in to the magnetic pull of Magdonlao (McDonalds). We had our first foreign cooked french fries and hot fudge sundaes. Boy were they tasty.

And...for some odd reason our computer has stopped uploading pictures. (it's tempting to blame everything on govt propaganda, so that's what we'll go with here) So no pictures of our local McDonalds, sorry. But check out our link to the right to see the rest of our pictures.

A Tale of Cho DoFu

The adventure began two days ago, while strolling the "shopping street", we wandered into an Adidas store. I (April) started looking the shoes over and innocently wondered whether or not they might have my size. I asked this guy standing next to me if they had a U.S. 11. He said, "For him?" and pointed towards Brandon. I said, no, me. And he just laughed in my face. Anyways...moving past my humiliation, I urge Brandon to start up conversation with this guy because rarely do we find someone that speaks a little English. So Brandon introduced himself to this guy who turns out is named Phoenix. (English name of course). Brandon successfully communicates to him that we'd like to have dinner with him on Saturday. We exchange numbers, he tells us to call him on Saturday with a time and place and we'll meet up with him and his girlfriend.
Moving to Saturday (yesterday)... We're walking around this nice little shopping mall and decide that it's about time to call Phoenix. So Brandon calls...next thing we know Phoenix comes and meets us in this shopping mall at 3 in the afternoon and says he has a surprise for us. He persuades us to follow him out of the mall. So we follow him, being a little reluctant and curious as to what is going on. We get to the door and he says, we're going to get a snack. Confused a bit, we make sure that we're still on for dinner that night as well. Phoenix says, "Yes Yes dinner good. Come with me for snack." Then the next sentence out of his mouth is what stopped us in our tracks. "I'm taking you to eat Cho DoFu." Literally, we stopped following him. Let me explain...Cho DoFu translated word for word is "Stinky ToFu" translated loosely, "Smelly, molded, old ToFu."
So Phoenix comes over, wraps his arms around Brandon and begins to shove him out of the door of the mall and towards the sidewalk. Brandon then begins his best defense of why we can not go eat Cho DoFu explaining to him that he's already tried it in Taiwan, our stomachs are still not doing so good, we're terrified of what is in it...blah blah blah, etc etc etc... Phoenix just laughs and says, "oh it's my favorite and you will try." So knowing at this point there's not way around eating Cho DoFu if we want to share with this guy, we begin what feels like The Death March. We only walked about 100 meters but let me tell you, the journey to this little street shop felt like hours upon hours because of what was going through our heads. We're thinking, even if we can manage to force feed ourselves some of this "food", our bowels are still not in the appropriate condition to handle some more authentic Chinese food.
None the less, we get there, he orders three plates full of Cho DoFu (one for each of us of course) and places it in front of us. The stuff on top is cabbage.

So being a little scared to try an entire square, Brandon does his best job of cutting a piece in half using his chop sticks, while Phoenix is shoving down his plateful. Phoenix then says, "No No No, you must eat a whole piece." Then he reaches over, uses HIS chopsticks to grab a piece off Brandon's plate, picks it up (still using HIS chopsticks), and shoves an entire piece into Brandon's mouth. USING HIS CHOPSTICKS! I about fell out of my chair laughing. It was quite a scene to see Brandon being fed by another man. I compose myself, and then he attempts to do the same to me! Brandon looks at me with huge eyes knowing I'll freak out if he tries that charade on me, and starts mumbling (because he's got a mouthful of Cho DoFu), "Just lean back, lean back! LEAN BACK!" Anyhow, Phoenix stops his feeding frenzy, I choke down a small piece of the stuff and try to occupy Phoenix while Brandon spits out his DoFu wad into a napkin.
We then successfully persuade him that we've had quite enough so he proceeds to eat all three plates of the DoFu.
This is Phoenix and Brandon before the feeding frenzy.

This is the kind lady that cooked up the Cho DoFu concoction.

And this is Phoenix working on the second of three plates full of Cho DoFu.

We did have dinner last night at a place that we prefer and luckily did not have to eat any more DoFu with Phoenix!