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.