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:

Amazing Race

First story:
Due to a wonderful mother-in-law we've recently acquired the first 4 episodes of this season's Amazing Race. Woohoo!! Well, we watched them all the other day and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. If you are up in this season's AR you know that the first episode took place in Beijing. It was so exciting for us to think about a bunch of American's rushing around Beijing, eating fish eyes, and raiding Tiananmen Square. You also should know about some of the competitors, (or should we say "characters") on this season. There are the token frat boys, the cheerleaders, & the couple "struggling" to stay together, but this season there are a couple in there who we think highly entertaining. There are two black girls who speak ebonically perfect and a married couple who...let's just say they must come from the deep south of Kentucky. Up until today they were our votes for "who should be eliminated next." (I'll explain in a moment)
Second story:
Tonight one of our best chinese friends came over for a visit. He's an english teacher so we usually speak english to him. Tonight though we thought we'd practice some of our chinese on him so he could help us with pronunciation. (This being the same guy whose in-laws can't understand him because they speak a different dialect. Let me also interject...those in-laws only live about 2 hours away.) After we discovered that we didn't stand a chance of understanding him, we transitioned into us helping him with his english pronunciation. After getting bored with going through the entire alphabet, practicing saying America instead of Americ, we got a new idea.
Merge two stories:
Why not introduce him to ebonics, hicks, & airheads all in one simple episode of Amazing Race?!We popped in the newly acquired AR DVD and fast forwarded to the parts featuring the couple from Kentucky saying "I ain't never been to China", the cheerleaders saying "like", the frat boys saying "dude!", and the black girls saying "oh, nuh uh, she not gonna do dat." Before you jump all over us for being stereotypical, examine the beauty of educating some of China's finest on the multi-faceted language that English is. ALL IN ONE EPISODE!! He thought it was hilarious that only the hicks had English subtitles explaining to other English speakers what they were saying. Of course he couldn't follow along quite as quickly as most of the people were talking, and couldn't read the English subtitles as quickly as they were flashing up there for the hicks, but he sure enjoyed watching all of them use two hands (one hand per chopstick) to eat the fish eyes. And even more so when all of them butchered the pronunciation of Xie Xie (thank you.) So thanks mother-in-law for not only being a our provider in time of AR need, but for providing some educational resources as well.
This is him trying to make sense of it all:

a BIG thanks to my mom & dad for providing the BIG HUNKS laying on the coffee table.

Sports Day

This last friday our university took a break from classes and had a big sports festival! We were obviously thrilled to have a break from classes but had no idea what a sports festival might look like. So, thursday afternoon we headed out to the university's track field to take a gander. We entered through the main gate (still quite a ways from the field) but already could hear the madness going on at the track field. As we walked closer and closer to the "stadium" the ruckus grew louder and louder. We heard a bunch of shouting in unison to large base drums with elaborately dressed drum beaters. The track field is an 8 lane track with a large stadium seating apparatus on one side and an iron fence on the other. We approached from the iron fence side thinking we'd avoid most of the crowd. That was definitely not the case however. It was crowded all around. And this is what we saw:

The view of the track is still a little blocked. But what was going on was basically like a school wide track meet with students & teachers competing. While we were there we saw about 7 heats of the 400m. It might have been a little more entertaining had we gone and sat in the student's section:

I know, you're wishing you had a matching outfit too. The picture may be too small, but if you look closely you can see the big red drums on the bottom row. We've uploaded a lot more pictures of Sports Day at our picture website over there ------>

This is about three o' clock in the afternoon on sports day...and that's the sun (a common day to day sight in our city). Say it with me now, "mmmm pollution filled lungs."

This next one is also a common site. Sadly, it's customary here for the grandparents to play a bigger parental part in children's lives than the actual parents. The grandmother's do most of the raising of the kids. They came out to watch some of the events at sports day as well.

We just thought this one looked kinda cool. They're not quite as excited about sports day as everyone else.
And this is part of the crowd headed to the stadium to watch.