Polka Dots and Flowers

I haven't posted anything in a while so this is gunna be a mash of everything lately.

I don't think I've talked about church yet. We don't have a branch that close to us so we skype in every week. Everyone meets in the girls' apartment below us. There's probably about thirty of us total(from our school and kaiyin). We do get to have sacrament every week thankfully, there are some guys at Kaiyin that bless and pass it. And this Sunday we got to go to real church! There was a district meeting so we drove down on a bus for two hours went to church. And they fed us the best food!! It was a huge hot dog and potato salad and coleslaw and tons of cookies and treats. It was the first time I was too full to eat anymore in china.

 Last week we went to a chinese spa..let's just say it wasn't as relaxing as I thought it was going to be. We decided that it would be cool to try cupping (it's a kind of chinese therapy..a painful kind) Not the best decision..haha but exciting nonetheless. Last tuesday was teacher's day so we got loaded with presents. I got probably 20 bouquets and flowers and a bunch of cards and chocolate from the kids :) I even got a couple happy birthday cards hahaha..the parents probably just saw the first card with english and bought it, super funny. The school took all of us english teachers and chinese teachers out to dinner that night. It was a super nice restaurant. I tried duck and prawns and this weird hot brown jello(update..it was cow's blood).

We went to a sushi place the other day...I hate sushi. But I found an all bacon roll with rice so it worked out good. (I did try some of the sushi and it wasn't awful, but I still don't enjoy it)

On saturday we went to a water park...sooo cool and way fun! The only bad thing was when we were leaving, we realized that a bunch of our stuff had gotten stolen. Melissa's tablet and Noah's phone and almost everyone's money got stolen. Me and kyle took our backpacks with us everywhere we went so luckily nothing of ours got stolen. I had a feeling that I should probably carry it around with me and I'm so grateful I did. Tender mercies of the spirit. So that was a bummer to the end of a really fun day. The water park was awesome though, we might go again sometime. We did karaoke that night for 4 hours..and it was a lot of fun.

My battlewounds

the chinese police that showed up after the pickpocketing that happened at the water park..they were useless.

hayden and noah sleeping on the bus

PICTURES!!!!

Rainy day

Chinese smoothie

Cute little river along the street by our house

First Squatter...nasty things.

We got stuck in the pouring rain one day and ended up playing in it :) So much fun!

Dumplings in soup..deeeelicious! These are like one of my favorite things I've had! I want to try fried dumplings! One of our coordinators raini  taught me how to say it in Chinese. 

Crazy Bus rides

We went out to eat dinner at some restaurant..let's just say I'm not ordering from pictures again anytime soon ha :P

They have really weird shirts here that make no sense..haha

Camille on James' scooter. We all got rides home after playing soccer at kaiyen school :)

Our whole group of teachers :)

Week One

Chinglish: Vanilla Ice Cream Toilet Paper....yeah i don't really know how to explain this. It's just regular toilet paper i have no idea why it says vanilla ice cream on it.

Pollution..

I still can't believe I'm in China! It's officially been one week..so crazy!!
 The first thing i noticed after getting off the plane was the humidity. I've lived in Mesa all my life so i can handle being hot, but this whole humidity thing is new. You literally start sweating like 10 seconds after you walk outside. The first day was awful..i thought I was gunna die. But, I guess you get used to it because i don't notice it so much anymore. The sky is sooo foggy and brown here from of all the pollution! The air looks almost smoky. But the area we're in is still gorgeous. There are trees and rivers and tons of greenery everywhere!

The day we arrived, everyone was so exhausted from the long plane rides and layovers so we didn't do much other than unpack and have a short meeting with all the girls in our group. After the meeting, we were getting ready for bed when all of the sudden the power goes out. I guess Melissa pushed the button to turn on the AC in our room, and it shut off our entire apartment's power. We tried turning it back on but we couldn't get it to work, so we asked our Chinese neighbors and they called the maintenence guy for us. But right before he got there, all the power turned back on again so it turned out we didn't need his help anyways :P  Our air still wouldn't work even after the power was fixed, so we had to tough it out in the heat for the night. Great welcome to China right?? We had a little fan going in our room so that helped to cool us off a bit, but it was still hot. It was stormy that night too and normally I love love lightning and storms but I woke up in the night for some reason.(probably the fact that I was not used to anything and I was sweating to death) and I was a little scared. Maybe even a little bit homesick. It just kinda hit me that I was thousands of miles away from home and in a strange place with strange people

One of our chinese coordinators Mary took us downtown and showed us around the city a little bit today. We have to take the bus to get there,and let me tell you...its insane. There is zero traffic enforcement here on the streets so cars do pretty much whatever they want. Alot of people here ride scooters (they're like motorcycles) around because they're super cheap and they just weave in and out of cars, on the sidewalk and all over the road. Nobody stays in the lanes here, i dont even know why they have lanes!

Anyways, the past few days have been sooo much fun! We wandered around the streets for hours yesterday and found this super good smoothie place with kiwi smoothies, they're pretty much my favorite thing. After smoothies, some of the guys decided they wanted to buy scooters. So we went to this scooter store and found out that as long as the scooters were electric and not gas, they could buy them and drive wherever they wanted. So the three of them all bought scooters to ride around town on. They're so much fun! I kinda wanna buy one myself ha!! But i'd be a little scared to drive it on the streets here because people are crazy..but no one ever goes like more than 40mph at the fastest anyways so i guess it's not that bad.

Last night we went and played soccer after dinner with a bunch of the Kaiyen teachers(they live in the apartments right next to ours so we hang out all the time). It had been raining all day long so the field was completely muddy and wet and had huge puddles all over. Funnest game of soccer ever! We got soaked and totally covered in mud. Noah, John, and James drove us home on their scooters afterwards, but we had to walk up the hill to our apartment because their scooters were dying and they couldn't drive them uphill. It was still fun riding on them for a little while though!

I think one of the things i miss most is breakfast. There's not really a difference between breakfast food and dinner food here. We basically get rice and noodles for every meal...it takes a little getting used to. I've actually grown to like rice a lot because we eat it with every meal. But every once in a while we get food that's just nasty. Like "i can't even tell what it is" nasty. But it's fun trying new things, i've had tons of new foods in just the one week i've been here.

OK the internet here stinks and is driving me insane..so I give up trying to post more today but I'll try again tomorrow. Sorry its so long, its because my internet is stupid so i keep having to smoosh all my days into one post.