China at Home

Last year in China, there was a lady named Kelly who was hired by ILP and the school to take care of us, keep us on schedule, help us figure out how to get around town, and that type of thing. I became friends with her while there, and I still talk to her sometimes. I was talking to her a few weeks ago and she said she was visiting California on vacation soon, and I told her that I live in California. It turned out that they were flying into LAX so not terribly far from my house. So on Tuesday night, Kelly, her husband, and two of their friends came and spent the night at my house! After we had it all planned out that she and Gaung Gaung (her husband) would come, she said "oh and two other teachers will come too, that's ok right??" Haha, such a Chinese thing to do. Plan it all out, than throw extra stuff in there. But of course it was totally fine! My brothers are at EFY this week so we had extra beds- it worked our perfectly!
In China, everyone lives in apartments and there are hardly any houses. Only super duper rich people own houses so when they got to my house, they didn't think someone they knew could actually live there.  They were nervous to knock so they stood outside yelling "Laa-keen! La-keen!" super loudly until I realized it was them. They loved the tour of my house and they were so excited to see a real American house, they just went around touching everything and  walked around asking questions.  It reminded me of when I was in China and wanted to know everything about everything!! I had forgotten how different Chinese and American houses are . We're all just people but even  the structure of houses is different depending on where you live.  Kelly was the only one who spoke English out of the group, so she would translate for the other three when they had questions about stuff. They had never seen a dishwasher or a clothes dryer before, they had only heard stories about them.  When I showed them how they worked, they were in awe! They were so excited to help me load the dishwasher after dinner because they couldn't believe you could put dirty dishes in it and  they would come out clean. They also loved looking in our fridge, freezer, pantry, and spice cupboard because Chinese have smaller fridges and fewer spices. Ming, Kelly's friend, loves to cook so she was excited to look at how people in America cook. She helped us chop the onions and peppers for dinner and I have never seen vegetables cut so beautifully!
We made breakfast burritos for dinner all together and it was super fun! Cooking together is a big part of Chinese culture (because of foods like dumplings) so it was a great bonding experience with our new friends. Even though we couldn't talk very much because of the language barrier, it was neat to see how close you can grow with people just by working together. For breakfast we had French toast, sausage, and cereal.  They had never had French toast before-it was fun to teach them how Americans eat it! They  also mixed hot water, milk, hot chocolate mix, and cereal all together and ate it… It was very unique haha. But if you think about it, most of the foods we eat in America are really weird to the Chinese.
A neat thing that happened was we were able to say a prayer with them before we ate dinner. I don't even think we would be allowed to do that if we were in China because any form of proselyting is illegal there. The next morning we had already started eating breakfast when Kelly said "Wait no! We haven't prayed yet, don't we need to do that??" So my mom said a really nice prayer thanking God that they could visit, and afterwords Kelly translated the prayer for everyone and they started to discuss it. Then Kelly told us they realized that to us, having them there as guests was a direct blessing from our God and we were really grateful to him for allowing us to have them there as guests. It was really amazing to see them realize so clearly how we feel about blessings from God because they are not religious at all. What a blessing!
They also loved the pool and couldn't believe we own one. We swam in it til really late and it was the perfect weather. When I pointed out the stars, they got so excited! It was really neat to see. China is so smoggy, seeing stars is a big deal, I'm so glad they could see them here.
I'm so glad I can have international friends, and I really do feel blessed! 19 days til China!!

 Checking out the llamas!

 Gaung Gaung, Kelly, me, Ming, and Ping.

 Ming and my mom are new BFFs. :)

 

A delicious breakfast!

I'm so glad I could see Kelly again. Until next time!

Saying goodbye

Oh, the heart wrenching sadness of leaving these kiddos. The poor babies only sort of understand we'll be leaving, but I think they understand it enough to get that we will probably never see each other again... Hopefully that is not the case, I want to go back!!! It was a sad evening in general, following a very tiring day. We played in the snow with our last class (awesome) and then I spent the day packing up my horrific mess of a room. I had a lot of school supplies.... every. where. On the way to tuck in the kids, I totally slipped in the ice and landed on my bum. That really hurt. Once I got to the dorms, I was able to keep it together pretty well. I made sure to visit my favorite kids (not that I have favorites or anything... heh. heh.) last, and visited lots of others first.

Me right before crying my eyes out. 

 Annnnnnnnnnnnd it's over. I started to cry, which means Daniel started to cry. Sorry baby! I felt SOOOO guilty for making him cry!

 Phil, me, and Daniel. So Phil was actually like the worst kid ever. He tried to be good, but he ruined many a beautiful craft by taking a glue stick, scissors, tape, or craft glue to them. I learned a lot about unconditional love and patience from him. While saying goodbye, he was crying so hard! Like, wailing in grief! And not because I was crying, he was just that devastated. So, I decided to be the adult and cheer those kids up.

 Yay! I cheered Daniel up! I was really worried about him. At the very end, he just kept holding and rubbing my hand and saying "Teacha ok, teacha ok" over and over again. Then, he taught me his Chinese name, Wefan. Seriously, it was like an emotional scene from a movie. I'll paint you s scene;

Me: "I love you Daniel! Wo-ei-nee"

Daniel: (grabs my hand and points to himself) "Teacha, no Daniel. Wefan."

Me: (points to him) "Daniel Wefan?"

Daneil: "No teacha Larkin, (points at me) Teacha Larkin, (point at himself) Wefan, no Daniel." 

When I figured out that Wefan is his real name, he got so excited and gave me a huge loving hug. I love this boy!

 Unfortunately, Phil was not cheered up. I hid a bunch of candy under his pillow so hopefully that's a happy little surprise for him.

I'll miss you, sweet kiddos!

Happy Birthday to Me!

It's my 19th birthday..... Super weird!  I was one of two teachers who had a birthday during the semester so we made it extra fun!

An adorable banner Abbey made for me- she is just the sweetest head teacher ever! With the addition of some fun artwork made by Emily, the little girl that visits us sometimes.... haha she's so funny!

 Two of my favorite dishes were served for lunch today- hash brown type potatoes mixed with peppers and carrots, and friend rice with carrots and peas. Heck yeah!

 Maria straightened my hair and did my makeup, it turned out really cute! Also, PIZZA!!! It was my first time having pizza since coming to China, that's a little too long for me! My group was super nice and paid for my meal... Yummers! (And thanks, guys:)

 Pizzzzzzzzzza. Stuffed. Crust. Pizza. complete with garlic dipping sauce. Can you say heaven?

Haunted House

This week was pretty busy- we put on a haunted house for the kids and it was really fun. We dressed up kinda scary (black clothes and dark makeup) and transformed Caiti's classroom into a dark pathway around the room using huge poster boards. The kids are short enough that they couldn't see over it so popped up when they walked by and that would startle them. The guy teachers hid in the curtains and jumped out at them when the kids would walk by and that scared them a lot too. I hid around a corner of the walk way and stared at them while making a creepy face and then grabbed them as they finally got the courage to walk by which freaked some kids out so badly they hit me. :P  Jake stood on a chair covered in a sheet with a mask and freaked them out and we had balloons and shredded trash bags hanging from the ceiling and a strobe light and all sorts of stuff. It made a lot of kids cry cause they were scared, including my favorite little girl named Milly. We used to call Milly "Spacecadet" because she would just stare off into space during class until we knelt down next to her and she would grin this adorable little grin and finally say a few English words once we helped her. Now she's much better about paying attention. Luckily most kids had a lot of fun and we had a ton of fun putting it on. My throat hurt so badly by the end of the night from screeching and making creepy sounds.

Flooded Classroom

Today my classroom flooded and that was crazy! The heaters here are run by hot water pumping through them and today they were draining the old water out in preparation of turning the heaters on in a few weeks. Problem was, something went wrong so all the yucky old water drained into my classroom instead of where ever else it was supposed to go. Before the water started gushing out of the small pipe air was whistling and spurting out and it was so loud  my kids were terrified and started running out of the classroom. The the brown nasty water started gushing. Ewwww. It was too bad it flooded but then we got to have class outside and the kids just ran around and had fun. It was fun to watch them be kids and be goofy because the school is very strict so they don't have a lot of running around play time outside. I got super wet with some pretty nasty water while I was trying to direct it into  trashcan rather than the floor and my shoes got soaked but thankfully the Chinese teachers mopped the classrooms while we were outside.

Giant Picture Frame

So when you google Weihai and look at the images, one of the main ones that show up is of this giant picture frame with stone hands holding it up. It's super cool! So we decided that we were going in search of the giant picture frame, despite having no idea where it was and not exactly knowing how to ask anyone. Jake, Abbey, Ben, Caiti, and I took off down town. Once we found the "beach" we followed it for a while until low and behold, an enormous picture frame! It was even better in person, and the details on the hands were amazing. It made me sad that there was graffiti on the hands, but at least you couldn't see it from the front too badly.

Mug cooking and microwaves

The first time we opened the microwave here in our "kitchen" at the dorms there were four cockroaches hanging out in side.  My roommate went ahead and cooked them along with her hot jello water and they were never seen again. Yummmmmmy. 

On that note, here in china, we've invented something called "mug cooking". It's where you have a big mug, and you cook anything and everything possible in it. So far we've made chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, noodles, jello, and what ever else can be made from "just add water"

mixes. We've even made things, like the cookies, that needed milk eggs and oil, with just water.  I brought lots of mixes so figuring out how to cook them in just a mug and a microwave has been an interesting experiment. So far I've successfully made yummy American noodles that only tasted a little weird. I'm excited to master some more of these microwave recipes to eat when all that's at the cafeteria is tofu. Why eat hairy meat when you can eat cockroach cookies?

This is Not Your Average Zoo

Saturday morning we went off on our first major Chinese adventure!  Our coordinator Kelly rented a big van for us and we drove about an hour and a half away to get to the zoo.  My first impression once we got there was that there was a LOT of stairs.  Since we don't have enough stairs at school already.....
So we got to the entrance and there was this huge cliff with animal decorations covering it.  It was enormous, and super cool. 

The bathrooms by the entrance were also impressive; I have never seen giant hippo and rhino bathrooms before but hey, this is China.

Due to the impressiveness of the bathrooms, we were all pretty sure the zoo would be great, too.  There were tons of animals but some of the coolest included:

These beautiful tigers:

Red Pandas:

This crazy looking emu:

And of course super exotic animals such as raccoons, bronze turkeys, and llamas!

There were all of the above listed *normal* exhibits, plus tons more average zoo animals.  But, there were also many more not so "average" things at this zoo.  The first thing we noticed that confirmed we were in a zoo in China was that next to the big cat exhibits, they had cages of live chickens (and a random duck.)

 

 We found out from the lady standing be these foul friends that for 50 kuai (another more commonly used word for Chinese yuan) you could throw one of the chickens down to one of the lions, leopards, tigers, ligers, or wolves.  I wasn't interested in doing that but some of the people in my group were so they bought a chicken and threw it to the leopards. It was crazy and a little sad, but that chicken was dead long before she hit the ground. 

A lot of the animals looked sad, but most of them looked ok. I got to sit in an elephant trunk and on the back of a camel, and hold a HUGE snake around my neck. I wish enormous zoos in the US only cost 5 dollars to go to....

Where in the World is Weihai?

Where in the world is Weihai?  First off, it's where I will be living in China!
Weihai is a beautiful city, and I am so excited to live there!

Some quick facts about Weihai:
Location: North East China, Across from the Korean peninsula





















Province: Shandong

Area: 2,099 sq miles

Population: 609,219

Average Temperatures: