Under the Sea!

Part of Joy's birthday surprise was taking her to the Aquarium! I got to see fish/animals I've never seen before...thank the Maker...it was really awesome!!!

One of my favorite parts of the trip: feeding the sea turtles!

Val's B-day!

Val's birthday was this past weekend. We had a surprise party for her, and were so excited that our friends kept the surprise!!! The girls usually do the cooking and I do the washing afterwards...but I gave it a whirl and tried to bake Val's cake. There were only minor problems, (like a crack across the top and uncooked insides) but thanks to Joy's expertise it turned out GREAT!
Val and Sally
Joy made cheese dip and salad!
After eating and spending time thanking Val's Maker, we played a few rounds of Mafia!

Whatcha Got Cookin???

We've spent alot of time this summer having friends over to teach us how to cook local food, and teaching them how to cook Western food. Last week Val and I went out with our landlord, her husband, and son. They drove us to one of our favorite restaurants, but we were surprised when dishes we had never seen before arrived on the table. One that we couldn't clearly identify was a huge drumstick looking peice of meat of some sort. We were given a plastic glove to put on one hand to pick off the meat from the bone with, and then a straw! We weren't sure what to do with the straw but we watched the landlord's son put it down into the bone and suck up the marrow/cartledge juice! So we gave it a try and followed his lead...it was a little chunky, but it tasted like gravy to me!! As we conversed more with our landlord we finally realized that we were eating DONKEY! Haha! The best part was a few days later when I was telling one of my local friends about it, she said, "I didn't know you could eat donkey!" I assumed everybody here ate it...guess not!

Ice Cream!!!Nacho Libre cupcakes! I forgot to put the "t" in stretchy!

One of our teachers sent her daughter over to learn how to bake a cake.

We found out that it was our teacher's birthday after her daughter came so we tried to see what we could spell on the cake using m and m's. I spelled out "I love you" in the local language, "Wo ai ni."Val's birthday is this weekend, and her mom actually mailed her a cake, along with some Hamburger Helper! So we made some for a friend and then dove into the cake last night...yummy!

Beauty School

I had a friend in the States who taught me real briefly a few different ways to cut hair before moving here. Joy let me experiment on her first...and has let me cut her hair ever since. And I've had a few friends who are kind enough to let me chop around on their heads since then! Val got her haircut recently, so I asked the barber where to get sizzors (since Sally's Beauty hasn't made it here yet). So a friend and I went out one day on a hunt to find them. We finally located the building that the barber told me about, and it turns out to be a 3 story building full of little shops that sell everything you could possibly need to start and supply a barber shop here. So after bargaining for about an hour, I walked away with 2 pairs of sizzors, a carrying case, and a clip all for about 10 bucks!When I got back, Lisa and Sally came over and they let me test out the new sizzors by shapping up their bangs!

Goodbyes

We've been blessed with some really great relationships with our international friends. We had a big feast and said our goodbyes to them a few weeks ago!
Lisa and Sally (above), some of our national friends, will continue to study here!We went ahead and celebrated Val and Ken's birthday a few weeks early...they have the same b-day! The green cake is from their home country.
Alvin and Ken really enjoyed the chocolate cake! They lived upstairs from us.

Our last group photo!

Field Trip!!

We're finished with school for the summer, but just before our exams we went on a surprise field trip. And this is why I say "surprise": I got a text message from my teacher just before heading to school one morning that said, "Bring your camera today." I really didn't have any idea why I needed to bring it, but I did. During the break after my first class, my classmates asked me if I was going to go with them to drink tea. Drink tea? I was really confused. But after class they told me to follow them and they would take us to meet our teacher. So I followed them to the bus stop to meet up with my teacher, still really unsure of what was going down. When I got there my teacher made sure I brought my camera and then told us that we needed to wait 30 minutes for the bus to come. During the 30 minutes we tried to understand as much about where we were going and what we were going to do as we could, in the local language. And we found out we were going to "watch a performance on drinking tea" (not really knowing what that meant) near Wal-Mart. So next thing we know, the Wal-Mart bus pulls up and our teacher tells us to get on. Ok-so in the world of public transportation, the Wal-Mart bus is this bus that takes you to Wal-Mart for free! You can get back on the bus to ride it back to several locations around town for free again, if you have a reciept showing that you bought something there! The bus comes down our street and we always make jokes about it. So we laughed really hard when we finally got to hop on for a ride! (And the scoop on the Asian Wal-Mart: it's got the layout of Wal-Mart as you know it, but the goods that are sold are completely different, they're acquired to Asian taste, dress, and customs...but they do sell Snapples) When we got to the tea house, we went in and watched this woman pour tea. She had some skills!!!
Then we sat down at tables, and this woman made tea for us. She showed us how to make it, held it up like below to "bless" it, then served us.
She taught us how many sips to take, and then how to hold it. Look at those pinkies!

After a tour of the tea house we posed for a group shot!

We thought we we're about to leave, when our teacher asked if all the girls could dress up! So we got dressed up in the server outfits and had a photo shoot.
We got a little creative with this pose.

Ya'll come on in!

So it turned out to be a really neat trip!

Road Trip

We hopped on the train a few weekends ago and headed out of town with some of our international friends.
Thanks for the new t-shirt Mama!
We met up with friends of friends and got to make lots of memories. For one meal we got to experience a "herbal" dinner...and at one point there were sauteed bees in my bowl. But I did get some Mexican and Italian while we we're there...along with some yummy local snacks!
Go TEAM!
We even got to see an Opera while we were there! The picture of the swan is actually a man's hands and arms doing shadows on the screen. He was pretty talented, he even did a snake eating a rabbit at one point!

Dance Dance Revolution: Asian style!