Shui Jiao, Shui Jiao, Shui Jiao

errr...I dunno. I couldn't think of a better title.
Sorry we've been a bit slack in the posting department. After persistent nagging of friends & family we've decided to rejoin the blogging world.
As you might not be all that aware...let me remind you that learning Chinese has its moments of great difficulty. It also has its moments of ridiculousity (if you will). And if there were some area of our lives that needed complication, this area is certainly not one. However, it seems that it is inevitable. Let me introduce to you: Shui jiao. (shway jeow) This is an everyday word in Chinese, but on average not one regularly confused with much else in the world. That is...for normal people. It is our luck however that this word is regularly confused for different aspects of our life.
Shui jiao-
1. To sleep. (at night...not to be confused with at rest) eg: I like to sleep.
2. Dumpling (aka jiaozi) eg: I like to eat dumplings.
3. Wrestle (as in the sport) eg: I like to wrestle.

So...if you never sleep, never encounter dumplings, & never participate in any sports remotely close to wrestling, you'd be in the clear when trying to communicate with Chinese people. However, given our current location in one of the biggest dumpling producing cities in all of China, given Brandon's newly acquired nickname of Dumpling King (his new favorite dish), given the fact that we enjoy sleeping, & given Brandon's history with the sport of wrestling, you might understand where this word proposes a problem. So this past week at two of our Christmas parties (more to come on this subject in our next update) Brandon had a heck of a time communicating to our neighbors things that he enjoys. It's never dull seeing him act out "wrestling." I still think a few of them came away thinking he just really enjoys sleeping.
I'm sure this won't be the last time we deal with confusing language issues.

Hey!! Merry Christmas!

Things You Should Know...

For this post we thought we'd compile a list of things that our friends and family back home should be aware of...you know, after going four months without seeing someone, they tend to change a little. So here are some updates on our life here, how we've changed, or random stories we'd like to share. So here it is: The Things You Should Know (in no particular order)...

- Before coming to China we never EVER ate eggplant (at least not that we were aware of). Now, it is a common staple any time we eat out.
- We love our apartment. Considering what we have to work with, we've really grown attached to our little concrete abode. For example: we may never go back to the showering with walls concept. Trust us, if you've never showered in a wall-less shower where you get water on the entire bathroom floor, toilet, & washing machine (yes our washing machine is in our bathroom too) you should definitely try it. It's so freeing. And our little contraption that we hang clothes on so that they can dry is brilliant! No more shrinking sweaters in the dryer folks!
- We accidentally told our friend yesterday that last week our home town got 18 kilometers of snow. Centimeters and Kilometers, sheeeesh, crazy metric system!
- We've got five Dr. Peppers sitting behind several cans of asparagus in our kitchen. We're rationing them for really special occasions. We thought hiding them behind the canned vegetables might take our mind off of them...but we're both fully aware of their existence.
- We wish we would have had our camera with us last night. We went out to eat with a friend and she ordered mashed potatoes! We didn't even know we could order that here! Much to our surprise though the mashed potatoes came with a heavy cream on top tasting much to similar to vanilla icing and on top of that were pink, blue, & white "sprinkles." It looked like a cute little cake, but it didn't taste like a cake. It tasted just like mashed potatoes with vanilla icing & sprinkles.
- Our favorite restaurant back home would never be one where you eat boiled beef or boiled lettuce. I know, sounds weird. However, it's our favorite restaurant here. It's delicious! Find some thinly sliced beef, some boiling water, and a concoction resembling peanut butter, olive oil, & sesame seeds & you've got yourself the best Hot Pot Restaurant ever!
- We've not driven a car (or well, anything for that matter) in 4 months. May not sound that long, but when you go from doing it every day to nothing at all, it's a little strange. So yesterday when Brandon heard our taxi driver say, "Would you like to drive my car?" (only in chinese), Brandon said, "YES!" But alas...when the taxi driver got a strange look on his face, we realized we'd misunderstood him saying, "Have you ever driven a car before?" Surely it wasn't because Brandon misunderstood him. We think it's just because he's going through car-driving withdrawals & is hearing things. bummer
- Fu Mart started playing Christmas songs a couple weeks ago. We've even heard the little kid version of Silent Night played a few times! But our favorite song we've heard in there goes a little something like this: "Mamasita, donde esta Santa Claus?" Really flew us for a loop when we heard another different language!
- As long as we're on the subject of Spanish, it seems it's trying to creep it's way back into our lives. Yesterday our taxi driver had stickers all over the dash with phrases in Spanish. We asked if he understood them but he didn't...so we did some translating. It probably wasn't all the way right, but what does he know! Anyhow, we had tutoring the other day and one of our words was "juan" (roll, as in a roll of toilet paper). So she asks us to read through our vocab words and we come to this one and both say, "Juan" (huan) as in Juan, Jose, Jorge, you get the idea. But in chinese it's pronounced jhuan. So she thought we were a little retarded for a second there but after giving her a little spanish lesson it was all cleared up. And then as we were leaving class she asked us how to say bye in Xi Ban Ya (spanish) and we seriously could come up with nothing. All of our spanish had disappeared at that moment and the only thing that came out was still Chinese.


ok sorry that was a little long for a post...but oh well. if you read it all..."Muy Bueno!"

O Christmas Tree

I, Brandon, am going to capture your imaginations by updating our blog all by myself. This may be the first time that I have ever "blogged." From time to time I have some original thought and I let April know of those original thoughts and she decides if other people need to be informed. This is because my thoughts need to be closely monitered. This time I am solely going around her to let you know what an amazing job she has done preparing our house for Christmas time. Just the thought of going out to a foreign environment and trying to find decorations in a totally different language is not an easy task. I'm just so greatful for a beautiful wife who helps the holiday's away from home have some kind of familiarity. Anyways, I just wanted to let everyone know how good of a job she has done, and just show off her decorating skills.

Here is our Christmast tree. April wanted to go with the silver and blue theme!

April found those red and green ball decorations at a local whole sell market, and April's mom sent us the stockings and Frostie.

And here is a wreath April found, I'm not sure how. She also bought the ribbon and made it look fancy. April also put a big bow on our door and is thinking about making some for our neighbors.

We hope you all are having fun decorating for Christmas. We both want you to keep in mind why it is we celebrate Christmas. Have a good one,

Brandon

A Post to Tide You Over

Taking a clue from the Rivers-s, we thought it about time to post a "Tide you Over" post. You'd think living in China would bring about daily post-worthy stories...maybe it's because we've been here almost four months and we're getting used to day to day chinese idiosyncrasies, or maybe it's just because it doesn't seem like a whole lot has happened in the past week...but we apologize for being slackers in the blogspot world.

So here it is: Our first entry of "Tiding you over" posts.

We got our first package of Christmas presents this week, and well, Brandon couldn't wait till Christmas day to rip into his. And boy was he glad because our apartment has been FREEZING lately!! Thanks D&E!

Is he excited? I think so! I just thought the picture was too good not to post.

I'm not sure if this was technically a "Tide you over" post since it does in fact still pertain to our goings on here. For excellence in "tiding-over" click here.

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.