Beijing !!!

Hey everyone we are now in Beijing! It is so different from our little rural farm town. Everything is very clean and westernized. Its like new york or something right in china! We took the overnight train here and upon arrival ate beijing dumplings and Peking Duck. Let me tell you Peking duck is to die for! We are staying at a hostel which is really great. I have noticed that the hostels in china or at least beijing are really clean and better then my dorm was in college! I mean they have an internet cafe and a coffee bar. Coffee in china!! we dont have that in Rongjia wan.
Last night we went to a couple bars, which made us get a little culture shocked. We havent been around so many foreigners in 5 months. It was kinda hard to stop staring at everyone. The drinks were good and the music reminded me of home. I swear Beijing is not in china it must a different planet its sooo nice.
Today we visted the Temple of Heaven. Its amazing!! You walk through a chinese park where people are singing old songs and dancing. Then you make your way through 3 huge doors . Inside there is a huge temple amaing toward the sky. The emporer used to come here to wish for good harvests. Its increadiable. Also the staircase to heaven is breathtaking.
We then went to Tianamen Square where we walked passed many kite fliers and guardsmen,. You get could your eyes and imagine what took place here years ago. Its enormous.
Then we went to the Forbidden City where we went from palace house to throne rooms. It is huge, I could take 10 days there with all the have! Everything is great , but theres still that feeling of restoration. Many of these things have been broken down or destryed and just restored, gives you a little sick feeling to think how beautiful it must have been and really still could be, but they destroyed it instead.
Tommorow its off to the great wall. More then.

Travel and Last few weeks:

I just wanted to finish up the review of these last few weeks before we set off for our month journey around china and southeast asia. Sorry the last blog was so long, but just think of it as the last few months all put into one. While you wait for the travel blog you can read all of this last one. We will be traveling from January 26-February 26. So we will have a month of blogging to do when we get home Here are the destinations

Beijing ( Forbidden City, Great Wall, Summer Palace, Tianamen Square)

Xian ( terracotta warriors, Hot springs)

Tibet ( lhasa, yamdrsko lake, all monasteries, Mount Everest BaseCamp

Cambodia ( Dirt bike tour through country stopping in temples and historic sites for sight seeing)

Hopefully we will make it to all these places. Travel planning has been difficult because in China you don’t plan anything until last minute. So as a foreigner it’s very frustrating. We will see where we end up. I know you will be awaiting the next blog.

Now for the last few weeks update

First I want to introduce you to my new girl posse. I now have a set of twins and several of their friends that like to find me after school and take me around town. If I step outside the school gate these girls find me and run to me ending in a huge embrace. Then they all take a piece of my arm, like a mother and her ducklings and we walk down the street until their street comes where we part ways by blowing kisses. Its really cute, these girls know only a lick of English , but they just enjoy being seen with me, kinda like little groupies. First I thought it was interesting to see twins in china, but we actually have two sets in our small town that we’ve seen. Both girls. It always brightens my day especially since these girls English names are lily and lulu. Don’t mix them up or you’ll get a mad little girl saying no I’m lily she’s lulu. In a tough voice.

We also recently had the senior 3 teachers over for dinner. Joe taught them to play craps. We used a huge piece of paper and drew the board and then used monopoly money, probably the most ghetto craps game ever, but I never saw these guys more excited. They were screaming and hollering when the dice was being rolled just like Vegas!

KTV: we felt really bad about the students that didn’t make it into being the host for the performance so we took the top 15 kids from the competition to the local Karaoke joint. Just to let you know karaoke is the biggest thing since sliced bread and let me tell you Chinese people can sing!! All of them. Maybe it’s a stereotype I’m starting but no really these people can sing!! The students spent three hours in this rented room. You can rent it by the hour or by the package. They spent there Sunday Afternoon (there only free time all week) belting the latest Chinese pop tunes and even played some English ones for Joe and I . We sang some britney spears but really did awful in the end I started to feel sorry for these kids for having to listen to us. We also got a cake and really just enjoyed letting the kids break out of their school shells.

Zhang Guing:

Recently we visited the 500 year old village in our province. It’s called Zhong Guing and it is said that all the Zhang’s from the whole world were started in this small town. It’s very interesting because this town is completely intact. Nothing has changed and the whole town is made up of buildings that all share a common roof. Almost like the skyways in Minneapolis, you never have to go outside. They even have parts of the city where there are small holes in the roof for collecting rainwater. The scary thing is as you walk around this place people still live here. We walked right into someone’s house accidentally like 5 times. Because everything is really shared commonly. They had a shrine to the ancestor Zhang his tomb there as well. The also had old rice tools there that you could try out and play with. There was even an old irrigation system they used kinda like peddling a bike. ( pictures are on the picture site) We even found the place where all the virgins in the town were kept until their marriage. They were made to do embroidery all day long. Interesting life. We also hiked into the mountains and decided that this was defiantly a trip worth taking again. I think we will come back and hike and maybe even bring a Chinese student so that they can translate some of the many things for us.

The Fish!!! If you’ve looked on the picture website you’ve probably already been sick, if not, I’ll warn you right now the pictures are not for viewing before or after eating. We were given 140lbs of fish from our school just last week! If you remember we were given a whole pig last fall. This gift is for the spring festival and every teacher in our school got 70 lbs of fish. Since there’s two of us they gave us 140!! Great! What are we supposed to do with our weight in fish? Especially right before our vacation?? Well the first 70lbs we gave away to our friend Leo. He’s a man that works for a construction company and part of the government. We met him a while ago and he likes to take us out for tea a lot so we thought this would be a good way to repay all his kindness. He was so happy! He’s actually smoking his along with some bacon, he promised us smoked bacon in return!! Sounds like a good deal to me.

After that what do we do with the other 70 lbs?? Well we decided to do what we do with all our Chinese problems…. Go ask The barber. This man really must think we are nut job kids that don’t know how to do anything. We are always asking him for help, but we love him so much he’s practically part of our family. We even let him do his laundry at our house now because the water is so cold that he was washing all his towels by hand. You should have seen his hands. So we told him to do it in our machine. He was so grateful. But really we love this man, he comes up look at us with our bag of fish( I must tell you that he has also gotten his own fish and has spent the day gutting and cutting and de scaling so he’s already too tired from kneeling outside), but he comes and helps us anyways. He tells us (in charade language) that it’s too dark outside so we must do it inside. He takes the bags of fish to my bathroom!! Yep that’s what I said bathroom! He shows us how to cut them, de scale them (which as you can see from the pictures he just threw the down the toilet.) and what parts to keep. We ended up keeping the head ( I guess we can make a soup) the intestines and maybe the heart I’m not sure. We had to clean the intestines out with our thumbnails however. I never knew fish intestines were so long. What kind of dish you make I have no idea. We then placed the fish into a huge tub and salted them, let them sit in this.. Open, trust me it smelled awful, for 3 days. Then we hung them out in the sun for three days, one day we missed because we went into town, trust me did we get a talking to from the barber!! . Dried fish, mmmm anybody know any good recipes?? I guess this fish will stay for a long time and actually it makes a lot of sense I mean people don’t have freezers here, and during spring festival everyone’s family comes to visit so you must have a lot of food ready.

Snow Day

It actually snowed in our town this past week. For only one day flakes came down and then melted right away. To our students though it was like candy. All the students ran around throwing snowballs and even hiding them in the classroom. On our way from our apartment to our classrooms was a battlefield. You had to cover your head with a book because foreign teachers were automatic targets. I finally got smart and brought some of my own snowballs. I even found a kid with a huge one and I just used it to go from my classrooms to my office. I would hold it out and all the kids would put down there balls. Its only cause my snowball was as big as their heads!! The student that made the enormous ball took it and carved a heart into it and gave it to me at the end of the day. I now have it in my freezer. I also had a boy that continued to put ice down girls and boys backs during my class. Finally I told him to come here and I searched him, I checked all his pockets for snow, but there was none, then a student near him said in a whisper.. Teacher Emily, and pointed to where the kid had thrown it on the ground. So I scooped it up before the student noticed and hid it. He couldn’t figure out where it went and as he bent down to search for it, I put it down his shirt!!! The whole class roared and cheered. How was I supposed to teach that day with the students acting all snow crazy anyway? We had more of a fun day then anything else.

Where do I begin to tell you about the last 2 months. Hmmm well for starters Joe and I have been doing great, we were healthy with no colds until this week, we have received many packages in the mail, Oh thank you thank you thank you!! And we did a little traveling. Read on to discover more.

Award

First lets start off with the award winner. That’s right yours truly received the teacher award for the city and county I live in. It was pretty interesting actually. It all started with as stated in previous entries just a recap I was hustled and bussled to a photo booth to have a picture taken for the application. When I asked why I needed an application for an award I already received our friends said, “well everyone will apply, you will just win” We then didn’t here about it for a long time and thought maybe they forgot about it. Until one Tuesday, it had to come that Tuesday, why?? Why not any other week. In the middle of the hardest week for us the award ceremony would be on Thursday. Great!! SO I had to make a mad dash to a store to find a suitable outfit, where I some how found this Chinese sweater that some how fit. And got into our schools car to be driven to the dinner. I thought at first there would be ohh maybe 20 people there., but then as in china fashion there were many things not told to us. We arrived early into this huge banquet hall dressed up like it was for a wedding. I looked down on the table to see a itinerary, when have you ever seen that in china??? It said award ceremony and speech given by the awarded. Oh crap!!! I thought, I have nothing, what am I going to say??

On the banner that hung in the front on a stage said. “friendship award ceremony and foreigner expert holiday dinner” Oh great so I now find out that all the foreigners all over the city and 7 counties will be attending. What am I to do, ….no speech.. Millions of people, I was shaking inside. Plus my boss would be watching it all. What’s worse then falling on your face then having your boss watch you do it!

As more and more people came in, it was fine though, I started to get less nervous and just try to memorize a speech in my head. Something about being thankful (even though it was fake!) and talking about how proud I am of Chinese students, ( yeah they always like when you say you are proud of china) These are my thoughts as I am shaking hands with the foreigners and there Chinese friends. Which leads me to my first point of action in writing this. People that choose to live in another country are crazy. Ok you have column one and column two. In column one you have people like Joe and I and all those other truly great hearted people, out to make the world a better place. Then there’s column two : how should I put this… the true crazies!! They leave or maybe are banished from there home country because they don’t know social norms or how to stop burping or something. I don’t know where china gets these people from , but I found them all in that room that night.

One guy from column two came up to me starring and shook my hand. I told him my name and he just continued to stare, I must say the stare wasn’t like a “I’m giving you the _you look good eye” This was like “I am looking into your soul through your eyes so next week I can be a serial killer and you’re my first victim eyes” He was scary and I asked for his name, He said voldkev or something like that in a rich Russian type accent. I said oh are you Russian, he said no, guess another place near Russia. In a scary Russian type accent again, but this time even scarier. Thank goodness the music started and I had to take my seat, he was giving me the willies.

Which brings me to point 2 I had to sit at the head table. Around the table sat china’s best from around our area. There also were other foreigners, but they all spoke Russian so I still had no help there. Joe sat with our liaison and assistant and a few other foreign friends of ours.. The whole time I was waiting for the speech time to come up. I couldn’t eat anything. Although looking back on it , they had some of the best looking food I have seen in china.

Well fast forward a few musical instrument performances and you have the awarding ceremony. We all get up on stage and are given this giant crystal looking thing. There are actually 4 people receiving it. The first ,man got it for his engineering a building or something, he’s from Korea, then there was a Russian lady who looked at me like she had swords in her eyes. I think she asked me about 5 times how old I was. She got the award because she was a university teacher of music. And then there’s me. Wow, what did I do?? I am the only middle school teacher in the group. I defiantly feel a little out of place but I decide to use all the fanciest lingo I can remember, use my table manners like crazy and wow these people. So The Russian lady asks me why I am here and who I work for. So I throw my Harvard card out there and tell her I work for an organization based out of Harvard. Its no lie, but its not like I went to school there or anything. but when people hear the H word you defiantly gets more respect. At least by the end of the night she wasn’t staring me down anymore. Man those Russian eyes could be lethal!

SO back to the speech business…. Ok so just as I think I have to get up, the host says,

“Anna so and so “ will give the speech on behalf of all the award winners. Thank God!!!! Oh I was so relieved. Of course, I thought, they have to have it previously so that the translator knows what they are going to say!! Right?? Wrong! This is china anything goes! Remember our disability speech, 5 minutes till and we go up on stage. So I have to say this was the most organized thing I had been to in China. I am so glad they asked that Anna chick, she’s the Russian with sword eyes, She gave a great speech or at least I think. She said something about how Russian influence is almost out of china or something crazy like that.. I started to zone out with happiness not having to be up there my self!!

Moral of the story: watch out for Russian eyes? Nope, but good guess. It’s thanking goodness for granny June teaching me manners. Even though I didn’t really fit in I just played the part and somehow it all worked out., oh yeah and thank god I didn’t have to give a speech , mine was really bad compared to what she said!

Joe said he tried talking to some foreigners there too and it was like they were all supposed to be speaking English, but it ended up sounding funny and he couldn’t understand them. Only in china!

Christmas at Yi Zhong this is a phot of the poster i made, all of our chinese friends think its hilarious!

Christmas was interesting to say the least. In china it’s weird how everyone had Santa Claus pictures up on their storefronts 365 days a year but no one really understands what they mean. Some know its for Christmas , but they don’t know why we have this old fat guy with a beard hanging around. At our school we tried to teach the students about Christmas and during the week before Christmas we tried to get the students to decorate their classrooms and have small parties. The Senior 2 class we teach loved this idea. I went to the shop outside the school and bought about 5 huge pieces of green paper. Then cut Christmas trees out of them. The real, live trees were too expensive, plus what are they going to do when Christmas was over. We had the students make origami ornaments in the shapes of hearts, cranes and bows (Mom Anderson’s Idea, Thanks mom!) This worked out so well that we also had our English corner students decorate the English corner room. We had two trees and more origami ornaments then you can shake a stick at. Actually I made the funny mistake of telling the students I like paper cranes. I said oh yeah I think im going to take them home and hang them on my tree in America and then I will remember china forever!! whoooops big mistake. The students in the weeks after Christmas spent who knows how long folding paper birds for me. I am now the proud owner of 999 paper cranes, (999 is the luckiest number BTW) Its so cute when you think about how much time it must have taken. If any one would like some cranes, let me know, I think I can spare a few.. uhhh hundred.

Christmas drama!

Well we did not find out this tidbit of information until after Christmas, but I guess there were many essays written in Beijing about not celebrating foreign holidays. Something about keeping china , Chinese and only celebrating Chinese holidays. Anyways….. Our school actually made an announcement one day that the students were not allowed to celebrate Christmas. That they should focus on there studies and not give gifts. Who bans Christmas????? China does!! Crazy I know. When we found out we were pretty upset. Although many students snuck gifts to each other under the radar, and we held our English corner Christmas party anyway. Hell they don’t know what happens in English corner! Its all in English Our students also decorated the English corner room for us. They painted on the windows and hung streamers everywhere. It was a sight to see. Only bad part is the English corner room faces the cafeteria so everyone could see the big fat letters painted on the windows that read Merry Christmas! , A week later the school said it must come down, we pulled the , “well we didn’t know Chinese , so we didn’t know about the announcement” card. The whole banning of Christmas really gave us a pull on our heart strings. Not only do we want to be home for the holidays but now the place we live bans it.

Christmas pageant

Oh wait actually it got changed to the new years pageant because we cant celebrate Christmas.

For weeks now the students have been preparing for this performance. Each class has about 2 skits, songs or dances. We spent weeks and weeks helping the students to translate and choose their songs. The performance had to be in English so all the students came to us for help. Probably just like finals week in college. It was the most stressful couple of weeks of our lives.

We were also the lucky ones that got to be judges. We were given the task of narrowing the 45 participants to 20. Along with the other teachers we had to give grades to each performance and at the end give our scorecard to be added to the others scores. It was actually a total waste of two days because all the teachers already had their favorites and because of special relationships the teachers have with students parents certain students automatically got in. Sometimes that great Chinese relationship situation can really work in your favor, but when you’re a poor teenager you don’t really have anything going for you. So we got to see most of the performances 6 times by the time the actual performance day came. Oh and lets not forget Joe and I performed a Chinese love song,. We had practiced a couple times. The girl part being way too high for me to do and for Joe the guys part included a Rap that went too fast for us to catch the words. All in all by the time the night rolled around we still needed a lot of practice, we weren’t horrible, but we needed help. At least we could sort of sing to the song if we could hear the words…. Yeah! Right?? Nope, we went to the rehearsal night all scared we went on stage and for some reason a student decided to start playing the drums to accompany our charade. Well we couldn’t hear a single word so we were doomed!!We just sat up there looking at each other like uhhh now what?? After telling the student thank you but no thank you, the next night was the big show and we hoped he would understand. The teachers of course told us to go home and practice.

The show the next day started and instead of starting off with a student performance there was a rock band. I thought it was hilarious!! The whole school shouted and got excited. I thought the band was going to shout “hello, rong jia wan” they had make up and everything. Defiantly rocked these kids worlds. The show then continued with skits ranging from traditional Chinese folk tales to western style fairy tales like Cinderella. One of my classes there was a boy that played a part in the “butterfly lovers” skit. Why do both lovers always die in Chinese fairy tales?? Anyways he played the part of a man that came between the lovers and he quoted “I will give you everything you want, Even my life” with an emphasis on Life, it was funny, so now when I see this kid I always say this line to him. During the Cinderella skit the narrator also loved to say Cinderella just like my 4 year old niece. “Cinnnerella” Finally came time for us to get up and sing our song. We started the song just fine, then as we listened to the tempo the song that was being played was the song without lyrics, so somehow they found the karaoke version on the cd we gave them!! ARRRRG!! So we just danced around and tried to look cute, we had a student walk across the stage and have Joe watch her, then I slapped him and the whole skit consisted of him trying to win me back. It worked out really well because we didn’t have a chance singing that song!! Then the whole crowd cheered Kiss Kiss!!! So we had to show them some love. We then sang Rudolph, with all the changed words, and thankfully most of them got it. Just this last week we found out that the school videotaped this whole thing and we were on TV, from our friend, the school didn’t even tell us, just our friend was watching tv one day flipping through the cctv channels and found us!! Nice!

More drama before all of this

The Chairman of the class told us one day that for the performance there needed to be hosts. SO he said the best way to decide would be to hold a speaking competition. We held it in two nights, the first night was to weed down all the people. This is how unorganized things are here. The students just went up in front of the classroom and spoke, gave an introduction and then read from an article. This seemed like a great idea, but they did it in stages, first the intro , then the article. The problem was that they would go back up to read the article out of order. And for people that cant read the names or remember which students are number 4 and 5, It made this very difficult. Plus one of the judges was the ch

airman of the class, so we had to watch out for him choosing only his friends to be in it. After the first night we were exhausted, How do you tell half the kids that there English isn’t as good as the other half when clearly there are thr

ee really good English speakers and the rest are all at the same level. The next day our Boss came to visit, so we had to show him around and also hold the second part of the competition. Our boss (Daniel) also watched our classes. Which I thought was going to be the scariest day of my life, but I was lucky he came on Friday and watched the best class in the grade and the best class I have. He also watched Joe’s class where Joe explained Rudolph to all the kids and put a chair on top of the desk and told all of them that this chair was Rudolph Joe then told the kids to yell names at the

chair. It was really hilarious. After all of that we then held the second half of the speaking competition The topic was Chinese celebrating foreign Holidays. Most students speeches consisted of the fact that china is a devolping country and that they need to learn from other cultures on how to do that. They also mentioned the fact that we live here and that for teacher Joe and emilys sake they should celebrate Christmas. Some of the students memorize there speeches and others read from there page , but I am so surprised at the ones that get up there and look as though they don’t want to be there,. They look up into the air or just start reciting in an angry voice. One boy even started shouting. Daniel said it sounded like a a communist general giving a speech.. This is how they learn to do speeches. We also had a question and answer time . The chairman asked him a question he couldnot answer and the kid seriously looked at him and started whispering “I hate you, I hate you” He was kidding, but it was weird because this was supposed to be a compitition and hes up there being crazy. He also (which is hilarious) had his middle finger up, it doesn’t mean the same thing in china as it does in America, but I couldn’t stop laughing the whole time this kid is up there with his middle finge

r up and saying “I hate you , I hate you”. After all of it we c

hose 2 boys and 2 girls who had the best spoken English. One girl is the head of the radio program here at school and one boy is from one of my classes. He is my surprise kid. In the beginning of the semester he was a punk. He always asked to go to the bathroom and would go play basketball. I gave him a talking to one day and said if you don’t come back I will tell your head teacher. I said I was worried some one kidnapped him in the WC ( water closet, the term used for bathroom here) SO after our chat he started paying attention in class and participating. Ever since his English has improved phenomenally.

The next day was the performance rehearsal and that’s when all the drama happened. The other teachers in our office were there and saw the hosts we had chosen. They then without telling us went to the students and told 3 out of 4 of them that they couldn’t be hosts. They said to one girl that she wasn’t pretty enough and that she sh

ould give a chance to another student. Which I was shocked after hearing this. Something like that would never fly in America. This is when we got into a huge argument with our teachers and was also the week of Christmas. The teachers claimed that they didn’t know about the sp

eaking competition and that being a host is more then just having good spoken English. These next few days were really hard for us. We had students coming to us in tears. Then having the teachers look at us like we were at fault. I then learned how much this performance was a joke. This performance had nothing to do with the students having a good time. It wasn’t for them to relax and enjoy themselves. This was something for the school to look good. The teachers chose the new hosts. One being the most beautiful girl in school (or so its said). I also believe the Chinese good relationships had something to do with this again. Really the whole thing made us sick. We felt like we had worked for nothing, but even more, those students had wasted their time. Preparing speeches and memo

rizing, it just wasn’t fair. Then the students they chose didn’t even try out during the compitition. It really made us feel awful. Even when I went to speak with the teachers to just find out there reasoning they got defensive with me and acted like They worked just as hard as they did, In my heart of hearts I really feel like the Chinese teachers work hard, but in a lot of cases they kn

ow nothing about the lives of there students. In some cases the students are just numbers to them. So when the teacher said to me that they work just as hard I wanted to ask them Do you even know her name or where shes from. It was just horrible. Then we had to argue to have Christmas eve and Christmas off school. Christmas eve was on Sunday and we were planning on having foreign friends that night for dinner. Plus we don’t work on Sundays anyway, but this day was to be a day for making up a vaction early in the year. We weren’t told about this until Friday of course, and to add to all of the other hoopla, we were really steamed Joe argued and argued saying that in our contract we wernt supposed to work thanksgiving even, but Joe and I worked anyway because we didn’t want to disrupt the schedule. The teachers made up this lame story that our contract didn’t say that, then when Joe said he was going to go and get it for them to read they finally said ok, but the worst of it all was that their argument through out the whole thing was “ but the school has done so much for” This is what really ticked me off, because they tried to m

ake us feel guilty after we worked so hard on the performance and then they take away our holiday. We are also some of the best v

olunteers here. We never ask for vacation days when some of our world teach colleagues we know ask for them almost weekly and we have English corner three times a week when most people have it once if even!! I’m not trying to toot my own horn but come on, we don’t slack around give us a break!! Lets just say it was an emotional time for us. Finally they agreed

After all of this the performance went on and we continued our lives, Tension has faded since then in the office, luckily we are all forgetting.

Christmas came and we had our dinner with all our foreign friends in Yue yang. More friends from all over Hunan came and we had a world teach banquet. We had duck,, salad ( even ranch. dressing. from mom and dad Anderson), deviled eggs, broccoli, home made stuffing( in a wok, don’t ask it was rough to make) Plus Our friend Am

y had Cookie mix sent over. Joe and

I made cookies in our new oven, they even had sprinkles!! Oh yeah FYI we got an Oven !!! It was shipped over from Guang Zhou. We had our friend Bear the phone guy help us buy it online. Its amazing, we bake bread, pork chops, and even did a French toast with strawberry /banana topping which we served to the teachers as a peace offering and Christmas present!

Now I want to talk about Packages!!!!

Thanks to everyone for sending packages! W

e received so many in the weeks before and during Christmas. You guys really don’t know how much it means to us to receive things in the mail. Even if its just a small letter, during these rough couple of weeks they really h

elped to lift our spirits. We were revived and given a chance to remember why we are here. We got packages from Family and friends. Some even so surprising, from friends we never would have thought would have sent packages. Even Joe’s old work mates from Larkin Hoffman sent us a package. Armed with easy cheese and chicken soup!!! We are really so blessed t

o have all of you in our

lives. We really couldn’t imagine the amount of love we have seen that can fit inside a box. Especially since it flew all the way over the ocean. And you guys knew exactly what to send here to name a few….. Pjs from colleen which I must say when I opened and got out the western size sleeves ..Amazing all my sleeves here are up my elbow!!! Parmesan Shaky cheese from larkin hoffman,….. ahhh you have no idea how great you are now we can make alfredo sauce!!! Ranch dressing, pancake mix!!!!, deoderant!! and monopoly from Mom and dad Anderson……..ahhh we love to play and try to teach our Chinese friends. Cribbage( joe has also taught the guys downstairs this game) , new shower shoes!! Yes I am so happy no more cold feet! ,candy, and ,baking soda, soooo needed!! from the groshens, and we loved megs wrapping , it was excellant, we are enjoying reading up on current china events via The star tribune! Thank You so much!! We are really so happy and thankful for all of our friends and family that have sent things, Really God Bless all of you, your amazing! When ever we get a package we hug it pretending it’s the sender and roll around on the ground with it like Joe is as pictured.

New Years

Well after all of that craziness with the teachers Joe and I felt that we really needed to get away.. Luckily we found out that the next few days we would

have off from school. A New year holiday (which made no sense to me, since Chinese new year is in February and I thought there was this whole not celebrating western holidays thing going on) Hmmm I don’t care I’m not complaining about a day off! We decided quickly where we could go. You see this is how traveling works in China, You never know when you’ll have time off until the day of so you have to be prepared for a quick travel plan. We decided to go to see Chairman Mao’s Home town. The place

that made the legend! Luckily this place is in our province and not too far away. It’s called Shao Shan. First we hoped on a train for Changsha and decided we should spend new years eve there in the big city. We called our friend Benjamin( that we met during orientation at church) and had dinner with him, we went to a great Mongolian place where we saw two goats tied up to a tree outside the entrance, Its really funny because Ben said he had never actually seen a live goat in the city before. We had an excellent meal and met the tea man. He’s the guy that refills your tea cup when its empty. It was so great he came over to me he said “do you like your tea strong or weak?” in English, when I said strong, what kind is this? He gave me a puzzled look, so I asked what is your name and he told Ben that the sentence about the tea was the only English sentence he knew! Crazy that out of all the sentences he knew this one.

We then walked on the walking street and saw all the people with sparklers. It was really breathtaking to see how many were out, all just wanting to be out and about for the new year hour. Then we found a really nice hotel and our friend all of a sudden ditched us for his friend that had a beamer. Oh well whatever, so we decided to stay in. At first we thought oh we are so lame, its new years eve midnight and we are in this hotel room, but then as I was looking out the window at the just ok view and people started shooting off fireworks right on the street corner. The whole city was lighting up the sky with real forth of July fireworks. Car alarms were going off dogs were barking it was crazy.

The next morning we took a bus to Shao Shan , Chairman Mao’s birthplace. I just want to say that I love traveling in China, everything is spur of the moment and if you get stuck somewhere its no worries. A little like Jamaican Island time. We took the bus and when we finally arrived to our destination we got off and were greeted by these women that rushed us onto another bus. We looked around and everyone that was on our first bus was following them so we though, oh well I guess this is cool. We are so trusting! It ended up to be exactly what we wanted. We started driving and the tour guide starting talking she then asked me if we had eaten and I said no, so the bus stopped and everyone got off at the only restaurant there ( they must make a fortune) We ordered from the menu by pointing to certain words and asking what kind of meat or vegetable it was and saying yes or no. There’s no picture menus here!! Plus we probably couldn’t tell what the picture was if there was a picture menu. The waitress told us that this one pig dish was what Chairman Mao ate everyday. SO Of course we had to try that right?? It turned out to be this pig skin, pok and fat dish that sat in a sweet sauce, Actually once you chew only the pork its pretty good. We also met a couple at the restaurant and asked them to join us. We all shared dishes which I think is the best way to go. Then you can have more. And we don’t really know what to order half the time! The best part of this place was the Mao statues. You can buy any size statue you want of this man, at any age. In China Mao is a god! They even have gold statues. Its crazy. Of course before we got back on the bus we had to buy our small Mao ( only 5 kuai!) and our new friends bought there commemorative Mao coins showing Mao throughout his life at different stages. All in color!! Fancy! We then were dropped off at a small house with a huge square infront of it. In the square there was steps that led up to a huge Mao Statue. In the house you could pay money and see his family tree. We bypassed that one and went straight for the statue. As we were walking up we couldn’t believe it. People were getting down on the pavement and bowing. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. People literally were saying prayers and closing their eyes in memory of him. I couldn’t believe it, Joe and I stood there with our mouths open! I’m not sure what we had expecting coming here, but it was surprising to see how much people still worship him. We then made our way back on the bus, which took us to his house. It was actually pretty big. We had thought he had lived in poverty, but the house is actually pretty nice in comparison to many homes we have seen here. It could also be that his house is well preserved. They had his bedroom, his parents bedroom, and his brothers bedroom. His brother was a soldier for some time and actually died fighting if you remember the story. The house was in the shape of a big square and the hallways and room all just sort of made a maze from room to room. They even had a pig pen right near the house. Only sad thing was that a soldier guy was following me around and not letting me take pictures or film. Bummer I know you all wanted to see the inside of the maoser house! We then left the house and walked up a hill. Which led to another hill. This is where we thought his parents were laid to rest but each time we thought that we would walk further down and there would be more graves, even a guy that was walking near us and knew English couldn’t figure it out. There was also a place were you light incense and pray and gave thanks to his parents for giving birth to him. Talk about drama. I lit a stick for the hell of it. After all of this we took the bus to the mountain. The famous cave where Mao spent 10 days “living simply” which inspired the nation to live simply. We got up to the gate of the cave and were met by a 32 kuai ticket price per ticket. Ehnn we thought, its probably just a cave, oh well. So we stood around thinking what are we going to do now. WE then met a girl , well let me say that correctly, she was a little crazy. Maybe alittle too excited to meet us, but oh well she was nice. She told us that there was a train leaving shao shan for changsha and its cheaper then the bus.. This now started our train adventure. We decided , hey sounds like a plan. She was with another tour group so we had to pay a few kuai to get on her shuttle bus and ride with them to the train station. We finally got there and got on the train and decided to play cards. A nice old man and his grandson also came and sat with us. We played Chinese cards for hours it was really fun. I swear though I just watched the movie The Last Emperor and I swear this is the same old broken down train as in that movie!! Funny because just as I was thinking that the train did break down. It then broke down a series of 5 times. Turning our 2 hour trip into 5. Good news though We met more and more people. After our new friends got off at there stop 2 university students came and chatted with us, they were the cutest couple I have met. Just traveling to see things on there vacation. We played cards with them and spoke English until we finally arrived in changsha. The bad thing was our train back to our city had already left and the next one wasn’t until 1:30 in the morning!!! We got off the train, bought our tickets and then ate dinner with our new couple friends. They took us to a dumpling place near the station and just as we were getting ready to pay the boy says that he already did. I couldn’t believe it, I mean he’s a college student, he needs his money, but he refused he said we were guests in his country. Such an amazing young guy. We got there phone numbers and said goodbye then went to the train station. We then just sat reading our books and waiting, but like always a crowd comes around looking at us and trying to get us speak Chinese to them. A man came and sat near us and told us he was from Beijing. He runs a restaurant there and he wanted us to come to it. Then art students swarmed around us trying to draw a picture of us. It actually made the time fly by. Finally it came time to board our train. And by this time we are exhausted! All of a sudden I hear my name being shouted. I think I’m in some sort of weird dream because often times I think I hear my name when I am listening to Chinese conversations, but it usually ends up being some other Chinese word.

But No its actually my name this time. I turn around and it’s the most beautiful girl in school! One of the hosts from the performance. She’s in line with her mother and father. I talk to her and find out all the great things she bought while in changsha. She went on a shopping spree , We then get on the train and she asks me if I am going back to rong jia wan( this is our small town about 45 minutes from the train station in the city closest to us, yueyang) I tell her yes that we will probably catch a cab and get back to school. She looks at me with big eyes and then goes and talks with her father. We board the train and luckily it is practically empty we can fall asleep for the 2 hour ride. Right before we fall asleep the girl is back and says that her father is the owner of a hotel in Yueyang and that he will get us a room for free!! We are so tired we don’t even try to play that we don’t want to be rude game, we just go ahead and say oh my gosh yes! We pull into the Yueyang station. Thank goodness the girl wakes us, because we would have kept sleeping. She gets us up and we all rush out and hop into a taxi. I notice her father has big poofy 80’s hair and realize this must be where she gets all her beauty. The family then takes us to the hotel and she tells me that her family lives here. Pretty nice place to live!! We then stay the night in the nicest Chinese hotel I have ever been to!! Marble countertops, a real tub! Nice bedding. Im telling you we got dropped at the Ritz! The next morning we made our way home. But I tell you it pays to know the most beautiful girl in school!!

Christmas/new years gifts from students

Well we got many different things from students. One of the best ones however was a 7 foot tall paper with calligraphy writing on it. Its so funny that Chinese people don’t realize how amazing foreigners think their calligraphy is. I was so excited We hung it up on our wall, but hopefully we can bring it home. It is a poem by Mao that speaks of how everyone should love there county. Really beautiful characters. We also received a bear from one of my junior students I noticed it had a place for batteries so I put some in, It so scary it plays a demonic Chinese chant and its eyes light up red. I have never been so scared of a stuffed animal! We put it on the couch when our boss came to visit, he said he might not be able to sleep in the same room with it!! We also got many cards and a piece of fabric that a picture of me screened onto it. Our student’s mother had works in a shop that makes everything you want out of a picture.

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