Dear Satan Claus...

That's how a few of my students began their homework assignment today.  I told them all to write a letter to Santa asking for a gift for Christmas Eve.  A lot of our students get letters mixed up, since Chinese doesn't have letters or spelling the way that English does...thus, Santa Claus becomes Satan Claus.

I will now include two of my favorite letters from class today:

Dear Stanta,
  I do love you.  Here I want to beg u for a Christmas present.  It should be a box of happiness.  If I open it, everyone would forget their suffering but get their happiness.  I would be appreciate if you give it to me.  Dear Stanta, waiting for your present.
Sincerely,
Annie

Santa Claus:
You ok?  You feel cold?
Now I'm writting to ask for a gift for I've been nice ever since birth.  I'm wondering would you mind giving me Rudolf as a gift since I'm really afraid of the dark and I hate walking long to class, the distance is killing me!
Cookie and milk are ready!  Don't forget to bring the little reindeer!
Sincerely:  Tim

To tell the truth, I'd be happy with either of those gifts myself.

We have liftoff

On December 1st, one fateful week ago, the city of Yichang reached it's prime.  As promised (a second time), the great kahuna known as Walmart opened in our lowly city!  I was determined to go shopping there, whether or not the doors had actually opened this time.  To my delight, they had, and I marched in, ready to experience all the shopping magnificence that Walmart had to offer me.  To say it was crowded would be a ridiculous understatement.  It was so crowded that they kept security guards on the escalators to make sure that too many people didn’t get on and break them.  Whoever is in charge of marketing at the Walmart here is either completely insane or an evil genius.  He (or she) decided that, in the land of rice and oil, that on the opening day of the biggest supermarket in city, they would offer a huge sale on RICE and OIL.  When I made it to the center of the beast, there were literally hundreds of Chinese housewives waiting in line to buy gallons of oil and 50-pound bags of rice.  Fortunately, I have absolutely no desire to buy either of those things, so I happily pushed my cart through the aisles, more and more delighted with every step.  The highlights, things that didn’t exist in Yichang until now:  Christmas wrapping paper, smallmouth bass, bell peppers, root beer, pints of ice cream, strawberries out of season, take-home pizza, cough drops, and ziploc bags!!!  We’re all really excited.  We’re even more excited for the day the crowds dwindle, and we can lay siege to “our” store.

感恩节 Gan En Jie

7:06 am:   First sign of movement on Thanksgiving morning.  Not because we want to get up early or     because we have class, but because we are woken up by an abrupt sound:  "doo doo doo!"  It's a text message sent from one of my students before dawn:  "happy thanks giving day ,i would like to give thanks to you for teaching me a lot of knowledges.  yours, april."  I grunt, roll over, and promptly fall back asleep.

9:30 am:  Second sign of life.  Twenty or so text messages after the original one, I decide it is no use trying to sleep and drug myself out of bed.  Breakfast?  Absolutely not.  I need to save room for the feast we'll be consuming later.

11:00 am:  I stand over Zack's head and pry his eyelids open and beg him to help me wash the dishes.  Being the gracious and kind man that he is, he stumbles out of bed in between groans and plunges his hands into a sink full of suds, effectively beginning our day of work in the kitchen.  I leave him to do the dishes and begin chopping various nuts and vegetables.

12:15 pm:  Zack and I are both elbow-deep in flour, working on making our own homemade bread.  I instruct him to mimic me exactly, so that both of the batches of bread would turn out well.  (More on this as it develops.)

12:30 pm:  Katie and Jessica arrive at the door, breathless and excited, shouting "Happy Thanksgiving!" with their arms full of pots, snacks, and ingredients.  Until now, it didn't really feel like Thanksgiving.  Now all is right with the world.

1:00 pm:  I break down and eat one of the cinnamon rolls I had prepared the night before.  I almost fall out of my chair upon realizing how delicious it is, and think that maybe there is hope for me as a cook after all.

1:30 pm:  Jessica announces that she is going to make the mashed potatoes, even if she is "domestically challenged."  I give her two potato peelers to choose from, and she goes to work peeling.

1:37 pm:  Jessica proclaims that the potato peeler is "handist" and she wants one made for left-handed people.  Zack shows her that even if he uses his left hand, he can peel a potato faster than her.

1:45 pm:  My turn to send a text message.  I text one of our sisters and ask her if she is coming to our Thanksgiving dinner or not.  

1:46 pm:  Our sister answers that she is in the hospital having her "gut checked" (whatever that means) and that she will come later.

1:50 pm:  Katie reveals that the sweet potatoes she bought earlier that day are not, in fact, sweet potatoes.

1:52 pm:  We all beg Zack to go out on a quest to find sweet potatoes, apple cider vinegar, and a makeshift turkey.

2:10 pm:  Zack, the valiant hero, leaves on his quest, armed with only a scribble of Chinese writing and his bravery.

2:00 - 3:30 pm:  Chopping, mixing, baking, sautéing, and tasting

3:30 pm:  It becomes quite clear that the bread is not going to be a success.  Something about the combination of me and yeast is volatile, and never turns out well.  We end up having very tiny, dense rolls.

3:45 pm:  Zack the Bold returns with sweet potatoes, something that isn't apple cider vinegar, and six roasted chickens.

4:00 pm:  I sit down in front of the chickens and begin to tear the flesh from their bones, thoroughly disgusted, but determined to finish so that we can all pretend that the meat came from a turkey and not six chickens.

4:30 pm:  Our sister shows up.  I still can't figure out what she was doing at the hospital, but apparently whatever it was, it hasn't ruined her appetite.

5:00 pm:  We are finished cooking!!!  At long last, we all sit down to our sumptuous feast, feeling as though we haven't eaten in months and today our blind eyes have been opened to the world of food.  We all begin by taking turns saying what we are thankful for.

5:07 pm:  We give up on saying what we are thankful for because tears are getting in the way, and we finally begin to reap the rewards of our day of hard work.

5:45 pm:  Possibly more full than any group of humans has ever been, we collapse on the couch, unable to move, talk, or even think.  We discover that you needn't consume turkey on Thanksgiving to end up exhausted after the meal.

5:50 pm:  We argue about whether or not we should eat pie now or later.  Even though we are all full, some of us argue to eat it right away while others are too tired to even argue, let alone eat more.

6:30 pm:  Pie.  Never has one single word seemed so succulent.

7:30 pm:  Zack announces that these leftovers aren't just going to clear themselves, nor are the dishes going to wash themselves.  Begrudgingly, we all take the hint and begin cleaning up.

8:00 pm:  Having decided that cleaning up isn't very much fun, our Chinese friends make their exit.

8:30 - 10:00 pm:  Block of time that none of us have any memory of.  Apparently we were all in some sort of food-induced coma.

10:00 pm:  We begin playing spades, in spite of the fact that Zack hates card games and I have never played spades before.  

11:20 pm:  Someone wins spades.  I won't say who, but it wasn't not me.

11:30 pm:  We collapse into bed, looking forward to tomorrow, because everyone knows what the day after Thanksgiving means.  Leftovers.

The emis stame

I'll the how-dumb-deid o'the carld havist mucht.
the warl' like an eemis stme
wag i the lift
Am' my eerie mememories fa'
like a yowdemdrift
the worlds cut ootithe stame
had the fug o'fame
am' history's hazelnaw
nao yirdit thain.

WHAT?!  I gave a pretty simple homework assignment:  write something in cursive to practice your cursive writing.  To be fair, I did say anything was okay, as long as it was written in cursive.  And he did write this random jumble of made-up words in cursive.  So I gave him full credit, but...seriously?  Ten dollars and a chinese duck neck to anyone who can figure out what this is supposed to mean.

In other news, I went to Walmart today.  For months, there has been a Walmart under construction downtown with a sign promising to open November 24th.  We’ve all been anxiously waiting, and today I went down to indulge my megalo-mart shopping fantasies.  It wasn’t open.  And didn’t show any signs of opening soon.  The Chinese have no word for “false advertising.”

万圣节 WanShengJie

WanShengJie is Chinese for "Halloween."  Yesterday we threw a Halloween party for some of our students.  When they found out, they were all thrilled to be invited, but distraught that they were expected to wear a costume.  Which meant that 3 hours before the party, several girls showed up at our coworker Katie's apartment expecting her to provide them with costumes.  Somehow, she faced the challenge with ferocity and all the girls were delighted.  Other students showed up to the party in no costume at all, then just wiped makeup on their faces or stole parts of costumes from others.  We had oranges painted like jack-o-lanterns, caramel popcorn, punch, dirt and worm brownies, and loads of candy.  Our friends were simply beside themselves the entire night, giggling like elementary school students.
Pictures of our Halloween party and more pictures from October can be found in our online album here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/elizabethopheim
If I can get my pictures to work, I’ll leave you with a picture of the four of us in our costumes.  I am a ninja, Jessica is a pirate, Katie took her costume off (she was a Christmas tree), and Zack was a robot (sort of).

Chinese ghost stories

As you all know, this is the week before Halloween, however, my students had no idea. So this week in class, I have been teaching my students about Halloween. Part of the lesson includes a viewing of the 1983 music video of Michael Jackson's "Thriller." While Americans find this video to be amusing and mostly think of it as an awesome dance, my Chinese students found the video to be quite frightening. My favorite part of class was actually near the end of the Thriller video, when all the students were on edge, huddled together....I slammed my book on my desk as loud as I could, and nearly every student screamed and jumped a foot in the air. I think some of them were a little mad at me for scaring them, but it was definitely worth it. While they spent the next ten minutes trying to calm down, I spent it laughing. After this, I gave them the assignment of writing their own ghost stories. Here I will include some of my favorites.

"A pretty girl was walking outside alone in the evening when a man followed the tracks of her. So she made her way to a graveyard and stood in front of a tombstone saying, 'Daddy, I'm back. Please open the door.' The man was so scared that he run away immediately. As the girl was laughing loudly for her good idea, she noticed an old man wandering in front of a tomb. So she went over and asked: ‘Excuse me. It’s already late at night, and what are you doing here?’ The old man said slowly: ‘Well, my son has carved my name wrongly on the tombstone, so I went out to correct it.’ Of course, the girl almost fainted.”

“Once there was a mother who was to give birth to a baby. After a few minutes, finally the baby was born. He was not a baby, but a little monster whose head was that big and grey, whose teeth were that sharp and big, whose crying was that scary. And he kept drinking his mother’s blood. The doctors were so frightened that they decided to kill the baby. But he ran away. Few days later, the doctors in that operation were killed one by one, but the head of the baby became biger and biger. He was always cryi8ng and his mouth was full of blood.”

“Long long ago, there was a butcher who killed pigs and sold them. He usually hug a pig on a peach tree in his yard and used a sharp knife to kill it. The blood of the pigs drop down into the soil. Many souls of pigs gathered under the tree and formed a large ghost; they hated the butcher very much. So the tree is covered with anger. One day, a man who researched in ghost saw the tree. He thought there would be something bad happen to the butcher. But the butcher ingnored his warning. Then a rainy night came. It rained heavily and the thunder and lighting sounded horrible. The large ghost came out and into the room. The butcher was waken up by the noise. He scared to death at the sight of the ghost.”

“In my hometown there was a couple, they are all killed in a terrible accident. I am sorry to say that there was a baby of 8 month in the woman’s stomach. So the terrible accident destoryed the whole family. It’s said that a man owed much money from the couple. But he made it a seret after they died. He never planed to give the money to their parents. So one day when the man on his way home at dawn, he saw a woman cry heavily and her hair is long also not held. When the woman looked up at him, he almost scared to death, the girl is the dead woman. The woman keep crying without saying anything and the man became sick after that time. And he didn’t pull through until he paid the money to the couple’s parents.”

Even after all of this, my favorite part is yet to come. As class ended and I dismissed the students, one girl walked up to me excitedly and handed me a piece of paper. She said, “here is a thank you note for you!” Here is what her thank you note said:

“I feel very happy in this class. You always try your best to speak loudly and clearly, though you’ll be much more tired in that way. The Halloween is coming, but you can’t spend it with your family, what a pity. I appriate your well teaching. Thank you! Wish you a happy Halloween Day!”

Seriously, there are no people in the world sweeter (or stranger) than my little students.

Fail.

No matter how many times we fail, we continue to expect success.  Yesterday, we went to the bank in China.  It took 3 hours.  One reason was that when we got to bank, here is what we found instead of the bank:



On the plus side, our sense of irony is developing quite nicely.

Feng Huang Phoenix

Last week was our fall vacation, and we made good use of it by visiting a city called Feng Huang, which means phoenix. As the story goes, in ancient times a beautiful phoenix was flying throughout China, and as it flew over this city, it thought it was so beautiful that it stopped to stay a while. So then the city was named FengHuang after the bird. Stories aside, it was an enchanting ancient city; one of the few cities in China that is still full of the traditional architecture and is less effected by the modernization which is widespread in other parts of China. Before we moved here, we had the idea that all the cities in China would be like this one; unfortunately, we were mistaken. It was great to spend a few days experiencing the China we had always imagined: curved rooftops, silk vendors, red lanterns, canal boats, and pointed straw hats.
However, experiencing real China also means traveling in the middle of the night, riding on loud and dirty trains, and trying to sleep on merciless rigidly hard beds. We left on Monday at midnight to “sleep” on an overnight train. Seven hours of traveling and zero hours of sleep later, we arrived in Jishou, a city an hour away from our destination. We climbed on a bus at 7:30 am and tried to sleep for an hour before arriving in FengHuang. When we finally made it to FengHuang, we checked into our hotel and took a nap before exploring the city. The next day was wonderful, the next night of sleep was awful. We are beginning to think that sleeping on the sidewalk would be more comfortable than sleeping on a Chinese bed. The Chinese say that hard beds are good for your back; I say they are good for sleep deprivation torture. After two or three hours in one of those beds, I would be ready to spill any secret in exchange for a little sleep. Although we were doggedly exhausted for most of the trip, we still had a really good time and bought plenty of souvenirs to share with our friends when we return to America. Actually, shopping for souvenirs is one of the main reasons we decided to visit FengHuang; we spent the majority of our time bartering prices with the local vendors. At 4:30 on Thursday morning, we got up to prepare for our departure. We caught a taxi at 5 am and put five people in the car that was meant for four and rode an hour to the next city to catch our train. Our train left at 7 am, and we tried our best to sleep until we finally collapsed into our apartments at 4 that afternoon. And now I have rambled on enough. Unfortunately, we are still having photo troubles, so I can only post one picture:



This is the view of FengHuang at night

I would love to post a dozen more pictures, but unfortunately I can’t. Instead, I will give you a link to our new photo site where you can see as many pictures as you like of our life in China, including more pictures of our trip to FengHuang:
http://picasaweb.google.com/elizabethopheim

National Day and Moon Cakes

It’s been almost a month since our last blog update, so I do feel guilty for not updating as much as I should. Even still, I feel like there isn’t much to say. Our first vacation started yesterday — Chinese national day and Mid-Autumn Festival combine to give us a weeklong break. Before the break, we had both begun our classes and met almost all of our new students.

In the 4 weeks we’ve been here, we have had the chance to reconnect with many of our old friends whom we spent a lot of time with last year. A few of them are really showing some promise and we have very high hopes for them. We are currently in the process of trying to schedule regular times to be with them to encourage their growth. We have met several new students but haven’t had much time to establish friendships with them. Soon we will be spending more and more time with them and we will undoubtedly be busier than we can manage in no time.

So, we are taking advantage of our holiday and resting for a few days. Chinese National Day was October 1st...it’s comparable to the American fourth of July. In 1949, the People’s Republic of China was founded, when the communist army defeated the Japanese who were controlling China at the time. Our students, and all Chinese, are very very proud of their country and its independence from foreign control, so this holiday is very important to them. What’s more, this year is the 60 year anniversary, so it makes it all the more special. There has been no shortage of firecrackers going off, especially in the mornings. The second holiday is Mid-Autumn Festival, October 3rd. As far as we can tell, this is like a harvest festival that celebrates the moon...Chinese people will eat “moon cakes” and try to catch a glimpse of the moon that night. (This is not always an easy task, as our area of China is nearly always cloudy.) As for moon cakes, I am one who will abstain this year...most foreigners find them disgusting. There are different types of moon cakes, but the most common kind is a pastry filled with lotus root and the yolk of a hard-boiled egg. For Chinese people, these are both times to celebrate, but for foreigners like us, it is a time to travel! We plan to rest for the first few days of our break, and then travel for a few days. I’m sure after we return, I will have pictures to share, but as of now, I am unable to put pictures up because of the internet restrictions in China. Hopefully next week I can find away around this unfortunate censorship situation. Instead, I will simply offer a link to a picture of a moon cake to tide you over:
http://www.snpfood.com/images/01_2005/mooncake.jpg

Hao Jiu Bu Jian!

Literally, “good wine no meet,” or long time no see! We are back in China now after two months of “vacation” in the United States. We were very busy traveling, visiting our families, and catching up on all of the American foods we missed while we were in China. We’re also very grateful to all of our Family members in Oklahoma, Minnesota, and South Dakota for your support and encouragement while we were with you. While it was wonderful to have that time to rest a little and be with everyone we missed so much, we are glad to be back at work in China!

The journey back was long, and unfortunately, eventful. We ended up missing three of our five flights, but fortunately we were able to re-arrange and work it out so that we still made it to China without too much delay. Even still, 40 hours of traveling with barely any sleep will drag anyone down, so we collapsed into our apartment on Wednesday afternoon and have been trying to recover from jet lag ever since. Now we are getting settled again, re-connecting with our friends, and preparing to begin another year of work.

We’ve only been back a brief five days, but as always, there has been no shortage of excitement or strangeness. This year, we have another teacher here to help us, Jessica. Thankfully, we really like her and we are all getting along great, which will make our work much easier. Also, our other teacher from last year, Katie, still remains with us and we are extremely glad to have her with us again. We all are facing the year with high hopes and lots of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, the weather here has been even hotter than the food, which makes it hard for us to want to leave our nice, air conditioned apartment to go out into what feels like a sauna. But, aside from that and a broken washing machine, things are going well. I (Elizabeth) will begin classes this week, and Zack will begin next month. This means that we will soon be meeting new people whom we can spend time with and share with.

I’ll leave you with pictures of our dinner on Saturday night: flame-grilled crawdads.

PS: This year I will be using Twitter to occasionally make short comments about our life in China. If you’d like to follow us on Twitter, we are http://twitter.com/chinabyeliz

家, sweet 家

We have made it back into the good ol' U S of A.  After 35 exhausting hours of traveling through busses, trains, and airports, we finally touched down into Oklahoma City at 10:00 am on Tuesday morning.  If you want to see us or talk with us, send us an email and we will give you our phone number and try to set something up!  We'll be in Oklahoma City for two weeks or so, and then will head up north until the first week of September.  We have a lot of stories and pictures to share with anyone who is interested in listening.  Thanks to all of you for your thoughts and support of us throughout the last 10 months; we appreciate it more than we can say.

Three Days

Due to some unforeseen events, we have decided to cancel our trip to Beijing and are returning to America right away. Today we will pack and clean, tomorrow we will sew up loose ends and depart, and Tuesday we will arrive in Oklahoma City. From the moment I'm writing this until the moment we leave, I have about 25 hours to get everything done, so I don't have time to write anything more. See you all soon!

Grading Treasures

This week Zack has been frantically grading papers in an effort to get all of his grades finished before we take a journey to Beijing.  In his wake, I have found several homework assignments from the students which are quite amusing.  Here are two examples from an assignment Zack gave the students:  to write a poem.

First poem, a love poem:

I love you so much

I want to be with you at lunch

and I hope you can give me a chance

because I want to marry in the church.

I would like some cheese

and you can plant some trees

to build up a beautiful world

and all the people like chinese.

Second poem, about Zack:

Tell you a person very important

he is a friend from American

and who he likes wear shirts

that do is our teacher favorite

He looks like a man heavyset

that's the fact

he wants what's best for us

so we give him him wishes best.

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."   -- Robert Frost

我们爱你美国

At long last, we have made it back to the blog for a post.  In the last several weeks, our internet has refused to allow us access to any and all blogs, even our own.  But, in my deviousness, I have found a way around the system and am now able to post on here.  At present we are less than a month away from coming back to the United States for our summer vacation.  Our return ticket is dated for July 1st.  We have been busily trying to wrap up the semester with final exams and grading.  As soon as we have finished that, we will try to spend a week in Beijing doing all of the touristy things before we pack up our things and head back west.  Our first destination is Oklahoma City, so we will be in OKC for at least the first week of July.  After that, we will head north to South Dakota and Minnesota.  If you want more details, you’ll have to ask us later, because right now we are all a little fuzzy on the specifics of where we will be and when.  

Other than that, we don’t have much to say at this point.  It seems like the longer we are here, the less there is to write about.  Because although things are still strange, we don’t find them surprising anymore.  Rest assured that when we come to visit we will have plenty of stories and lots of good news to report.  But for now, I’ll just tell you that we are really looking forward to seeing all of you and having some time to relax and re-experience goodies such as Dr. Pepper and ham sandwiches. 

I want it that way

This week in my classes, I (elizabeth) have been teaching my students about American music.  I teach them about many different genres, and play them a song to represent each genre.  After each song was finished, I asked my students to raise their hands if they liked the song.  I'm not sure there is any better representation of our students' attitude and mentality than the outcome of the hand-raising.  I will show the results below, with the name of the artist I played for them followed by the number of hand-raises the artist received.

Ray Charles - 0

Ella Fitzgerald - 0

Johnny Cash - 3

James Brown - 0

Elvis Presley - 6

Guns N Roses - 1

Snoop Dogg - 0

Backstreet Boys - 31

There are 31 students in the class, all between the ages of 18 and 20, both male and female.

Love Me, Love Your Stomach

This week in my classes, I gave the assignment of creating an imaginary restaurant menu.  The students were delighted, and immediately set off to the task before them with cell-phone dictionaries in their hands and imagination in their hearts.  All I can say about the results is that I am fortunate to be in a place where almost every day something makes me laugh until I cry.  I have compiled a menu of my own, using some favorite quotes from my students' work.

Restaurant names:  Love Me, Love Your Stomach

  37 degrees

Restaurant descriptions:

37 degrees is our restaurant's name. We choose it because its human body temperature and thus we prove that we care about our guests sincerely.

Chinese sea-food restaurant. We have all kinds of sea-food.  We have witresses who are as beautiful as mermaid and waiters who are cool like pirate.

Dishes: (I don't even know what some of them meant to say.)

Scrambled spinch

Salty taste crispy trotter

Jam duck's neck

Flaby

Sweat and saul chine

Duck blood steamed chicken giblets

Yellow belly dance

One hundred kinds of flowers with dew

Mud-baked dragon tongue

Odd-odour bean curd

Hot hog bowel

Tasty baby pigeon

Fry sphenoid with block pepper

Beef chafing dish

F*** a fish head

As if this weren't enough for one day, one of Zack's students sent a note to him before class, which read:

Sir:

I have diarrhea.  It's severe.  So I hope to ask for a sick leave.  I hope you can understand me.

- Betty

Now I will leave you with a picture of a restaurant menu which speaks for itself:

There are no foreign lands...

...it is the traveler only who is foreign.       -- Robert Louis Stevenson

It's been about three weeks since we've updated anything, so I feel as though it is time.  The problem with living in a foreign country for this long is that it just becomes too much to write about.  The longer we stay here, the more I have to say and the less I am able to say it.  It's as though the task before me is copying down War and Peace on a post-it note.  Things that we originally found to be completely absurd have become ordinary and expected; still, we hear, see, taste, and experience new absurd things every day, which are just melding with the previous things to become one astronomical amalgamation of absurdity.  

Having said that, I will now attempt to give you a brief and inadequate synopsis of what we have been doing in the last few weeks.  The first weekend of the month we had a one-day break from school, so some of our friends from a nearby city came to visit us.  We had a great time together, exploring our own city and just spending time with each other...even in a city of 4 million, we get lonely sometimes, so it was great to see them.  The next weekend was Easter, so I will include some pictures.

Coloring eggs...Emma and Katie

Still coloring Easter eggs...

The final product:  our Easter basket complete with flower-shaped marshmallows.

Easter Sunday morning -- our brunch feast.

A few times in the past few weeks, we have had some truly sublime days of sunshine.  We took advantage of the rare opportunities by spending a lot of time outside and walking around downtown.  More pictures:

This man is giving a Chinese calligraphy class in the square...he's just using water to paint the characters on the cement.

On one particularly awesome sunny day...riding a paddle-boat at the children's park

Zack bonding with the pigeons at the park

Your eyes aren't fooling you...that really is two girls carrying an umbrella when it isn't raining.  I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but Chinese girls long for white skin.  They will do anything, no matter how insane, to achieve this white skin.  This includes wearing long sleeves and carrying an umbrella when it is 85 degrees outside.

The newest member of the Opheim household.  We rescued him from a woman at the park who had him in a tiny cage and picked him up by the ears.  She sold him to us for about a dollar fifty.  His name is Titus.

After seeing this picture, you may need to refresh your browser due to cuteness overload.

So, that has been our life lately.  We've been busier than ever, with students coming to our home every night of the week.  If it weren't for the few free afternoons we have during the week, I think we'd both go crazy.  But, we didn't come here for a vacation, we came here to work.  And that's what we've been doing.  And in case any of you are wondering when we will be returning for the summer, we booked our tickets to come back to the states on July 1st.  I'll leave you all with a picture I took in a little valley on the outskirts of town.  Take care, everyone.

"The manner of giving is worth more than the gift"

   -- Pierre Corneille, Le Menteur

As I was cleaning up today, I glanced around the apartment and realized that our home is filled with gifts from our students.  They range from beautiful to thoughtful to strange and absurd.  Then I realized that I have never shared any of these gifts with those back home.  I coupled this with the realization that I haven't updated the blog in a while, and here is what has come from all the realizations:  pictures of some of the glorious gifts we have been given this year.

This is a "friendship knot."  They are everywhere in China.  This one is particularly lovely.  As far as we know, their only purpose is for home decoration.

The majority of the gifts we receive are food.  The majority of the food gifts are just disgusting stuff we would never buy for ourselves.  This is a vacuum-sealed piece of tofu snack.

Here is a jade (?) dragon statue given to us by the father of one of our students.  We were in her home and not thinking, told her that her shelves were cool.  Immediately, her father grabbed this dragon which was sitting on the shelf and insisted that we take it with us.

This was a birthday gift for me.  It is a creepy robot-baby that dances, crawls, and talks.

This was a post-holiday gift that one student brought from her hometown.  It is exactly what it looks like...a little vacuum-sealed squid.  Even Zack couldn't finish this one.

This is one of the coolest gifts...it is a "bamboo slip."  Basically, the predecessor to paper in China...strips of bamboo sewn together with writing on them.  It has a famous Chinese poem written on it, although we can't read it.

A closer look... 

One of the aforementioned absurd gifts.  This, as you can see, is a bracelet.  The absurd part is that it wasn't a gift for me, it was a gift for Zack.

Another birthday gift...a photo album with the face and foot of a lamb.

As you can read from the picture, this is a "phone stape."  Whatever that means.  It's actually two little matching cell phone charms...the black one was for Zack and the white one for me.

Last but not least, our favorite and most disgusting gift of all.  This is a "hometown specialty" from one of our students.  If you can guess what it is, you win a prize...like the privilege of eating these things.  They are actually little vacuum-sealed duck tongues.

No, I'm not lying...duck tongues.  You can see that the little tongue-tendons are still attached for your culinary pleasure.  We have yet to attempt to consume this......."delicacy."

There you have it...the good, the bad, and the scary.  Next time you get a pack of socks for your birthday or a fruitcake for Christmas, just be thankful and realize that it could always be worse...you could be looking at a package full of duck tongues.

Dutter-colored fly

I have a notebook that I bought at a shop here that says "Butterfly...Dutter-colored fly.  We often see a kind of insect-butterfly. They fly in the sky, brushwood, tussock, auso between the flowers with their smart wings, which make the nature more beautiful."  Almost every day our ears are graced with really strange versions of english, so I decided to share some amusing tidbits from the homework of our students.

"When you are lying to someone, you must be nervous.  Maybe I'm a little timid, before I speak up.  I will told myself again and again: 'keep clam, keep clam, or it will be found.'  Just like a stealer."

"After the final examination, a very excellent boy told he had hots for me, to tell the truth, I had the same feeling."

"Even my father was at home, he was strict, and talked to me like a Dutch uncle."

"Before you find your handsome prince you've got to kiss a lot of frogs then be thankful to them.  It's they that make you a attractive dish."

"I saw a obese girl.  She wore a very big T-shirt.  Her proud flesh was obvious.  I nearly shouted and asked my girl-friend who this fat and ugly was."

"I just have a light impression on you, that is a beautiful caucasian with sandy hair and blue eyes."

I hope they entertained you as much as they did me.  I'm sure I'll have more samples in no time.

爸 爸 约 翰 !!!

No.  We have not fallen off the edge of the world.  Thank you for asking.  We simply fell into a routine of nothing but rest (translation = laziness) for a few weeks while everyone we know went home for vacation.  I don't exaggerate.  Everyone we know left for about 4 weeks.  Beyond that, almost every restaurant and store was closed, leaving us alone in our apartment with nothing to do but obtain some much-needed rest.  As thankful as we were for the opportunity to get some R&R, we got bored after a while and tried to do some traveling...unsuccessfully.  We had planned to spend some time traveling around the east coast, around Shanghai.  However, by the time we tried to reserve our tickets and hotels, everything was booked up for Chinese New Year.  We learned that Chinese New Year is the largest human migration in the world.  Every family travels to be with the rest of their family to have fifteen days of reunion dinners with their family and friends.  So, we ended up staying at home and only spending a couple of days traveling to a nearby big city to buy Western amenities like cheese.

But, I digress.  The point is, since we last blogged, we have experienced Chinese New Year firsthand, and we are certain you'd like to hear all about it.  To properly understand the atmosphere of Chinese New Year, you need to think about how important atmosphere is to the Christmas season in America.  During Christmastime in America, everything you see radiates festive-ness.  It is the same here during New Year...everywhere you look, everywhere you go, everyone you see...you cannot miss the fact that Chinese New Year is upon you.  Every shop is converted from a shoe store, grocery store, convenience store....into a miniature fireworks outlet.  Every window in the city is plastered with "paper-cuts."  They are not dissimilar to the paper snowflakes we all made as children.  They are decorative designs of flowers, chinese characters, or animals cut out of red paper and hung on windows.  Here is an example of a paper cut made especially for this year, the "year of the ox."

Not only are firecrackers everywhere, but they are cheap!  And so accessible.  It is unbelievably easy for any Chinese kid, no matter the age, to obtain both firecrackers and a lighter to entertain himself.  Which means it was equally easy for Zack to fulfill all his firecracker fantasies by buying enough explosives to destroy an entire lego-nation.  Here is a sampling of Zack's Chinese New Year purchases:

He spent days running around the neighborhood blowing up various objects and inviting children to help him in his antics.  Ordinarily, we hear firecrackers a few times a day, just on any old day.  But on Chinese New Year, we hear firecrackers all day long.  The loudest is at midnight, when each family lights their biggest firecrackers...it puts the fourth of July to shame.  The strange thing is that it is so steeped in superstition.  So many of the traditions are based on superstition or getting good luck.  Everyone hangs signs on their front doors that have the word for “happiness” hung upside-down.  This is because the word “upside-down” in Chinese sounds like the word “come to you.”  So hanging happiness upside down is like saying “happiness come to you.”  Here is an example on our neighbor's door:

One tradition is to eat dumplings on new years day and as they are prepared, a coin is put inside one of them.  Whoever eats the dumpling with the coin in it is said to have good luck all year.  One crazy example is that one afternoon I was sitting at home and suddenly heard the loudest firecrackers I have ever heard.  And it sounded like they were right outside my door.  So I went to the door and looked out, and one man had laid a long strip of black cats up the concrete stairs leading past my door to his door.  Can you imagine how loud black cats are inside a concrete stairwell with steel doors?  On New Years Eve, families all light loud firecrackers outside their doors to “scare evil spirits” away from their homes.  That was one tradition we did not partake in.

Since Chinese New Year (January 26), we haven't been up to much.  Our students all came back to the city last week, so last week was our first week of classes.  We were delighted to be back at work at long last, and since last week we have spent a lot of time with our students.  Many of them brought us gifts from their hometown...our favorite and the weirdest was a bag of duck tongues.  Yes, duck tongues...complete with the tendon-like-strings that used to attach the tongue to the now speechless ducks.  Unfortunately, if we are going to keep up the pace in our work, I need to sleep at some point.  I'll leave you with a picture snapped at the bus station.

.......just in case any of you need to debark.

pictures, pictures, pictures

We've created an account on photobucket.com to post some extra pictures that we don't feel are necessarily worthy of the 15-minutes-of-fame that the others get.  So, if you're bored or have a lot of free time, there are tons more pictures of our travels in china for you to peruse.  Go to this page: http://photobucket.com/elizabethopheimchina.  When you get there, it can be a little confusing, just click on one of the albums on the left; they are labeled by the months in which they were taken.  Now, if you don't have time to look through it, we do have one video we'd like to share with you that was shot during a recent trip to the supermarket.  If you have a weak stomach or a very soft heart for all animals, maybe you'd better skip this one.  Click here for the video.  Enjoy!

新年快乐

...we know, it's been a while.  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!  With the holiday season, we have been busier than ever with classes, preparing for finals, grading finals, Christmas shopping, Christmas parties and banquets, and traveling.  Now we are finally settling down a little, albeit still surrounded by piles of post-finals week paperwork.  However, in the name of procrastination, I have decided to take a few moments to provide a much-belated update of our life in China.

Finals week, which incidentally was also Christmas week, was crazy.  After preparing all of our final exams, we learned that we are only allowed to make 1 one-page-copy at the school for each student.  So there I stood with a 5-page exam in my hand and exasperated exclamations rising in my throat with no idea what to do before my final the next morning.  Eventually we ended up hiking across campus to a print shop every night and paying to have all of our finals copied ourselves.  Just one of the many frustrations of learning to function in a different world.  When it came to actually giving the students the finals, we were even more frustrated.  We caught several of our students unabashedly cheating.  In one of my classes, I caught 7 students cheating and I'm pretty certain there were more of them that I didn't catch.  In the end I resorted to telling them that if I even saw more than one pen on their desks I would fail them.  Many of them seemed bewildered that their formerly laid-back and slack teacher had morphed into a super-strict hawk-eyed monster.  

On Christmas Eve I finished a final at about 9:30 am and we spent the rest of the day scouring the city for gifts for each other.  We had a Christmas party that night with many of our students, complete with punch, cookies, music, and a white elephant gift exchange.  After they all left, we settled on the couch to watch It's a Wonderful Life and fell into bed exhausted to rest up for Christmas Day.  When Christmas Day came, we opened gifts from each other and from home, cooked a delectable assortment of non-Chinese foods, and allowed ourselves some much-needed relaxation.

After finishing our finals on Friday, we embarked on a journey on Saturday to visit some of our expat friends in Enshi, a nearby city.  When I say nearby I mean in distance, but not in time...the city is about 110 miles away from us, but the bus ride there is 12 hours long.  No, I'm not kidding.  We arrived at the bus station at 7:45 am, took one look at the "bus" and turned around.  It was a van jam-packed with people and suitcases...however crowded you are imagining it in your head, triple it.  We exchanged our tickets for a "DA de qi che"...BIG bus.  After finally leaving, we spent what seemed like an eternity in another dimension.  Imagine that you are stuck in a straight jacket inside a bouncing inflatable castle with all of the loudest people you know and half of them are chain-smoking....and it's 35 degrees.  When they release you for 5 minutes to take a bathroom break, you climb down a cliff to a tin-roofed shack to find that these are not toilets...not even port-a-potties.  It's a trench with 18-inch high walls separating the "stalls."  And then it's back on the bus.  The only thing that made this trip tolerable was the view.  Beautiful mountains and cliffs with valleys full of farming communities and towns untouched by city life.  To be honest, one of our favorite sights was not the landscape, but the few villages we drove through that seemed to be having some kind of bizarre harvest.  I'm not even talking about the 8-or-so pigs we saw hanging upside-down with blood and guts all on display.  What we saw is something I never thought I would see in my life...dozens and dozens of dogs.  Not live dogs...dog carcasses, skinned and gutted, and hanging by their feet on meat hooks in outdoor markets.  Morbid fascination kept our faces glued to the grimy windows of the bus for a while, making us forget everything else.

That being said, we really enjoyed our time in Enshi with our friends.  We had a second Christmas and had a wonderful few days being refreshed and relaxing.  Then it was back on the bus again.  As the clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve, we were dragging our luggage out of a taxi and dragging ourselves up to our apartment exhausted and wondering, "what are all the fireworks for?"  Now we are at home, looking forward to six sensational weeks of R and R.  I've blabbed enough, now I'm sure you're all wondering if you read all of this for nothing or if I'm actually going to get around to putting up the pictures you came here for.  Here they are...

If you were wondering if we had a tree, yes we did...and here it is.

Two students "helping" me decorate Christmas cookies

My real helper

Our Christmas Eve party...everyone is showing off their new gifts.

The idea is that you can figure out for yourself what this one is.  Zack found it at the market.

In Enshi with some of our friends.

A weaving shop owned by some Tujia people, a minority group in Enshi.

That's all the interesting pictures we have from this month...in the hustle and bustle, the cameras fell a little by the wayside.  Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas season and good luck with your resolutions.