Disneyland!! Sort of...

I told Jason we should do a joint blog post and this is what I got :)
 Jason: This is the story about a lovely lady whose name is Ressa and her husband who taught kids.  (That beginning part is to be sung to the Brady Bunch song). Then one day they went to the park with their kids and played on rides.  They went on the merry-go-round, boat n float ball throwing thingy (We sat in boats floating in disgusting water and threw balls into baskets), toot n scoot (a very mini version of Autopia at Disneyland only not nearly as cool), and the twirly wirly (Carts that spun around and went up and down). They made funny faces, acted like kids, and were just plain silly.

Ressa: On Tuesday we were invited to the 1st-3rd grade Field trip to the park down the street.  There were twelve 3rd grade, ten 2nd grade, and eight 1st grade classes making roughly 880 students with maybe one adult for every 40 students.  We all walked across the street and down a few blocks on the crazy Xingtai streets where traffic laws are nothing but suggestions and everyone survived!  I was pretty impressed with how the whole thing went down. The students have amazing self-discipline when they know there is a Chinese teacher somewhere nearby. If we had attempted to do this with any one of our classes on our own someone definitely would have gotten lost or killed. 

For a couple hours we went on a couple kiddie rides with the students, but mostly waited in line and played with them.  It was so much fun!  Amusement parks are way better when there are tons of kids around.  It's also kind of fun when they think you're the coolest thing there.  In a very tiny way we felt like we were Disney characters at Disneyland or something because the teachers wanted pictures with us and set their students up with us for pictures, people asked us to hold their baby, random adults were so entertained by seeing us ride rides, and other young adults came to pose with us in even more pictures. 

I felt a little weird because I was the only adult on this ride and everyone was looking at me funny. Oh well, the poor kids didn't seem too scarred by my unnatural enthusiasm for being on a carousel.

Goofing off while waiting for everyone to get off the carousel so we can go wait in another line.

This girl is stinkin' adorable.  She was shy, but playful about it.  Jason kept hitting her hat and her whole face would scrunch up into this adorable smile before she would pull the hat over her face again.  I couldn't get her to smile for me without the hat, but she is my student so maybe one of these days I'll catch it in class :)

We were sitting on a ride and one of my classes noticed I was there so they got super excited and ran over to say Hi. It was fun to go overboard on our screaming to get them to laugh.

Still Ressa (Jason is now reading a book): After the rides, we went to a museum about an astronomer/scientist born in Xingtai in the 1200s.  It was kind of interesting, but we were all pretty wiped out so it probably wasn't as cool as it could be.  I think the most exciting part was finding thick blades of grass outside that we could whistle with and amazing the third grade class we were with.  They thought it was really cool and wanted to do it, but they just couldn't understand that the grass goes between the thumbs, not in their mouth.

It's so funny how Chinese people think squatting is comfortable - even adults! This exactly what it looks like when kids squat to go to the bathroom on the streets.  We had to do a double take when we saw the entire class squatting!

The museum looked more like a Buddhist temple

Chinese sundial

Not sure what this was, but it looked cool!

Beautiful blossoming tree very common in Xingtai

Old men doing calligraphy with  water

 Nothing too exciting happened since Tuesday.  We now have three days without classes and no idea what we're going to do because it's supposed to be cold and rainy (hopefully rainy).  They never came to fix our sink so I assume that means we have another few days of water running directly from the faucet to the floor since the really cheap pipe keeps falling off the sink drain.  Good thing we have a squeegee and a drain in our bathroom floor!  Oh, and for those of you wondering (probably only our parents care) Jason is feeling much better this week :)