This Is a Title

This week was a little less eventful than last week. We spent most of our time teaching and preparing to teach (and finishing that Korean drama, of course). The kids are starting to get pretty used to me. After the welcome at the beginning of the day, everyone is supposed to line up behind their homeroom teacher, and they all looked excited to come to me every day. A lot of times it's more like they run up and tackle-hug me in a group. It makes me happy. I think they all know my name now too, although they like to call me "Teacher Lindsay" (the teacher that I switch off with for part of the day) or "Teacher some-word-in-Chinese-that-obviously-means-something-funny-but-I-don't-know-what" because they know it bothers me.

We had some more fun culture classes this week from the Chinese teachers. One day we did Chinese painting. We learned how to hold the brush and we got the special kind of paper and paints that you are supposed to use. We made this painting. In case you can't tell (because I couldn't), it is a picture of flowers and grass overlooking a pond with fish in it. The Y-shaped things are flowers.

We also had a cooking class. We made deep-fat-fried pork-stuffed lotus root. For those unfamiliar with lotus root, it looks like this and tastes a little bit like a potato but crunchier.

It was very yummy. They have promised to give us the recipes for all the things we cook, so I should make some for people when I get home. I don't know if you can buy lotus root in the US, though.

Kung fu class continues to make us feel very cool and very stupid at the same time. I really like it. I have a really hard time keeping my balance and the teacher likes to laugh at me for it. He had to modify one of the moves in our little kung fu routine thing for me because I couldn't do the original one without falling over. No one else seemed to have this problem. Also, if he keeps having us stretch like he has been, we'll all be doing the splits by the time we get home. That's what he says at least. We'll see if it actually happens.

The other thing we've been doing this week is trying to set up our Beijing trip. We leave this Wednesday, which is crazy. We're wanting to go by train, but the China train system (while cheap) is being rather frustrating. You can't buy tickets for trains until ten days before the train leaves. Our trip is during a holiday when everyone wants to travel, so the trains fill up super fast. This means we have to get all of our four of our tickets separately, and since our trip is eleven days long, we don't get to buy our train tickets back until after we leave. We got our first ticket fine, but when we went to buy our second ticket (Yellow Mountains to Beijing), they were all sold out. Like, completely, they-looked-for-a-half-hour-and-can't-find-us-anything sold out. We're still probably going to find a way to get where we need to go, but it is likely to cost about five times as much. Plus we had already booked all of our hostels, so we might end up having to cancel certain ones and book new ones depending on when we get places. It is all very complicated and I hope we manage to figure it out at some point.

On an unrelated note, it turns out that my apartment has the biggest and nicest living room of all the ILP apartments in Zhongshan (And there are a good 45-50 people here from ILP). This means we had church in my apartment today, and will probably keep having it here for the rest of the trip. We got to take the sacrament for the first time in 3 weeks, and it was awesome. We skyped into the branch for the sacrament meeting talks, and then had Relief Society (plus 2 guys) on our own. Everyone had to bring their own chairs, but we had 31 people come and we all fit really well in the apartment. We also broke our couch (you can see it turned on its side in the picture). Oops.