Life Barf

Once upon a post I promised I wouldn't fall behind and I swore an end to overly long and hectic "catch up" posts.

And you believed me.

HA!

Okay here goes.
Although I do have "adventures" my life is somewhat routine.
The routine goes something like this:
 I begin every Monday weeping at the prospect of teaching a new lesson and the dread of how 'well' (terribly) it will be received by the children. Missionary letters come Tuesday morning and help me through the day. By Wednesday I have taught the 'new lesson' enough that I'm no longer afraid and by lunch I feel overwhelmingly apathetic toward teaching it. Thursday I only have one Grade 5 class so I can push through it easily enough. After my afternoon class (movie class) with the international students I feel FREEDOM rush over me! I don't have to teach again until MONDAY!!!! Fridays I rest/clean/ and sometimes grocery shop. Saturdays we do something new and Sunday consists of phone-church and trying to catch up on my journal or blog and sometimes youtube. I use the evening to plan my lesson and begin the dread of the next morning.
Lather-Rinse-Repeat.

After my initial DREAD every Monday I teach the class and find it's never what I planned, but I can make it work. This week I am reading the kids a story and teaching them new words from it... or so I planned. Turns out, they don't care about the story or the words, BUT they do like teaching ME Chinese. At this point I feel like I am just a foreign  babysitter, so if they want to teach me Chinese (and it gets them to not be rowdy) it's fine by me. 
I'm focusing and trying to learn as much as I can... I am probably not 'good' at all, but I am eager and willing so it's a start. I also do retain a surprising amount. Even I am surprised when I see an object and my brain tells me that I know the word for it in Chinese.
I am also getting to the point of Cave-man comprehension.
I don't know much, but if I combine situations with facial expressions and the words I DO know... I can usually guess the point they are trying to make. I'm not gonna lie, I feel really cool when I ask Tessa if she was talking about X and she confirms "Yes!"... meaning I understood! CHINESE... kinda...

Here are some shots of every day living. Including my bathroom floor before and after I SCRUBBED it on hand and knees, cool braids I do in my hair, foods I eat like a chocolate cream filled panda cake and crunchy-crusty fish (head and all) which I avoid more than eat because of their wicked aftertaste... and during taste... OK! i don't like them but at least I tried! If all else fails (which happens often in this cafeteria) I have a slice of bread with Peanut butter and cornflakes and honey... fine dining.

This was a special fancy feast Tim invited us to

Also I think the lady on my laundry detergent looks like Miranda Crosgrove

MIND BLOWWWWWWWWWWNN
not really, but i do think it every time I wash my clothes and I had to get it out there.
I wonder if my clothes smell like the set of iCarly.

I also made tortillas. It earned me 20 extra Mexican points. Fiesta!!!! ARRRiiiibAAA!!!!

Peanut Butter jar for a Roller

Asian Taco things...

I am what I am
(this store sells 'Mexican Leather' products)

One night it was raining very hard so Noelle and I got out umbrellas and went out barefoot dancing in the rain. The reason we took out umbrellas was to use them when we saw a huddle of girls waddling under one umbrella to their dorms or boys sprinting up the rainy steps umbrella-less. We would awkwardly try to make conversation while we were fairly close to these strangers (sharing our umbrellas) walking them dryly to their destinations. We called our service team the Pair-o'-Parasols.
Here is our wet aftermath in the kitchen:


Sometimes we do cool and caring things... like run about sharing our umbrellas.
OTHER times we do stupid things... like accept rides from Chinese strangers driving AMBULANCES.
Yeah...
Not our smartest move but I can assure you it sounds worst in retrospect than in the moment.
Although even sitting on the orange stretcher, looking up at the hand-cuff straps on the ceiling, we knew it was a bad choice to get into this car with strangers who offered us a cheap ride into the city. As we sat back there planning how we were going to get away/beat these guys up if we were headed off to human-trafficing, the man (in his late 20s) tried to ask us questions in Chinligh (Chinese+English).



 The happy ending to this story is that our attack plans were never needed for the man pulled right up to the WAL*MART, asked for a small fee, smiled, waved and drove off. He was just a nice man who was excited to see and help out foreigners.
Either that... or one day we'll find out it was because of the 'three big guys standing behind us'. (3 Nephites reference in case you are lost)

Call us old fashion, but we decided to just take the bus home.



Another thing we do often is play Phase10.
It's pretty competitive and often ends up with secret alliances and/or teaming up to skip Garth like 5 times in a row. Muuuahahahahhahaa. (also I am always eating when I play so we captured that as well)

 And we play with the students

Alright enough about daily life and bad decisions

Tell us about an "adventure" Saturday

Okay Okay since you asked

Wait... you're the one typing...
 who are you talking to?

Weirdo

On Saturday we went to Nanchang to buy our TRAIN TICKETS TO BEIJING!!! woot woot!

I love it when people smoke RIGHT in front of me on the Bus. I LOVE it. Sharing is caring. Sharing your choice to smoke by BLOWING it into my face is so thoughtful and considerate. I love to smell it and smell like it! Hopefully I get secondhand smoke real bad and it effects my lungs because I hate singing.
I really don't care if you choose to smoke, but just don't smoke ONTO me.

DUCKS

None of them gave me any advice.


TRAIN STATION



After we bought our tickets we headed on a bus out to Tessa's old University. It took long to get there! I was happy to be off the bus! I am always happy to get OFF a bus.

Mostly I was excited to eat. We ate at a Chinese-KFC-wannabe place. I got a Chicken Wrap that was alright and 2 of these EGG tarts that I love. They have them all over in China and I love them.



Then we headed to get some smoothies for dessert (mostly just for Noelle). Noelle was unimpressed by the 'smoothies' on the menu. As she tried to explain what she wanted, I got a juice drink to sip while I browsed a nearby Papeleria [paper store]. The juice was amazing so I took another drinking selfie so I could always remember it's miraculous tart/fruity flavor.

I bought a Chinese chess set too... if that matters.



This is a crazy octopus hair machine... we don't know what it does.



Here is the Library which we only went into to pee... Kodak moment?


Noelle tried to take some cool pictures of us swinging on the rope swings... it didn't work out.



Here's a picture of me walking down this brigde-deck-path thing:



The other thing we wanted to do was buy the shaver/carver tools they use on Pineapples here, but how were we to get to the market?
Oh I don't know how about Tandem bikes! whooooooooooooooot whoooooot!!!!!
(SERIOUSLY I was so stoked)


It was actually Terrifying to ride in the street. As mentioned before on my blog, driving here is NUTS and so wobbling through on our bikes was scary, but because we didn't die, we found it hysterical.
The seats on the back of the bikes prevented us from leaning and pedaling comfortably and on the last dirt road home I was singing a song called "Ow ow ow, My butt hurts". The inspiration for the song was the bike seats and how they chose to treat my poor little tush. Also our fitted JEANS didn't help out the situation. Even so, it was SO much fun and probably the hardest I have chuckled here in China (besides when Garth showed us this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OZjHjJToVo)
Another thing that made me laugh was when, because we were buying the peelers, we were asked if we were going to open a Pineapple stand in the market. Just picturing it makes all 4 of us laugh. These clueless Americans vending Pineapples when we can't even say Pineapple [in Chinese].


Here is a beautiful shot of me eating a berry. It was extremely sour, but I liked it. Tessa bought us a small bag of them. I'm not sure what they are.



I feel like every Chinese meal we eat is just the same stuff. Surprise we had stir-fry stuff and watery fish soup. It all seems the same to me. But here is the after-wards of Dinner :

I think we should have eaten at Jubway:

jk I just wanted to show you JUBWAY. hahaha


Previously we had gone through Fuzhou looking for a DVD store. It was a lonnnnnnggg bus ride and when we finally scoured the streets and found it, it was closed:

but since Nanchang is a much bigger city we thought we would try there. We went out of out way to get to the shop and when we got there... they said they were out of ALL DVD's... Oh well we saw a new cool part of Nanchang and tried JACKFRUIT for the first time! Also here is a Duck house in the lake that Garth called 'AMAZING'. Cool...sure. interesting... neat... yeah, but AMAZING? So I ask: are you AMAZED by the Duck house that looks like the manger?


So the day had warn on us. We were tired and sat on the curb waiting for our bus. We talked with some locals (kinda...lol we can't ever understand fully) and suddenly Tessa rolls up in one of two little buggies and says "get in, we missed our bus". Garth and I hop in the one without Tessa and realize that if the driver wanted to she could take us anywhere and all we know how to say is "NO TOUCH ME" and " I NEED EGGPLANT". However, again, all was well and we arrived at the train station where we could catch a different bus home.
We bought our tickets and realized there was a two hour wait til the bus left. It was already late and the school is like 2 hours away. BLEEHHHHH... so we decided to go get some McDonalds.


When we got back to the bus we found out that they sold our seats from under us. We had no other choice though so we waited outside the bus on little stools they said we would break because we were too fat. We were too tired and Slap-Happy to be too upset. Here is us outside the bus. One picture is of me and the Scumbag driver who sold our seats.


then they has us walk like a half a block away... wait at the side of the road and the same bus we were waiting outside of, pulled up and we got it. the crammed us on our little stools in between people's legs and in the row of the bus. We paid soft seat ticket prices to sit out tiny stools that made me sing a reprise of "Ow ow ow, My butt hurt". Somehow we got home.

My room smelled bad when I got home but I was too tired to even... anything. I crashed and woke up the next day to find my watermelon had rotted, but needing to clean it up motivated me to rearrange my apartment. I opened my window to air out my room, which blew my door closed when I had gone to the kitchen to get a rag. No worries though, I went downstairs and used my Cave-man Chinese and it WORKED! They Understood Me!
I got back in my room and finished taking care of the decaying melon and found a nut cracker an the bottom on a bag of macadamia nuts I have been storing because I couldn't crack them. God rotted my melon so that I could crack my nuts. hahaha
Here is where I live:
Looking extra fancy, organized and clean:





Our ward has general conference a week late so that we can download it all and not have to stay up weird hours. I haven't finished the Sunday session but I have PLENTY to say already. Look forward to that.
I am going to nap before I have to go 'teach'.


Also here is a picture of me jumping on my bed:

bye.