B-day Party

I've gotten a little behind on updating with pictures. But we had a birthday party for our friend Sally a few weeks ago!
Some traditional birthday food: fried noodles and red eggs!

And no party's complete without a little dancing!

Going to the Hotel, and we're...gonna get MARRIED!

Well first I gotta give a shout out to all my girls who have and are getting married this summer...I love ya'll SO much!

My teacher got married this weekend! So we headed out with our classmates for the big event!

Hmm...where do I begin? Well, this lady MCed the entire wedding ceremony, giving play by plays of what was taking place!
JieJie(big sis) and DiDi(little bro)
The cute little flower girl and boy started the ceremony!
Then the MC gave a brief bio/sketch of the groom as he approached the stage and then walked to the end of the aisle to recieve the bride, getting down on one knee and offering her flowers!
No one sat down during the entire ceremony...we all stood around cheering and snapping photos! When they made it to the stage a bubble machine started blowing bubbles out, and continued on and off duirng the rest of the ceremony! Fun!
There weren't any vows exchanged...only a few speeches from the fathers and more bio/sketches of the couple.
They actually poured the drinks and threw the bouquet during the middle of the ceremony!

She's so pretty!!!
Then the reception! The bride and groom did a wardrobe change and then came around to each table to GANG BEI (cheers)! Yay for PEPSI!
Interesting wedding food!
The ladies! Our teacher is holding the bouquet that our class bought for her!

Barista

We got to spend time last week showing our teacher and her students how to make coffee and eat with a knife and fork!

American Idol?

Last weekend our school had the final round of their English Singing Competition and they invited us to be the "special" guests. I was definitely impressed with all the preformers...it was sort of like watching a spiffed-up karoke session. I thought it was cool that no one seemed intimidated to get up and go for it...no matter how it sounded or looked! We even had glow sticks to wave around to make each preformer feel like they were a supa-star LIVE in concert! These were the hosts:

This 1st band came out and sang "Every Birth You Take" (a.k.a.-"Every Breath You Take") They had a few typos in the program!
Loving some back-up dancers!

The girl to the left above stole the competition when she belted out Whitney's "I will always love you" (written in the program as: "You will always love me")! Our friend, below left, got so excited when someone sang Elton's "Can You Feel the Love Tonight"...he couldn't stop clapping and swaying and singing along...precious! And below right, the intermission consisted of a speed haircutting competition...I felt like I was watching the movie Edward Sizzor Hands. I've never seen sizzors and hair flying that fast in my life...I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

Our sweet friends that joined us!

Jolly Green Giant

Trusting and Thankful

This has been such an incredible month! My cup is overflowing with thankfulness from spending time with our family and watching it grow!!! They're engaged!!! Sharon & Cliff, we are all SO excited for you!

And thank you guys for all the goodies from home!

It takes a little time sometimes!

I'm not really good with making schedules and following them, and I tend to work better under pressure (which some people call procrastination), so one of things living on the other side of the world has taught me is how to plan. In order to get things accomplished here there's always a process to go through, so I'm learning to always expect that accomplishing one task is going to take patience and time. The cool thing is that the process usually always ends up allowing me to meet and spend time sharing with someone, whether its riding the bus, going to the post office, or getting my shop on!!!

This is just a fun little story that I wanted to share with ya. Over the recent holiday we headed out early one morning to the center of the city to buy some foam for our beds (you know the good stuff that makes the bed real soft) and some fabric to have a few summer clothes made (b/c obviously I'm a little bigger than all the Asian ladies). The place where ya buy fabric is a huge underground market that is filled w/ rolls of material for as far as the eye can see. And the foam happens to be in the same market laid up against a stairwell in large bundled rolls. We got to pick out how thick we wanted the foam, gave them the measurements of our beds, then settled on a price we'd be willing to pay for it. After that a sweet little old man that owns the foam rolled it out in the middle of the market floor and used a honkin' butcher knife to cut our foam to size. After rolling it back up again we headed out with our big bundles of foam and had to find a person that'd be willing to take us back to our apartment, since we couldn't get ourselves and our foam in a taxi or on a bus. We ended up stuffing it in the back of this man's bread truck and then hoping in the back with it since there was no room to sit in the front. Needless to say, we made lots of fun memories in the back of the bread truck on the 40 minute drive back to our apartment.

When we brought all the foam upstairs, we had to move back all the furniture in the living room so we could vacuum off all the dirt and dust the foam had collected. When we went to put it on the first bed we realized our measurements were a little off and had to head back to the living room to do some re-cutting. We had tried to convert the measurements we made in inches with our tape measurer into centimeters when we had it originally cut, but we were off by a pretty good amount. (so if you see any packages that i send your way with foam padding you'll know where it came from)
We definitely worked up a big appetite by this time so we had some noodles delivered to the house and had a little lunch break.

After lunch it was back to getting the foam and the sheets readjusted on the bed!

Finally we had a little xiuxi (rest) on our new and improved beds before heading back out with some friends...and I'm telling you I've been having some pretty amazing sleep ever since!