Visited Zhu's hometown for moon festival!

Wow I got to go and visit my friend Zhu's hometown with my other friend Sarah this weekend. We went to his hometown by car and spent the night at his aunties with his mom. It was really really awesome. He lives in a very small village. Maybe only 1000 people and he told us that this is the way that most of china is. We got to meet his grandparents and he showed us the dam in his village that flooded almost 10 years ago. He is 22 but the chinese count birthdays different than the americans. He was born only one month before me so I am 22 here as well. He grew up in a 3 story home right next to this beautiful river and his grandparents live up the hill from him. They live in a small 2 story cottage made out of logs and mud. We ate lunch with them today and had tea with them yesterday. His grandfather's 80th birthday is on October 12th and this is a very big deal. His grandma is in her 70's and she still does all the cooking and cleaning for her husband and they are very very healthy. They raise mulberry leaves for silk worms and grow all their own vegetables and fruit. We walked about 10 or 11 km today because we wanted to go and see Zhu's classmate who had a bunch of puppies but she called him and said that the puppies were all gone when we were almost there so we had to turn around and walk back. The village is so beautiful. It's in this forest and very misty and rainy but quite cool. The atmosphere is so different from the city and I am very grateful to have been invited to see his hometown. We ate fish, rice, tofu, taro, and soybeans with peppers last night for dinner and today for lunch at his grandmothers we had taro, pork, potato and rice, and this really long vegetable that we saw growing outside. I forget the name of it. Zhu's grandparents cannot read but they work very very hard. They speak the linan language but cannot speak very much mandarin at all. That is the dialect of language that they speak around this area. Many many people speak mandarin but some only know the linan language. We came back on the bus and stopped in the town where Zhu's boarding school was for high school. We got to walk around the campus a little bit before we took the bus back to linan. Tonight me and sarah are going to go to people's square to look at the puppies there. I am doing laundry right now and really really enjoyed my weekend.

went to a karaoke bar!

We went to a KTV place. Super awesome. moon festival tomorrow. Tired well goodnight!!!

Going to a tea house tonight, walked around peoples square last night

Well last night was really fun. I walked around peoples square in Lin'an and for a city of about 500,000 that they call a town it is reminiscent of New York City. I threw some darts at some balloons and won a glow in the dark bracelet. It was super awesome. Before that I had a piece of Chinese version of birthday cake and it was adorned with a tomato a peach and something else that tasted good. Lots of frosting. I have also been eating mooncakes. Monday is mooncake festival here so this is a really big thing. Sunday night is the full moon and people from all over are going to be traveling to the West Lake in Hangzhou to watch the full moon rise on sunday night. It is supposed to be very very beautiful. But maybe people won't be able to see it because there is a typhoon somewhere and according to my english students the "influence" of it might make it too cloudy to see the moon which really sucks because it is supposed to be the most beautiful moon of the whole year. Mooncakes are pastries that probably contain as many calories as you need in one week. They are very heavy and after eating one for breakfast it is now 4:34 pm and I am still full. I am looking forward to my long weekend because I don't have to teach on monday and I don't have classes on tuesday. My classes are reading around the world in 80 days by jules verne. He is a most pragmatic author. I get many interesting words out of my students. One said that he wanted to "ameliorate" his english and another in a dialogue said that in order to study the atoms in a frog you must "anotamize" it. I find it funny that they will use words they don't understand to make themselves sound cooler. I don't even know what ameliorate means... He even spelled it correctly so that's kind of cool. I had coffee in a coffee house near the peoples square and the pot was 98 yuan. This is only like 15 dollars or something but for here thats like through the roof. Although I must say that was some excellent coffee after drinking nothing but nescafe for weeks. I had an excellent braised beef dish for 30 yuan. Only 5 dollars but keep in mind that this is uber expensive. A normal meal is like 10 yuan. It's ok to go out once in a while but I won't be doing it all the time. I had a lot of fun yesterday and I will post more tonight about my banquet with my department. I love everyone!

Lynn locked herself out today

Well lynn locked herself out of her apartment today and it was actually pretty funny. Yang Wei came and tried to open the door with the spare keys and none of them fit so she had to call a locksmith who came and tore the lock out of the door with a screw driver and a hammer and then installed a new lock. I also got my laundry key from Zhu and did my first load of laundry. Yay! I guess the lesson learned is that doors are pretty indestructable here. Go lynn we'll be commenting on that for oh yeah... months. love you guys

asked for a bar, got a brothel

Well if there's one thing about taxi drivers here they are very prejudiced. They don't like to pick up white people. Probably because they assume that they won't be able to understand us. We (Me lynn and morten) decided that we wanted to go to a bar last night. Well a bar here is called jiaoba we asked for a bar and ended up at this fancy looking building way way out of town. In the middle of the jade market. Well this should have told us something, but there were budweiser signs everywhere so we assumed we were at a bar. Well we walked in and there were these lines of girls. Very beautiful girls that said helllo to us and then giggled. We should have known then something was weird but morten kept following the guy past more lines of beautiful girls. It was then that we noticed they all had numbers. When the guy opened the door to a room that had a VIP sign and tons of couches we turned around and bolted. Well the guy was yelling at us but we didn't care we ran as if the devil were chasing us. The problem with getting a cab back was that there were none to be had. After walking around this ghettoy area for like 30 mins. A cab driver rescued us and we went back to the old campus. Well that was my adventure last night. I was really really scared but I made it back home ok so now I just have to wait for the next one.

oops forgot one thing

I forgot to mention that me and ju rode around on his electric moped! It was awesome. It was raining so I had to hold this umbrella up so he wouldn't get wet and really cool. Anyway ok laundry time!

had fun met ju's family

I had a lot of fun yesterday! I didn't really do much for the first half of the day, but when Ju knocked on my door at seven last night I was ready for an adventure. He took me to an english corner run by his friend Abdul from Ghanna. Abdul is really awesome. He's a teacher from a private english school in town and they run the english corner so that people can go and practice their english in a controlled setting. There were only about 10 people there so it was really small and nice. We played some games like charades and a game where we had to take the letters out of the word comfortable and make new words. I had a lot of fun it was nice to be the student instead of the teacher. Then Ju took me to the DVD store and I bought Stardust to show to my classes this next week. After that we went to go meet with his cousins to watch the opening ceremonies to the paraolympics. It was really fun to meet his family. They were very kind and welcoming and gave me a chinese name. le le. It means joy joy. We had to leave at 10 because they close the gates to the campus and ju is a student so the curfew applies to him. He dropped me off at my apartment and then went back to the new campus. I live on the old campus. I watched Stardust with Lynn after that. She never saw it so it was really awesome like watching it again for the first time myself. I went to bed late and woke up late today and haven't really done anything of merit this morning. I should do laundry I guess. Classes tomorrow. Love you guys! I love you blake.

Vicariously

Well apparently some people are living vicariously through me so I have to be slightly more descriptive with my days here. So I will start out with yesterday morning. Well wednesday morning actually. So I went for a one mile run and then I walked another mile after that and then I stretched. I know how long it was because I ran on a track! I did pao bu on a paodao. This is prounounced like pau for those hawaiian peoples reading this. "pow" for the americans. and bu is like boo. and all I can say of for the last part of paodao it rhymes with the first part. It means track. And then I went to my teaching meeting after which I spent the next 8 hours reading harry potter fanfiction and then I went to sleep. Yesterday morning I went to my first class and then the second class to teach them. I sweated through both of them scared pretty much shitless but I think I was only speechless for about half of the time. They were really surprised that I was the same age as them but my students are so respectful. They are so kind and interested in me and what I have to say. It isn't at all like I was scared of. They are not used to being the centers of attention in a classroom so when you make for class discussion, they really don't want to. When I went up to the front of the room to talk they are give you very rapt attention. This is what they are used to. My job is to get them to talk. In my last class today I did manage that and I actually kept everyones attention for the full time. We interviewed each other and then presented ourselves to the class. As well I played a game with them where we threw a ball of paper around the classroom and paid a compliment to the person who caught it and then we have to start the next compliment with the last letter of the previous compliment. For example if I told someone that they had a nice shirt then the next person would say something like you are very tall. Or something of that nature. They were creative too. I had one where someone said they were wise and then the next one was you are very energetic and then I had one where the compliment was something like you are lovely and then the next person said you are forever you. I completely cracked up. Everyone did. They are so smart and intelligent. I'm sure that lot of them are amazingly smarter than me. They are bilingual after all. Look at me I am having trouble with whether my niunai cha is binda or re. My life is going really well so far. According to my books I am just past the honeymoon phase and entering the "cultural fatigue". So well I have fixed on some lesson plans and hopefully they will fully enjoy perhaps watching a little bit of a movie next week. If I can find it over the weekend and find a cash machine that dispenses 50 yuan notes. Or I could tell people to put money in my bank account? Haha I really am just kidding. LOL I promise I am not starving really. I figured out what is in the baozhi dont eat them and my lesson is if something tastes good just eat it don't ask questions and don't pay too much attention to it. ie. don't look inside a dumpling or too close to your plate because I swear to god you will lose your appetite. Tomorrow is Saturday and I am off to maybe hike to the top of a hill and to find pride and prejudice if at all possible on DVD. Well I love everyone and I am excessively tired due to too much caffine too late in the day. I love you blake and co. (this means you strange hawaiian/portugee/irish whatever you are and you minnesooootan person... there was a really funny video on yahoo about the minnesoota state fair where everyone talks in really long ooooohhhh sounnds anyways night guys I hope you are settling in ok see you in december.)