Will's Birthday and Nanjing Friends

Nanjing is like my home away from home (from home). We had three weeks of VIA in-country cultural training and language classes there, and they city is really awesome. In my opinion, it's not as crowded as other cities in China and the people are nicer. Also, three VIA vols and all my friends from training are there. Anyway, so I went back two weeks ago for Will's birthday. It was SOOOOOOOO fun! :) The night before his birthday, we went to all-you-can-eat Japanese food and we combined to eat 21 dishes, I think. It was Benihana style, with the chef right in front of us cooking special for us! We had steak, unagi, shrimp, scallops, beef wrapped around mushrooms, more steak, lamb, and then of course sushi, sashimi, miso soup, curry stuff, hand rolls, tempura, the usual. I had six orders of sashimi, tuna and salmon. The night was amazing. Best meal I’ve ever had in China by FAR. Oh yeah, and it was all you can drink too! But we didn’t drink very much cuz we wanted to taste our food. Haha… I did try sake for the first time ever… I was disappointed. Haha.

This is Wang Dong and Weng Fei. They were two of the language partners that VIA hooked us up with back in August. What started out as set-up conversations quickly developed into some awesome friendships. There is a crew of like 6 guys who all study/live together at Nanjing Normal University and are going next year to the University of Maryland to study law (I might be off on this). They have all graduated from really good schools across China already. They’re SO SO SO SO awesome and teach us lots of cultural stuff. They hang out sometimes with Will when I’m not in Nanjing, but they always make it a point to get together when I’m in town. :) It’s SOOOO FUN! We go out to eat and just sit around and talk stories for hours. In Chinese! Before, I wasn’t following a lot of it, but now I can! They speak English really well too and can explain stuff to me if I don’t get it. :) In the picture above, we are going out shopping for food for Will’s, Wang Dong’s, Weng Fei’s, and Yun Feng’s (another language parter) birthday celebration. It was SOOOOOOOOOOO fun! Everyone made a dish – Wang Dong made these Coca-cola chicken wings that were ono, Yun Feng made this steamed rice with ono sauce and veggies inside thing, Will made CHEESEBURGERS (WOOOO!) on this mini bbq grill thing that they bought before (SOOOOOOOOO ONO! And we got to eat the leftovers the next day too, haha!). This picture is all of us cheers-ing (ganbei! 干杯!) and that's Will's supernice apartment.

SOOO, in China there is a tradition where you always cake the birthday boy/girl (as in, eat your cake, save your frosting, and then smack the birthday boy/girl in the face!). It was SO hilarious – Will wasn’t even suspecting it, and someone came up from behind him and got him SOOOOOOOO good. J And then everyone started caking everyone and I ran away to finish eating my cake (no like waste you know!? also so no one would cake me). I came back to take pictures and I thought it was over and I was safe and then I turned around, and Wang Dong was coming at me. hahaha… I turned my head and took the cake straight in my ear/hair. What a mess… haha… but then after we all washed off (just stuck my head under the shower) and it was fine. J Cleaning up the next day was not that fun, but Will did most of it, so yeah. Sucks that since the get-togethers are usually at his house (it’s a nice house), so he always has to clean. Oh well.

Then we all went to KTV (karaoke)!!! It was so much fun! J We sang songs in English and in Chinese and everyone had a good time. The cool thing about this birthday party was that there were an even number of Chinese people and foreigners, and so we did a lot of talking both in Chinese and English. I am really happy that we’ve made some Chinese friends and that we’re not just hanging out with Americans, cuz that would defeat some of the purpose of coming to China. We all struggle a lot with whether to hang out with Americans just because it’s easy and semi-fun or to stretch ourselves and maybe have to fight through awkwardness to hang out with Chinese people. I am really glad that Wang Dong and co. have turned out to be such good friends of ours. They are so much fun and this night of a million birthdays was amazing!

The Three Musketeers (Me, Jenna, and Nhu)

When I first heard there were gonna be three girls at this post (there is usually at least one boy), I was like darn because I get along with boys so much better, in general. But after being here a while, I’ve come to know and love Nhu and Jenna. They’re both really great girls – super supportive and understanding. We all have each other’s backs. We’re all pretty silly together (lots of girl-on-girl action jokes, haha). We had to take some random pictures around the school for something that the school wanted, but we took some goofy ones as well. :)

Seriously, I couldn’t ask for any two better partners. Maybe it’s because it’s Thanksgiving time and I’m feeling in a love-y mood, but I am really really thankful for both Nhu and Jenna. Jenna likes to cook and in general plays the “mom” role. She just whipped up the best Thanksgiving dinner -- with mashed potatoes and my Granny's yam recipe and everything (without access to an oven or microwave or normal ingredients). She's a vegetarian and humanitarian in general as well. Jenna’s apartment is also the general hang out spot for all of our student friends, just because it’s way more PIMP than ours.

These pictures below are taken by the basketball courts, where it says on the wall “Make Ouyang Yu Famous … Train the Students First Rate”. I thought our school was crazy the first time I saw this. But it’s just the Chinese way. There are like motivational sayings all over campus. Like in the cafeteria, in HUGE letters on the wall it says 尊重他人就是尊重自己 (zunzhong taren jiu shi zunzhong ziji), meaning like to respect others is to respect yourself. It’s cool.

Nhu is awesome. She and I make a good complentary team, as she likes cleaning and I don’t. I like taking out the trash. :) Man, I have to get on that; it’s piling up. Haha. Other than that though, she’s helping me stop caring so much about what other people think and to stop thinking that people are judging me all the time. It’s actually really good to be here in China to learn that lesson, because everyone stares at everyone. It’s part of the culture. I do it, too. Haha. And so it’s like whatever. Really, people are just curious. And I like talking to them! :) But about other people too, I am working on just doing what I want and not thinking so much about what other people will think about me all the time. It’s good. :)

For Halloween, we all dressed up. It was awesome. Jenna was a rock star, I was Maggie Cheung from In the Mood for Love (google images it, she’s a Chinese actress and in the movie she is like a 1930s Shanghai woman or something I forget), and Nhu was the grim reaper with a scary mask. We reserved the media room especially for that week (we usually teach in a more ghetto classroom with just a chalkboard) and we taught an awesome Halloween lesson together (Nhu and I). It was so fun! We told scary stories and taught the kids “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat, if you don’t I don’t care, I’ll pull down your underwear!” … haha… that went over well. :)

Jenna did my hair and makeup – it took like an hour. She has a background in stage makeup, so she was on it. The hair was the main thing. That whole thing was so teased and hair sprayed up because we don’t have a curling iron here. It was ridiculous. But I did get one good picture of myself that day. :)

The Past Couple Months...

Sorry I've been MIA for a while on this blog, but I'm back! Here are some of the things I've been up to for the past couple months, as well as comments on what life is like here:

This is the three of us (Nhu, Jenna, and me) at the Hengyang County Foreign Teacher’s Appreciation Banquet, which was on September 24^th. Nhu and I had to sing two songs IN FRONT OF EVERYONE – Right Here Waiting by Richard Marx (Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will be right here waiting for you…) and 月亮代表我的心 (Yueliang Daibiao Wo de Xin), an old Chinese song that you can youtube if you want to see how it sounds. The music was all off and we came on after this really awesome Chinese woman singer and it was just the most embarrassing thing ever. But we got through it and everyone laughed and told us we were good sports. Other performances included a mime show, a bunch of foreigners singing another song, a soccer demonstration (lame), a Beijing Opera changing faces one man show, violin, and some ghetto hip hop dance that was really scandalous, haha! These little girls presented the flowers to random foreigners who won awards.

This is me holding my wannabe hamburger that I was really excited to eat, but ended up sucking really bad. Hahahaha… In my town, we get teased a lot --- like we get our hopes up about stuff only to have them come crashing down. And that’s okay, that’s life. Man, I was so excited for this hamburger. My town has no Western food whatsoever, but on this day, Nhu, Jenna and I were in the next town over, 30 minutes away, and it’s bigger, and we thought maybe they would have a good hamburger. TEASE. Oh well, though, it wasn’t bad, actually. :) Other teases in our everyday life include the school telling us we can get paid on a certain day, but then the office being closed; that we have a holiday on a certain day, but then the day getting changed after we have already made plans (:( Indonesia); people saying they will come visit us but then plans falling through; our families sending us packages but then them taking forever to get here or the post office not being open or something; the electricity going out in our apartments; tons of last minute changes and random decisions; and the list goes on. It really isn’t bad, and we’re getting used to life here, lowering our expectations, and just going with the flow. It is what it is. :) I'm happy I'm here. :)

This is me playing basketball against the army! WOOOO! I am fouling someone, as usual. J Haha… the guy in the yellow is like the Kobe of our team. He’s really good, but when he’s on the court, the offense is stagnant. This is the second game that I played against the army. We lost. Bleh. Oh well. I had two points. :) haha… I am getting more and more out of shape. All my muscles are shrinking – I can tell by the way my pants don’t fit and even some of the other clothes that you sent me that used to fit. Eh well. :(

These are some of the English teachers at our school after the Halloween party that we put on. Nhu, Jenna, and I organized a party (read: 320 students in an auditorium where everyone had a numbered ticket and if their number was called they got to come up and play a game). I emceed and it was SOOOOOOOOO FUN! We set up games like the balloon stomp (balloons around kids’ ankles and they went around stomping them and the last person with an un-popped balloon won), three-legged race, rice sack relay (like potato sack, except here it’s a rice sack haha), etc. It was soooo fun! :) All the kids had a really good time, and we gave out candy and prizes. The teachers said it was a lot more orderly than last year and that they felt it was more successful. Here at OYY, everything is compared to previous years (it was kind of strange at first to be here with all of the expectations that everyone had because of the past volunteers – like in Mexico, I was the first volunteer the community had experienced, in Yunnan last year, I was the first – but now I’m used to all the references), so it means a lot when the teachers or students say that we’re better than previous years. Haha…

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!