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.