北京 Beijing, baby!

That's right, at this very moment I am sitting at Starbucks in
Beijing...drinking a something-ccino and stuffing a blueberry muffin
in my mouth as fast as I can. It's not because I'm hungry or in a
hurry; I just want to inhale all of the American-ness at once before
it slips through my fingers. (yes, even though we're in the most
famous city in China, to us it is like a taste of home.). We left on
Tuesday afternoon, and already we have seen Starbucks, Dairy Queen, 7-
Eleven, Papa John's, Walmart, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Hooters. (we
skipped visiting the latter.) But please don't misunderstand, we
intend to experience all we can of real Beijing...the great wall,
Tiananmen Square, Peking duck, the silk market, and the gleaming new
subway system. After we finish our rounds through Beijing, we plan
to visit Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Wenzhou, more famous places in
China. After what I'm certain will be an exhausting 2 weeks, we will
return to our apartment in Yichang, hopefully with a few good stories
and great pictures to share with you.

Merry Belated Christmas?

Here's the thing.  It's not that I didn't want to update all of you on our lives during the holidays...it's just that I didn't feel it was all that exciting.  And to tell you the truth, a ho-hum holiday is exactly what we wanted.  You see, excitement isn't always good when you're in a foreign country.  Sure, if we ate roast dog for Christmas dinner or had a bamboo Christmas tree or had a Christmas morning earthquake...we’d have some very fascinating stories to tell.  But, while excitement and stories are great for any other day, it’s the last thing we wanted on Christmas.  So, perhaps you can understand why I’m thrilled to report that we have nothing to report.  We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with our closest friends, Katie and Jessica.  We holed up in our apartment and gathered around the Christmas tree, ate Christmas cookies, watched It’s a Wonderful Life, stuffed stockings, opened gifts, and enjoyed a Christmas dinner.  Just like you!  There’s nothing better than having a few days when you feel like you’re at home.  The day after Christmas, it was back to reality, and we had a huge Christmas party for all of our friends...the final count was 31 people.  We ate store-bought cookies (shaped like snowmen, flavored like beans), listened to Christmas music, read the Christmas story, and played white elephant/dirty Santa.  The pictures above are of our Christmas tree and of some of our friends at our Christmas party.  I wish I could put several more pictures up, but alas, I am still extremely limited by the “Great Firewall.”  But as always, if you want to see more of our pictures, you can go to our Picasa page...I just put up pictures from the month of December.
Our Picasa page:   http://picasaweb.google.com/elizabethopheim/

For New Year’s Eve, our school took all of the foreigners out to eat.  We all got on a bus and drove for about an hour to a restaurant in the middle of nowhere.  During the bus ride, somebody shouted to our boss, “Jian, where are we going?”  Jian responded, “to a slave market!”  While we love his sense of humor, the whole night was a little unbearable.  The food was super weird, the restaurant felt like it was in the middle of Antarctica, and the drunkenness of the other foreigners made us embarrassed and uncomfortable.  After it was finally over, we got home and Zack bought a giant pack of fireworks to try to redeem the evening, and we rang in the New Year with the explosives...of course, we had our New Year about 14 hours before you all did.

Now we are just finishing up the semester, getting into our final exams at last.  We are exhausted, and definitely ready for classes to be finished so that we can have a rest.  But, we are also extremely optimistic about next semester and what is in store for us and our work here.  We hope you can keep us and our Family here in your thoughts as we prepare for a New Year of work.

Dear Satan Claus...

That's how a few of my students began their homework assignment today.  I told them all to write a letter to Santa asking for a gift for Christmas Eve.  A lot of our students get letters mixed up, since Chinese doesn't have letters or spelling the way that English does...thus, Santa Claus becomes Satan Claus.

I will now include two of my favorite letters from class today:

Dear Stanta,
  I do love you.  Here I want to beg u for a Christmas present.  It should be a box of happiness.  If I open it, everyone would forget their suffering but get their happiness.  I would be appreciate if you give it to me.  Dear Stanta, waiting for your present.
Sincerely,
Annie

Santa Claus:
You ok?  You feel cold?
Now I'm writting to ask for a gift for I've been nice ever since birth.  I'm wondering would you mind giving me Rudolf as a gift since I'm really afraid of the dark and I hate walking long to class, the distance is killing me!
Cookie and milk are ready!  Don't forget to bring the little reindeer!
Sincerely:  Tim

To tell the truth, I'd be happy with either of those gifts myself.

We have liftoff

On December 1st, one fateful week ago, the city of Yichang reached it's prime.  As promised (a second time), the great kahuna known as Walmart opened in our lowly city!  I was determined to go shopping there, whether or not the doors had actually opened this time.  To my delight, they had, and I marched in, ready to experience all the shopping magnificence that Walmart had to offer me.  To say it was crowded would be a ridiculous understatement.  It was so crowded that they kept security guards on the escalators to make sure that too many people didn’t get on and break them.  Whoever is in charge of marketing at the Walmart here is either completely insane or an evil genius.  He (or she) decided that, in the land of rice and oil, that on the opening day of the biggest supermarket in city, they would offer a huge sale on RICE and OIL.  When I made it to the center of the beast, there were literally hundreds of Chinese housewives waiting in line to buy gallons of oil and 50-pound bags of rice.  Fortunately, I have absolutely no desire to buy either of those things, so I happily pushed my cart through the aisles, more and more delighted with every step.  The highlights, things that didn’t exist in Yichang until now:  Christmas wrapping paper, smallmouth bass, bell peppers, root beer, pints of ice cream, strawberries out of season, take-home pizza, cough drops, and ziploc bags!!!  We’re all really excited.  We’re even more excited for the day the crowds dwindle, and we can lay siege to “our” store.

感恩节 Gan En Jie

7:06 am:   First sign of movement on Thanksgiving morning.  Not because we want to get up early or     because we have class, but because we are woken up by an abrupt sound:  "doo doo doo!"  It's a text message sent from one of my students before dawn:  "happy thanks giving day ,i would like to give thanks to you for teaching me a lot of knowledges.  yours, april."  I grunt, roll over, and promptly fall back asleep.

9:30 am:  Second sign of life.  Twenty or so text messages after the original one, I decide it is no use trying to sleep and drug myself out of bed.  Breakfast?  Absolutely not.  I need to save room for the feast we'll be consuming later.

11:00 am:  I stand over Zack's head and pry his eyelids open and beg him to help me wash the dishes.  Being the gracious and kind man that he is, he stumbles out of bed in between groans and plunges his hands into a sink full of suds, effectively beginning our day of work in the kitchen.  I leave him to do the dishes and begin chopping various nuts and vegetables.

12:15 pm:  Zack and I are both elbow-deep in flour, working on making our own homemade bread.  I instruct him to mimic me exactly, so that both of the batches of bread would turn out well.  (More on this as it develops.)

12:30 pm:  Katie and Jessica arrive at the door, breathless and excited, shouting "Happy Thanksgiving!" with their arms full of pots, snacks, and ingredients.  Until now, it didn't really feel like Thanksgiving.  Now all is right with the world.

1:00 pm:  I break down and eat one of the cinnamon rolls I had prepared the night before.  I almost fall out of my chair upon realizing how delicious it is, and think that maybe there is hope for me as a cook after all.

1:30 pm:  Jessica announces that she is going to make the mashed potatoes, even if she is "domestically challenged."  I give her two potato peelers to choose from, and she goes to work peeling.

1:37 pm:  Jessica proclaims that the potato peeler is "handist" and she wants one made for left-handed people.  Zack shows her that even if he uses his left hand, he can peel a potato faster than her.

1:45 pm:  My turn to send a text message.  I text one of our sisters and ask her if she is coming to our Thanksgiving dinner or not.  

1:46 pm:  Our sister answers that she is in the hospital having her "gut checked" (whatever that means) and that she will come later.

1:50 pm:  Katie reveals that the sweet potatoes she bought earlier that day are not, in fact, sweet potatoes.

1:52 pm:  We all beg Zack to go out on a quest to find sweet potatoes, apple cider vinegar, and a makeshift turkey.

2:10 pm:  Zack, the valiant hero, leaves on his quest, armed with only a scribble of Chinese writing and his bravery.

2:00 - 3:30 pm:  Chopping, mixing, baking, sautéing, and tasting

3:30 pm:  It becomes quite clear that the bread is not going to be a success.  Something about the combination of me and yeast is volatile, and never turns out well.  We end up having very tiny, dense rolls.

3:45 pm:  Zack the Bold returns with sweet potatoes, something that isn't apple cider vinegar, and six roasted chickens.

4:00 pm:  I sit down in front of the chickens and begin to tear the flesh from their bones, thoroughly disgusted, but determined to finish so that we can all pretend that the meat came from a turkey and not six chickens.

4:30 pm:  Our sister shows up.  I still can't figure out what she was doing at the hospital, but apparently whatever it was, it hasn't ruined her appetite.

5:00 pm:  We are finished cooking!!!  At long last, we all sit down to our sumptuous feast, feeling as though we haven't eaten in months and today our blind eyes have been opened to the world of food.  We all begin by taking turns saying what we are thankful for.

5:07 pm:  We give up on saying what we are thankful for because tears are getting in the way, and we finally begin to reap the rewards of our day of hard work.

5:45 pm:  Possibly more full than any group of humans has ever been, we collapse on the couch, unable to move, talk, or even think.  We discover that you needn't consume turkey on Thanksgiving to end up exhausted after the meal.

5:50 pm:  We argue about whether or not we should eat pie now or later.  Even though we are all full, some of us argue to eat it right away while others are too tired to even argue, let alone eat more.

6:30 pm:  Pie.  Never has one single word seemed so succulent.

7:30 pm:  Zack announces that these leftovers aren't just going to clear themselves, nor are the dishes going to wash themselves.  Begrudgingly, we all take the hint and begin cleaning up.

8:00 pm:  Having decided that cleaning up isn't very much fun, our Chinese friends make their exit.

8:30 - 10:00 pm:  Block of time that none of us have any memory of.  Apparently we were all in some sort of food-induced coma.

10:00 pm:  We begin playing spades, in spite of the fact that Zack hates card games and I have never played spades before.  

11:20 pm:  Someone wins spades.  I won't say who, but it wasn't not me.

11:30 pm:  We collapse into bed, looking forward to tomorrow, because everyone knows what the day after Thanksgiving means.  Leftovers.

The emis stame

I'll the how-dumb-deid o'the carld havist mucht.
the warl' like an eemis stme
wag i the lift
Am' my eerie mememories fa'
like a yowdemdrift
the worlds cut ootithe stame
had the fug o'fame
am' history's hazelnaw
nao yirdit thain.

WHAT?!  I gave a pretty simple homework assignment:  write something in cursive to practice your cursive writing.  To be fair, I did say anything was okay, as long as it was written in cursive.  And he did write this random jumble of made-up words in cursive.  So I gave him full credit, but...seriously?  Ten dollars and a chinese duck neck to anyone who can figure out what this is supposed to mean.

In other news, I went to Walmart today.  For months, there has been a Walmart under construction downtown with a sign promising to open November 24th.  We’ve all been anxiously waiting, and today I went down to indulge my megalo-mart shopping fantasies.  It wasn’t open.  And didn’t show any signs of opening soon.  The Chinese have no word for “false advertising.”

万圣节 WanShengJie

WanShengJie is Chinese for "Halloween."  Yesterday we threw a Halloween party for some of our students.  When they found out, they were all thrilled to be invited, but distraught that they were expected to wear a costume.  Which meant that 3 hours before the party, several girls showed up at our coworker Katie's apartment expecting her to provide them with costumes.  Somehow, she faced the challenge with ferocity and all the girls were delighted.  Other students showed up to the party in no costume at all, then just wiped makeup on their faces or stole parts of costumes from others.  We had oranges painted like jack-o-lanterns, caramel popcorn, punch, dirt and worm brownies, and loads of candy.  Our friends were simply beside themselves the entire night, giggling like elementary school students.
Pictures of our Halloween party and more pictures from October can be found in our online album here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/elizabethopheim
If I can get my pictures to work, I’ll leave you with a picture of the four of us in our costumes.  I am a ninja, Jessica is a pirate, Katie took her costume off (she was a Christmas tree), and Zack was a robot (sort of).