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.