More and More China!

This weekend was great!  We taught a couple classes on Friday and then just hung out till dinner when we met up with Serena, Jeff, and another couple for a barbeque dinner.  It was an outdoor restaurant (can I just say once again how much I LOVE warm weather?) where local street vendors set up their carts of meat, vegetables, and tofu kabobs to sell and barbeque for customers.  Serena and Jeff tried to get us to pick some food on our own, but we still have no idea what things are when it comes to meat and tofu so we basically made them choose everything which turned out mostly good.  We had a nice array of bits of lamb, chicken, pork, soy beans, vinegary peanuts, snails, toasted bread, and cicadas.  Jason has been saying he'd be willing to try a cicada and I didn't let him forget it!

eew, nasty, gross.

Trying to decide what he thinks.  He said it tasted like burnt paper and goop.

We spent three hours talking while they very slowly brought our dishes out one by one.  At one point a girl came up to me and, in broken English, asked for my telephone number.  I didn't quite understand her and I didn't want to give my phone number to just anyone so I said I didn't have one  (I know, I lied.  Call me a sinner). She then asked again and said, "My friend, he wants  your telephone number.  Do you have a boyfriend?"  Jason then realized what was going on so sat right up and motioned to himself while I smiled and told her I was married.  The poor girl was so embarrassed and I'm sure her and her friend (who were at the next table over) noticed when we all tried to conceal our laughter and shock at what just happened. Oh well!!

In front of the Barbeque

Saturday morning was spent catching up with my family and skyping with Gideon!  He's doing extremely well for just having heart surgery and he even recognized us on the computer.   After skyping we headed off to a market Serena had told us about.  Not the cleanest place, but really cool and very Chinesey.  It will be a great place to buy souvenir/gift type of things which was a relief because we were starting to think places like that just didn't exist in Xingtai.  We also bought popcorn that tasted like kettle corn, yum!  As we were browsing at everything we caught the attention of a lady who laughingly pointed at Jason's scruff and then motioned to an electric razor. Ha, Chinese men just don't grow much facial hair it seems so she probably got her hopes up when she saw Jason.

After church on Sunday we took a much needed walk around the park.  It gets rather stuffy in our small apartment and I was going crazy being inside all day.  The park is like a completely different place now that there are leaves on the trees and bushes and grass/weeds on the ground!  Of course, an outing would never be complete without the constant stares and people "secretly" taking our pictures.  It got bad today and a boy ran right in front of us as we were walking and yelled to his friend as if he were taking a picture of him instead of us. Yeah right, kid.  We thought we'd make his life a little easier and just smiled right at the camera for him. 

I think this has something to do with the scientist museum we went to with the students.

That's water completely covered in cotton, algae, and leaves. 

I think these tree trunks were the inspiration for army camo :)

Funny story.  That lady way in the back in the red?  She was singing in your very typical, high-pitched, whiny, Chinese voice while telling some sort of story.  We stood to watch for a minute and when her turn was done a sort of dignified, yet burly looking man walked up to the mic.  We expected something more pleasant sounding than the woman so were a bit more than shocked when out came this falsetto/raspy/very not musical sound. No one seemed the least bit bothered by it, though, and kept looking back at us when I let a little giggle escape.  I really wanted to record it, but needed to leave because I was barely holding myself together!  I felt so mean and uncultured, but hey, it was funny.

P.S. Tomorrow we leave for Beijing for a week!