Sucking the Marrow out of Life...

So, yesterday was a slow start to an eventful evening. During the day, Meghan had construction workers putting in new pipes in her apartment. This is what I had done last week. Meghan didn’t want to sit in her apartment alone with these workers, so I went over and entertained her. After about 5 hours of pounding, hammering and sawing, the construction workers left. One problem though, they left her apartment a huge mess (much like they did mine). They did not push back any of the furniture, and also there was a 3 inch wide trench going across her entire kitchen with a pipe in it. The workers did not fill this back in. So, we called Maggie and told her to have someone repair this. A worker came and put cement in the trench, and immediately after he was done, I suggested that Meghan wrote her name in the cement before it dried. She did, and know her name will always be on the kitchen floor.

After this, we decided that pizza sounded really good. We called Maggie and asked where a pizza joint was. She gave us somewhat confusing directions, but we thought we’d try to find it. On the way, we bumped into Chris, Megan and Travis who were just getting back from their campus. They decided to join us for dinner. After walking around for what seemed to be an hour looking for this pizza place, we gave up and ate at a Chinese restaurant. We were taking to the dinning room upstairs. It was hard to order because none of us felt like being decisive and ordering stuff for the group. Finally, we ordered two chicken dishes and some beer.

While we were eating, we noticed everyone at the tables around us eating what seemed to be a delicacy at this restaurant. It was a plate completely filled with pork (still on the bones). There seemed to be like five pounds of pork on the place. This pork was served with a plastic glove and a straw. First, those eating this place would suck the marrow out of the bones with the straw. Ofcourse, this is done making as loud of sucking noises as possible. Next, you put on the glove and eat the pork. It was, um, an interesting experience happening around us while we were trying to eat.

After dinner, Meghan decided that she needed soft-served ice cream from McDonalds given the way that she had. None of us objected and followed her for ice cream. Now, I feel it is important to remind everyone of the fact of how many foreigners we’ve seen here in Chengde since we’ve arrived. I’ve seen about 6. So, while we were in McDonalds, we saw two guys from Germany, two women from France and two older guys from the US. That means that there were 11 FOREIGNERS in McDonalds. At one point, there were more foreigners in this McDonalds than Chinese. It was crazy!!

After our wonderful McDonalds experience, we headed back to the hotel where Chris, Travis and Megan are staying and just hung out. Nothing else really too exciting is going on.

Today we are going to meet Megan for lunch (because Travis and Chris are on campus). I think I want to go shopping this afternoon. We passed some cool stores while we were wondering around for the pizza place last night. Then, tonight, I assume we will all go out for dinner. I teach tomorrow at 1:30 pm. Another spoken English class with all English nursing students is what I have to look forward too! I am using the same lesson plan for all my classes (since they are all spoken English), so that makes my life easier. I just have to change around a couple of activities that weren’t as popular in my first class. So, tomorrow shouldn’t be too stressful of a day.

We are going to try to get together with Matt, a foreign teacher from Drake who’s been here for three years, this weekend. We need to ask him some questions about booking travel, so we thought we’d buy him a couple drinks while we quiz him with our questions. He seems like a nice guy, and helpful, so hopefully we’ll be able to get a time set to go out this weekend.

We have a school break that goes from October 1-7 and we are looking into traveling. Right now, we really want to go to Mongolia, or Lhasa, Tibet. However, plane tickets are too expensive on the sights that we’ve been looking at. We are hoping that Matt has some good suggestions for us. If we can’t find any cheaper to those cities, we are going to find someplace cool within China to go to. I really want to go to Chengdu, to see the pandas, but they are still cleaning up there after the horrible earthquake. So, that is going to have to wait until the spring. However, that’s cool, because that means we might see some baby pandas!

Hope all is well….