So, I think it's time for me to tell you about my kids...

My homeroom kids. There are adorable. They make my heart happy. Sometimes I giggle out of sheer happiness when I see them around campus. I love them.

Ella: Ella is the cutest little girl ever! When she smiles her whole face lights up and it is adorable. She is so well behaved! We have all the kids’ names on the floor in their spot where they are suppose to stand for opening. Usually all the kids are running around when they get there and we have to round them up. But Ella is so good! She goes to her spot and stands there, I love it! She has been gone a lot this month but I love it when she is there.

Ben: Ben is Ella’s counterpart, they are my quiet sweet little kids. Ben is ADORABLE! I can’t remember who started it but the kids play this game where they will come up to me during breaks and put their clenched hand near my mouth as a microphone so that I’ll sing. (They’ve pretty much learned the Baby song by JBieb.) The game has now morphed into where they get me singing and then turn their hand into a gun and shoot me. But Ben still just has me sing. He is such a sweetheart. He is also super chill. Sometimes the other kids will steal his tokens or hit him or something and he never gets upset. He has the cutest smile and loves calling me “techa banana”. I love it.

Angel: I first named her Wendy. It seemed the perfect name. But then a month after teaching (a month!) her parents wanted to change her name to Angel. There was nothing I could do about it so I made her a new name spot on the floor. And I don’t know if it’s just me but is seems like ever since her name got changed she has been less of an angel and more prone to acting up. But she is still a sweet little girl. She doesn’t speak a lot of English (none of the kids really do, they are 4 years old and this is their first year). She gets along really well with the other kids (even Tim who is a little bit of a bully.) She is smart too. She always reminds me to get the token bags when I forget and knows where they are. She’s a good kid.

Marcus: The best way to describe Marcus would be like a punk-gangster type kid. He just has swag when he walks. He doesn’t get upset and cry about things, he turns the cold shoulder like he is too cool for you. But he is sweet at the same time, he always comes and takes my hand to bring me to the table when it is time for me to go to his group. He loves to have his picture taken and will get you to take the  picture but as soon as the camera is on him he puts his “cool” look back on, like he doesn’t care or anything. He is so funny. He loves whispering Chinese into my ear and I don’t know what he is saying! So I just whisper “don’t speak in Chinese” in his ear. Then he whispers in my ear again like we’re communicating or something, but truly, neither of us has any idea what the other one is saying. I love him.

Sami: She joined my class a couple weeks after we had started but from the very beginning she seemed to be older (she’s not) and just more advanced. She loves attention being in pictures. She strikes me a someone who is used to getting her way. Whenever there is something she wants or she is upset she automatically goes into this cry thing that will immediately stop once she has what she wants or attention. It drives me crazy. But she is such a good student. She is a quick learner and continues to show a lot of progress. She is also very helpful with the other students and loves helping the teacher.

Joey: Joey is a quiet little boy and oh how I love him. Whenever he sees me he runs and gives me a hug. And by ‘gives me a hug’ I really mean he hugs my leg, he wraps his little arm around my thigh and just holds on tight. Its real adorable. And I love how he just giggles and giggles at the silly things I do, it makes me feel like I’m funny. Sometimes he likes to scatter the tokens when other kids are trying to count them which makes my life more difficult, but I can never stay upset. He has these big eyebrows and squished little face, he looks kinda like an old man in a little body sometimes. He makes me happy.

Tim: Tim is rather infamous. All the kindergarten teachers knew who he was after the first few days and even the Primary teachers have heard of him. He is bigger than most of the other students and has this thing for hitting people (teachers and students) and he likes to run away. Yet when you see him outside of class he is the first one to see me and smile and wave, and he won’t stop until I see him and wave back. Even then sometimes he just likes to smile and wave at me. He has a lot of ability and does really well in class…when you have something he wants such has a snack, craft or toy. He is so excited to see us in the morning. He, like Marcus, could probably be a gang leader. Sometimes I feel like I’m teaching little gangsters. Tim is cute though, and I do love him.

I wish you all could meet them, but hopefully you will be able to reconcile yourself with pictures instead. I will try to post them on Facebook sometime. We’ll see if THAT happens. J Also, there are so many other kids in our group A that I shall have to tell you about, not to mention the other (older) group. But I’ll save that for another day.

I love China!

First week back from Vacation

Some highlights from this week:

We had a grilled cheese party! Yes, you read that right, a grilled CHEESE party!! We found cheese! It was in this deli/import store. I got a block of cheese for 37.5 yuan which is about 6 US dollars…but it was worth it. A bunch of us in the group got together and made grilled cheese. We had a pan and an iron. I tried cooking mine both ways and I prefer the iron. It was fun. Emmaline and Teal brought cream cheese…it was SO good in a grilled cheese! Ahh, best day of my life. I love cheese. And the cheese was melted and perfect, I’m sure Cindy Evans would have LOVED it! Haha! (She hates melted cheese).

Kung Fu was a BLAST! We’ve been learning all these different moves and found out that they all go together in a sequence and yes I feel so cool doing them. We’re all getting Kung Fu outfits and I cannot wait! We’re gonna be so legit!

We watched the Relief Society broadcast on Tuesday which was sweet. Darci and I watched the Saturday morning session of General Conference live because we had slept all day (no sleep on the train remember?). It was super cool to think about how I was watching conference the same time as everyone else…except it was midnight for me. It was super cool! The change in missionary age announcement was crazy! I was definitely very excited, Darci recorded the happy dance I did because I was so excited. There were a lot of different emotions I felt thinking about that announcement. I’ve thought long and hard about some things this past week. Maybe I’ll post them on here someday. Maybe not. I don’t know.

Some crazy stories from this past week:

I got bit. Hard. By my little student Tim. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned him before.  But he often hits us teachers as well as us students. We were starting classes so I was taking a toy away from him and he sure didn’t like that. So he grabbed my hand and started biting. I didn’t really know what to do, I didn’t expect him to bite me for that long or that hard. But after he finally let go, I realized it actually hurt. I showed our head teacher and she showed the Chinese teachers. I probably would have been fine but the Chinese teachers looked at it and took me down to the nurse. She cleaned it, had me ice it and then put something on it. Then I went back to teaching. Luckily our head teacher had been there so she could cover for my class real quick. They made him apologize to me. Then life goes on. The mark lasted for a couple days though. You can still see where his front two teeth bit down though. Even though he is a violent child, I still love him.

That was pretty much the only crazy story, unless you count the fact that everyday I’m living in China as a crazy story.

Peace!

Living out of a Backpack : 10 Days Around China

Ok, so my journal entry is taking way too long to write out and I’ll probably bore you with details anyways…so here is the short and sweet version. And yes I know, that even for a short version..its still pretty long.

Train: hard seats – 32 hours – that is way too long to be on a train. Not very comfortable. Lots of smokers because we were near the back. Squatter bathrooms smelled awful. Just laughed at everything, that’s all you can do sometimes to handle it.

Xi’an: super fun city. The weather was awesome (aka NOT humid!). My favorite part was biking around on top of the city wall. Darci and I rented a tandem bike, it was AWESOME! Did some fun bargaining. Katrina is my favorite to watch bargaining. We pretended we were sisters at one point. We were starving students. Got called “my dear” every other word by this one vendor. One of the vendors let me sit while he bargained with Katrina and gave me this book call “You May Find You Chinese Name Inside this book” and it was written on a paper and taped on the book. But to my surprise, I actually DID find my name in this book, Solana and Curtis. Found this awesome taro ice cream that I fell in love with. Ate it twice in one day…What? Who said that? Moving on. Tried octopus at the Muslim quarters, didn’t get to go into the mosque. Bummer. But the octopus wasn’t that bad. The seasonings were good (cumin, I think.) but the texture was weird.

Train: hard sleeper – 21 hours – it felt like heaven compared to hard seats. There were so many more people who knew English so we made so many friends. Iris and Eric had the bottom sleepers and were so nice to let us sit on their beds. We gave this one friend we made an English name. We wrote down names we thought were cool and all our brother’s names. We put down Corbin for my brother’s name even though its spelled differently and that’s the one he picked. This guy Evan helped Kelsey and I on the train and his brother and he sat with us for awhile. They have 4 kids in their family. We asked how that was possible and it sounded like they just have to pay a fee. We played Uno with them and some other people that joined. It was an awesome way for us to learn the colors and numbers in Chinese and we helped them learn them in English. It was great. There were a lot more families on this one it felt like. The whole atmosphere felt very friendly and there were no smokers around us! We actually got to sleep which was so nice! We met this kid William who is super good at chess. Him and Teal were best buds. Victor was my little friend and let me tell you, this kid is so cute! I love his voice! He helped me practice my numbers. He sure stole my heart. This train ride went by so fast.

Beijing: Our first day in Beijing (Monday), Darci, Jace, Katrina and I went to Insect street to try some new things. We ended up eating: scorpion(surprisingly good), snake(not bad), starfish(hard and gross), ostridge(pretty good), eel(I didn’t like it), deer kidney(not bad but not good either) and those were the crazy things we tried on sticks. But we also had this sugar comb stuff, coconut milk, this nasty milk yogurt thing (dairy is just not good here, unless its ice cream), cotton candy made to look like a flower, and this dried fruit stuff. Pretty fun stuff.

The next day (Tuesday) we went to the Temple of Heaven there was beautiful rose gardens, this circle of old people hacking sacking like you’ve never seen it done before! They were tricksters fo sho! There was a beautiful moment when everyone else was taking sweet picture of this spider but across from the bushes beyond us was this group of people dancing. There were wearing traditional costumes but one lady was also wearing sunglasses on her heads. They looked so happy and they danced with each other. It was a tender moment for me to be able to watch these modern people celebrating a culture rich with traditions and history. America is a relatively young country with a blend of many cultures. I was happy for these people who laughed and danced and enjoyed their culture.

Then we went to the Summer Place, we didn’t have a lot of time but it was a beautiful place and probably the coolest summer home I’ve ever seen! It was just before sunset so all the colors seemed to be a little more vibrant. I love how all the buildings are fully of such colorful artwork and architecture.

The next day (Wednesday) we went to Tiananmen square, there were so many people. I wore my red and white striped shirt and had some fun taking “where’s Waldo” pictures. We had so many Asians ask to take pictures with us. Jace went to go do something so Darci and I waited for him and we had all these people take pictures with us and give us their kids to hold and take pictures with. It was fun and we didn’t have anything better to do, but it was hard to get away. Then we went to see the Forbidden City that was pretty cool and we hiked to this hill thing over looking it. Pretty cool stuff. Then we went to the pearl market. It was so fun and there were some great deals and fun stuff. They would also call you beautiful girl. And when you bargained they would give you the “low price” but only because you so beautiful, or you so nice, or even just, because I like you. Such fun!

Our last full day (Thursday) we went to the great wall. We woke up early to take the subway to a bus to a van. The van got a flat tire on the way (I feel like I’m always getting flat tires on road trips!). We were suppose to go on this long 6 hour hike. But they dropped us off at the wrong place so it ended up only being the last hour or 2 of the hike. Emmaline and I were pretty excited about that because we are not super fast, strong endurance hikers like everyone else. Even with the shorter one we were bringing in the rear. But it was way fun. The Great Wall is super legit. There is a good reason why they call it great. The stairs leading up to it are death though. They are steep and there are many. But we made it! I hiked the Great Wall, jumped on the Great Wall, ate Oreos on the Great Wall, did a cartwheel on the Great Wall, did the worm on the Great Wall (the guards nearby chuckled heh heh), and yes, I even KISSED the Great Wall. The one big disappointment was that we wanted to zip line off the great wall but that part of the wall was closed for reconstruction or something. Sad day. We were really bummed.

We went to the Pearl Market one last time get some things before going back to the hostel. Packed everything up to leave in the morning.

Next day (Friday): woke up and went to the train station. Ran to get on the train first so we could put our luggage up (we were last, last time so we had to sit with our luggage on our laps, but we didn’t have seats this time so we needed to make sure our luggage made it in the luggage area.

Train: Standing seats – 20 hours – yes, we didn’t even have seats. We bought these stool things and newspaper to sit on. Darci bought this car window thing that you use to keep your car cool in the summer. My stool broke within 30 minutes of the train leaving. It was awesome. Luckily since we were first we got the back of the train..or not so luckily because we were near the bathrooms and the trash in the smoker area. But since we were the last cart on the train the trolley people didn’t go past us so we could spread out some. It was a long ride. We took turns sleep on the floor on the newspaper and mat. The bathroom smelled atrocious and we smelled it every time the door open. We had people throw up in the trash bag next to us and we had mothers hold their children over same said trash bag to poop. It smelled so bad constantly. When we got off the train we thought the smell was haunting us, but no, it had just sunk into us and we felt sorry for anyone who had to get near us. I think most of this train ride I have just blocked from my mind. But hey, I got to experience 3 different forms of train rides. I just hope I never had standing tickets on a long train ride again.

But we made it home! Went from train to train to bus to bus and up the stairs where we could shower and wash our stuff. I was going to try to stay up so I could go to bed at a regular time but ended up falling asleep almost immediately.

Overall it was a super fun vacation that went by so fast. Lots of adventures were had! Hope you enjoyed the abridged version of it. Peace!