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.
