Cheese!!!

I have to say, the most recent highlight of life in Beilun has be to be that the supermarket started offering chedder cheese again! WAHOO!!! Normally we have to go into Ningbo for cheese.

School:
- Okay, so this was on the way to school ... on a little stone path, a little Chinese toddler spotted me, and ran to hide behind her mother. She peered back around her mom's legs, pointed at my head and yelled, "tou fa!" and proceeded to stare at me. It just means, "hair". Problem was, the toddler just couldn't get over it, and I was trapped on that little path because I couldn't get around them. Awkward turtle.
- When reading books, my elves like to pretend to grab an food item off the page and eat it. If it's a lollipop they'll pretend to lick it. If it's a cookie, they're pretend to take a massive bite out of it. Today, one of my elves was also offering me a pretend grape. I pretended to pop it in my mouth, before I remembered that Chinese grapes are different. You have to peel them first. The elf looked at me like I was super weird before pretending to peel his own grape and then popping it into his mouth.
- Yesterday upon arriving at school, one of my elves proudly presented me with his 'new toy', a lighter. The kind for cigarettes. At first I thought it was some sick joke for liquid candy. But when I read the label, it said in no uncertain terms, "KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN". His mom assured me that he had broken it so now it was his toy. Awesome. And no. No it will not be his toy.
- As part of Fine Arts Day, my elves got to tie dye Tshirts. Dana was teaching my elves how to bind their shirts with rubber bands. First she wanted them to cross the rubber bands and make an X. She wasn't sure they knew all their English letters yet, but in China, everyone uses sign language for numbers, especially for bargaining. Making an X by crossing your two index fingers in the number for 10, or "shi". So Dana told the elves to make a 10 with their rubber bands and showed them by crossing her two index fingers in the shape of an X. Well, I do have a smart alec, and he replied to Dana, "No, a 10 is a one and a zero, not an X."
- I was surprised yesterday when one of my elves came in to tell me, "I coffee." It's very common for them to leaving out the verb. But still, I was thinking in my head, I sure hope not!! A 3 year old on a caffiene high? This is not going to be a good day. This elf actually carried the nickname "terrorista" before I got here. But after she had a coughing fit, I realized she didn't have the diction to distinguish coffee and coughing.


Ocean World:
I took 6 of my 3-year-olds to Ocean World. It was awesome. We did a practice run the day before so luckily everything went smoothly. On the bus they were fantastic (45 minute ride), we watched 3 different shows, and walked through the aquarium.

One unforeseen difficulty was definitely the escalator. It's cool because they built the escalator into a tunnel aquarium, so you're surrounded by huge fish the whole way. But I didn't realize my elves had (I guess) never been on an escalator before. The whole day I was just trying to keep up with them, but all 6 stopped at the edge of the escalator and all refused to take one more step. I walked on it for awhile to show them, but in the end, I rode the escalator all the way down, and Alice put them on one by one, and I took them off at the bottom one by one. Of all the things I thought of that day (bathroom breaks, snack, what to do if there's tantrum, having a meeting place in case one gets lost), the escalator was not a problem that I had planned for.

Disclaimer on the pictures:
- I took Dana's camera since mine is broken, and I couldn't figure out the focus, so sorry if they're blurry. At least you get an idea.
- I'm only posting the ones where you can't see their faces, RFKC style.

 

Baby Baluga in the deep blue see!
When my elves see this picture, they start 'singing' like the whales in very high pitched squeaks.

The escalator :D

Penguins :)

This turtle was climbing up and trying to get out. I was seriously concerned it was going to reach it's neck out and bite.

Big Booms and Sirens

Home:
First, I think I have finally out-smarted my ayi! She washes my sweatpants EVERY TIME and not having a drier means that 4 out of 7 days of the week, I have no sweatpants. I've tried hiding them from her, but she always finds them. I've tried putting them in my closet, folded so precariously that they HAVE to be clean. But no, she washes them anyway. So this morning, I have a new strategy. I'm leaving them on the drying rack in that hopes that she will find them right where she left them, just out of the washer. OOOooooOOO. Maybe, we'll see!!!

Back to the big booms and sirens.
I've said it many times, but it's just so true: If China were to ever go to war, no one would ever know it. The constant fireworks and echoing booms go unnoticed by all. And I gotta admit, sometimes I have to focus on the sound to realize what I'm hearing. But last weekend, in the middle of our International Game Day, a loud wailing siren went off, and just didn't stop; the type of siren that suggests you should be ducking for cover for an earthquake or a tsunami. Once again NO REACTION from anyone in the crowd. After a good 15 seconds, I figured if it was an earthquake, it probably would've happened by then, and just let it go. But if there is ever a real emergency here, I think it would take a lot of convincing the public for there to be any safety measures taken. Oh and that siren was actually to commemorate a past earthquake in China. But it was no different than the normal earthquake siren. I guess you have to be sure of your history around here.

Last weekend we also had a big craw fish cook out at Cup of Joe's. There was a huge turn out, and some guy with a white cowboy hat cooking up all the fixins. There were several guitars, a fire, and a good time had by all. My favorite part was when the Li Ren guards did their nightly march by. It's the most pointless display I've ever seen. They get together about 12 of our community guards-who-do-nothing-but-smile-and-wave, and make them march the whole perimeter of Li Ren at 7 am and 7 pm. When they past our hearty group, several of the older European gentlemen started to sing "Hi ho! Hi ho! It's off to work we go!" We all started giggling :) Even the guards!


School:
I was really proud of one elf who put together almost a whole sentence as she encouraged our class fish to eat a piece of food that was eluding him. We just need to work on word order:
"I want eat fish!!! I want eat fish!!!"

One elf wanted me to help him make a spider in the Art Center. This is code for helping him to trace and cut out his hand print. I'm not sure why they've decided to call that little project a spider, but when they ask for a spider, I know exactly what they want. One of my new elves, (who has very limited English but I've taught her a few animals names) flipped out when she heard the word "spider". Her eyes got really big and welled up and she was about to run and hug me. The best part is, she can't pronounce the /s/ sound yet, and I guess /d/ must be a little difficult too, because with her horrified look she yelled, "piter???!!!" and frantically looked around, her eyes asking "Where?!?!"

Butterfly is actually another animal name that my new Korean elves have mastered. The butterflies they see are actually white winged moths, but I'm not one to judge. It used to be a death sentence whenever I could hear "Butterfly!!!!" yelled on the playground, because there were about 20 Early Years students in hot pursuit. The kindergarten however just planted a garden outside my window, and they've been looking for the suspected insect that has been nibbling on their plants. This week, one of the kindergartners watched as a giant moth landed right on his plant and took a big bite. Since then, the whole Early Years department has been very disenchanted with the so called good-for-nothing 'butterflies'.

2 year olds, and a lot of times 3 year olds, really enjoy the word 'no'. That drives me bonkers. Especially to little elves whose often only way of communicating is through showing emotion. Their English just isn't good enough to explain why they're upset. So I've been working on the phrase, "no thank you". They know that when they hear, "no thank you", they have to stop and think about what they might be doing that could be causing a problem. I usually gravitate towards the "no thank yous" to make sure the problem is solved without physical-ness. I realized the elves may be misinterpreting this phrase when they started to say to the tape dispenser, "no thank you" with gusto, each time the tape stuck to itself.


Mandarin Class
This week, I had Mandarin class with just Shelley. I practiced reading to her, answering written questions, and quizzed her on some soccer vocab. I'm typically the idiot still driving down the field while everyone else is screaming "hand ball!" or "penalty" in Mandarin and I just have no idea.

Tuesdays with June was also fun. One of the other students asked about this restaurant down the street. There's always a cage outside with a chicken, or pheasant or quail ...and sometimes to our horror, a dog. The student wanted to know if that was a way of advertising tonight's special since those animals are usually gone by the next day. One of the other students had dawning comprehension on his face as he sighed, "Ohhhh, so that explains the goat!!!" ...........

Cup o' Joe

Erich has been training new summer staff members at his cafe "Cup o' Joe". It's been interesting to see the difference in service depending on the customer.

Foreigners vs. Locals

+ Foreigners like plates to be cleared when you finish them to create space for other dishes
- Locals believe that clearing plates while the people are still seated is a sign the you want them to leave, considered very rude.
+ When foreigners order to go, they want to be informed when the order is ready they can take it and go!
- When locals order to go, the order is set on a table for them to pick it up at their leisure. If you inform locals that their order is ready to go, they consider it very rude and a sign that you want them to leave the restaurant (of course I don't see a problem with that, if you order to go usually you want to leave anyways!)
+ Foreigners stand in front of the register when they want to order. Sometimes the Chinese staff doesn't recognize this gesture as wanting service.
- Locals yell their order out until someone takes it down.
+ Foreigners *typically* know it's rude to be on your phone while ordering, and especially rude to be on your phone when taking someone's order.
- Phones for locals take priority. If the phone is ringing they drop everything and answer it. They are sometimes offended when we let our phones ring and instead finish what we're doing before we check to see what we missed.

Still ... we have a lot of fun at Cup 'o Joe. So many barbeque's, potlucks, pig roasts, and just general gatherings, often with a guitar by the camp fire :)

Have You Eaten Well Today?

That's Mandarin for, "How are you?" Okay, technically 'how are you' literally translates to 'ni hao ma?', but that's basically the equivalent of saying, "What's up?" The only socially acceptable response to that is, "I'm good, and you?" When you're talking to a familiar person here and you actually want to know how they're doing, the code for that is asking 'ni jin tian hao chi le ma?' or "Have you eaten well today?" It's a way of checking on someone's health. Of course, the Chinese are very reserved and modest anyways, so they would never let you know if they're swamped, sick, tired, stressed. They'd also never let you know if they're stoked, excited, elated ... deng deng (etc). The only socially acceptable answer is still "I'm good, and you?" ... but it shows a little bit more care, espeically since not long ago, food was very scarce here and many people went hungry. Anyways, that's your cultural lesson for today.

The Weather (tian qi):
has been hot and muggy, sometimes up to 90°. So when it poured cats and dogs today - the type of rain where it's flooding in 10 minutes - I didn't really want to bundle in hoods and rain jackets. I'm faced with the unnatural predicament of buying an umbrella, something that usually makes my peers laugh at me. I looked on our version of amazon (tao bao) and found these KIDtastic umbrellas. This one is still a favorite of mine, what do you think?

Along the same water/weather lines ... trust China to take something that was never broke, and break it. Our hot water got shut off due to emergent issues. Ever since they turned it back on, I've had cool water showers, cool water in the not cool sense. It was okay Sunday after 3 hours of soccer in our wonderful 90° heat, but today it was less amusing.

The last couple of weeks have been busy. Unfortunately you may not see many pictures from here on out since my camera broke :( but Alice always sends me pictures from our Thursday night dinners. So here's two Thursday adventures:

Mom, this is the soup with chicken feet that I had to pick around.

The closest dish on the right has 'mu er'. It's a black mushroom/cabbage that Alice
always insists I eat.

And don't forget about dessert! Yummy yummy pineapple!

I also went for a hike with Chen, the part owner of Cup o Joe. We hiked up the mountain where the Beilun Botanical garden is located. Super pretty, and super good work out!

Water break!

Flipping my hair :) Sorry, this is the best pictures of where we started way down there in that valley.
We're about halfway up I would say at this point.

The trail

Hidden treasures along the way.

Feeling Loved

Well, first off, I forgot over our recent Labor Day - holiday - 4 day weekend that my ayi/hostmom would still be coming on Monday. She LOVES looking after me. She tried to throw out my shoes because she says the soles are broken. If you know me, I wear my shoes till they literally are falling apart, or until Momma gets a hold of them. She also force fed me strawberries (the horror!), which weren't terrible, but I can still report that I don't like eating strawberries. When I came back after grocery shopping, she had left me a traditional spongey breakfast bread in the kitchen, and she drew a heart with strawberry juice :)

It was also coincidently my birthday week, a secret which I failed to keep under wraps. My parents found out, and luckily they waited till after school to decend upon me with Chinese cake and big purple flowers. Very fragrant. My TA Alice also remembered and brought me some carnations. Very sweet :) And I got to open my parents present over skype. They made me a Family book that I can share with the people I meet along my travels. Just a little part of home to bring with me :) And Grandma and Grandpa Squire, if you're reading this, I'm still hoping to open your presents over skype with you. I have my undercover agent Andrew working on that! :)