Fun Days

I had a fabulous weekend.  The L girls came and stayed with me Friday night.  We ate at our favorite American/Italian/Mexican place (the Teach for China hot spot), watched a movie, and made plans for Saturday.  Dance dares were the main item on the list.  If you've ever seen Ellen Degeneres then you know what I'm talking about.  If not, basically you go up behind some random person and dance awkwardly behind them.  The goal is for them not to catch you in action.  We're all very white and the usual stare targets so this wasn't the easiest.  It was a blast though.  Here's our lovely project thanks to A.

We then went on a tour of the new grocery store. Yes, a tour of a grocery store is an exciting thing to do on a Saturday for a group of girls here.  We happened to discover a new 'fast food' place.  They had chicken burger things, decent fries, these awesome sweet potato nugget things.  It was a great find!!! And super cheap.  A plate of jiaozi or a bag of nuggets is about the same price.  That's a good deal to us.

These are the flavor options you have here in China. They tend to be... interesting.

I showed the girls these Avatar statues that are just hanging out inside this arcade thing by the grocery store.  I hadn't realized before that the lady statue was not appropriately covered so I made sure to fix that.  A few young boys - probably about 10 years old - just followed us around, which made taking these pictures really awkward.  We're used to being stared at so we just ignored it.

New Chinese boyfriend.

Then the highlight... STINKY TOFU!  Street-side stuff people!  Technically park-side, but still the same.  I gave the guy a 5 and he started filling up this bag.  Apparently you can get a lot of stinky tofu for 5 RMB.  'A' told him I only wanted a bit and then when he was about to fill each piece with lajiao (fiery hot evil spices), we both freaked out for a second and told him no.

I felt very Chinese after this experience...

The verdict: stinky tofu is not all it's cracked up to be.  I've been told that the stinkier it is, the better it tastes.  This stuff didn't reek like the stuff a little further up the street.  Maybe I'll have to try that next time.  Obviously it wasn't terrible enough to make me swear off of it for the rest of my life.  Now I get to really cross it off my bucket list at least!

After all of that fun stuff we walked around town and headed up to the farm.  Once the van dropped us off, some of the workers were heading up to take the garbage so they let us ride the weird little truck thingy up there.  Thank goodness it was a short ride.

That was my fabulous weekend!  I'm done with my college teaching for the week already and now have tutoring to get to.  Tutoring last week was so much fun.  I'm excited to see those kids again.

Last thing: I just had lunch with our newest sister and another really close friend of mine who met with us every week.  The 3 of us will be meeting together every week for studying, dinner and whatever else happens.  Thank the Father for that!  I can't wait to continue to build my relationships with them and to help strengthen them.  Next item on the to-do list is to meet up with the 3rd year girls and see which ones of them would like to meet with me.  Hopefully I'll have an update on that by this weekend.