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.