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.