the happenings of the week

Another week has come and gone.  My time in China is flying on by!  It is making me realize that the time that I have here is very short and that thought makes me sad.  I love it here. I love experiencing these new things and discovering more about myself.

One of the many great things that happened this week is that the sun was out for one full day!  Ah!  You have no idea how happy this made me.  It was such a gorgeous day and I definitely soaked it all in.  It may have only stayed out for one day but it gave me hope that the sun does actually shine in China.  Also, I think it is important to note that the fountains in the hotel by my apartment have begun filling up with water.  That has to mean that the warm weather is approaching really soon.  I just know it.  I can't wait for the day when my clothes don't take 4 plus days to dry.  That will be a cause for major celebration.

Earlier in the week we went to our favorite little restaurant that happens to be on our street.  Lucky us!  (or maybe this is a bad thing because we are tempted to go there more than we probably should...)  Lately, this restaurant has sounded so good to me every single day.  It might be due to the fact that we usually try to eat at the school's cafeteria.  Cafeteria food in general isn't the tastiest.  Now try mixing cafeteria food with Chinese food.  Yeah, they don't really go hand in hand in my book.  So after a failed meal at the cafeteria we went to our favorite little restaurant.  We asked for jiaozi, which are practically pot stickers.  Unfortunately, they didn't have any so we got fried rice instead.  Don't worry, the fried rice is still an excellent option.  They told us to come back the next day and they would have jiaozi.  Of course we had to because we agreed to it.  The next day after classes and a heated game of ping pong with the Asians, we found ourselves sitting at this restaurant again.  Little did I know, I would be making the jiaozi myself.  It was awesome and so much fun!  Through the huge language barrier, I successfully made jiaozi and they were oh so good.  The little family that runs the store is the cutest and so sweet.  They always give us at least 50% off every time and they are so excited when we come in.  They are officially one of our adopted families here in China.  They may not know that but they are.

This week we also went with our other adopted family to climb a mountain.  The mountain we climbed is at the monkey park that we went to a few weeks ago.  This time we hiked up a different mountain to a temple.  It was a fun little outing and I always love spending time with these people.  

(This was the other week when we celebrated my Chinese grandma's birthday.)

Saturday we set off to go find a park that we had heard about.  We should have known that we wouldn't end up finding it because the directions we had were not very helpful at all.  Instead, we found a huge market.  It was the biggest market I have ever seen in China, and that is saying a lot.  We explored this market for hours and we didn't even make a dent in it.  We will for sure be going back.  

I am ready to take on another week in China.  Hopefully my students will behave better than they did last week.  I have learned to set my expectations low for classes.  If I don't, I will never meet them.  I just hope this week that no one cries the whole 40 minutes of class and that no one throws up in class either.  If those happen, it will be a good week.  Also, side note, these little Chinese students are in love with Justin Bieber.  I think we practice our English way more during that song than we did the previous 35 minutes of class.  Someone needs to show them a better music selection...