I will open this post with what is quite possibly one of my favorite moments to happen here in China. And it all started like this… My wife recently discovered a toy store here that is absolutely amazing. It has tons of imported toys and in the back of this huge toy store is a sand pit and about ten small homes that form a mini town. It is a great place to go and let your kids play. So, we went to this particular store to find a toy for Joshua’s birthday present (Sydney’s best friend). But, when we arrived the store was totally gutted and a handful of employees were walking around tearing down signs and shuffling piles of garbage. We sat there dejected for a few minutes, totally bummed that this toy store had closed. We walked around for a bit and even let Sydney play in the sand pit (one of the few things still awaiting its destruction). But what had started out as a devastating loss began to slowly show its true colors of opportunity. My eyes fell on a simple plastic bench and instantly I thought “that would be great for the kids”. After bartering the price down quite a bit we ventured off to see what other goodies we could find. I stood in front of a massive pile of broken and discarded toys and then noticed at my feet a Spiderman outfit. I picked it up to joyously discover that it was an ADULT SIZE COSTUME! Now my mind was running at a million miles a minute with all the potential that I held there in my hands. A man walking by casually said “I will give it to you for free” and then another employee ran off into the back to grab me a BRAND NEW ONE! My words are a mere sliver of the emotion I felt in this one moment. Then I thought “what about my friend Chris?” so I grabbed another outfit. “Oh, and what about my brother who’s coming back soon” so I grabbed yet another outfit. Ahhhhh. After we rummaged through all the piles of toys and bartered the price down enough we came away with; a plastic kitchen, a big plastic bench, two Soldier dolls (which will now spend their existence as princes and boyfriends of various Barbies and not their original design of army men), a big Nemo fish pillow, a plastic walking toy (to help kids learn to walk), 2 Christmas candle holders (random… I know), a table for the girls room, an air cannon (which at 7 feet away will violently ruffle your hair and at 6 inches away will take your eyebrows clean off your face… ok I made the second one up), and most importantly 3 ADULT SIZE SPIDERMAN SUITS!!! Did I not tell you this was one of my favorite memories??? And we got it all for only $15USD!
Another revelation I’ve had of living overseas is that it’s not always good to know what people are saying… Sometimes it’s better just to live in ignorance of what people around you are saying. Obviously, this is just on a few occasions, but I had one of those this past week. In the past when I didn’t know as much Chinese, if someone would approach me and use Chinese, I would just nod my head in agreement and mumble something like “Alright, don’t eat the fish here on Tuesdays, sounds good!” with no real clue about what was being said. But now, we understand so much more and can’t avoid the occasional hurt that comes with it. So once this week before class started I was surrounded by students grabbing at my hands and giving me high fives and what not. This is normal. But at one point a kid starts saying “Pang”, which means “fat”, while talking about me. Now you might be reading this and thinking, “Matt, maybe you heard him wrong, Chinese is a tough language and it could have been something else” well if you are thinking that, thank you, your kindness overwhelms me. What I left out in telling you this (and seals the deal that he was calling me fat) was that as the student was saying “fat” he was grabbing my fat stomach. I feel sad inside. OK, I wasn’t hurt that bad (since this isn’t the first time a Chinese person, in front of others, has called me fat), but it was one of those reminders that I can speak the language and can’t hide behind my pretty foreign face.
OK, that’s all for now.
the petersons
October 25, 2009
October 20, 2009
Teaching... Sponge Bob and Barbie
Teaching has been a blast so far. I have really been enjoying myself as I get up and teach/entertain these kids. I would say I’m part teacher and part clown. It goes over great with the younger kids. For example, I teach them generally like 6-8 new words with each lesson. Then we play a game where I hide the flash card with the new words then the kid who guesses the word correctly stands up and plays me in a game of paper, rock, and scissors. Whoever wins that scores a point either for the students or me for the teachers. At the end of class if they have more points than me I usually sing them a song or dance for them (neither of which are a reward for winning, but get the kids laughing and wanting to beat me), if I win they will sing me a song or some random kid will come up and do some kung fu move (which always leaves me deeply satisfied). After class gets over the kids usually surround me and grab at my hands and jump up and down. I don’t know why they do this, but they love it when I also start jumping up and down. Then I try and pull my way towards the door as 20 or so kids hang on to me, only to arrive at another class ready to do it all over again.
As goes with most posts here are some Sydney quotes:
(So this quote must be prefaced with the fact that Heather despises Sponge Bob Square Pants and has no part in exposing our kids to it, I however enjoy it and from time to time put it on for Sydney)
So we’re trying to teach Sydney about letters and what we’ve done recently is associated letters with different things. With “S” we’ve associated it with “Snake”. We’re also constantly trying to teach her manners. So when Sydney and I were watching an episode of Sponge Bob the intro started and at one point Sponge Bob’s name comes on the screen (which has plenty of “snakes”) and he appears in front of it to play his nose like it’s a flute (isn’t Sponge Bob great!) and so when the title to the show appears Sydney starts yelling to me “Daddy, Daddy, “a snake”” and I say “where Sydney?” at this point Sponge Bob is standing in front of his name and blocking all the “snakes”. And so Sydney says in the sweetest voice “Excuse me Sponge Bob” and motions with her hand to move. I was instantly melted with humor and Sydney’s politeness.
Also recently I got up with Sydney in the morning to make her breakfast and to get the day going. For whatever reason this particular morning I was feeling alive and well and decided to start beat boxing a bit, while making breakfast in the kitchen. When I finished Sydney clapped her hands and said “bravo Daddy, bravo”. Again she said it later and me, being the confused parent (because where do they get this stuff?), I asked her where she got that from and she informed me “the Diamond Castle” (which is one of her favorite Barbie movies). Thanks for all your help Barbie.
Till next time,
the petersons
As goes with most posts here are some Sydney quotes:
(So this quote must be prefaced with the fact that Heather despises Sponge Bob Square Pants and has no part in exposing our kids to it, I however enjoy it and from time to time put it on for Sydney)
So we’re trying to teach Sydney about letters and what we’ve done recently is associated letters with different things. With “S” we’ve associated it with “Snake”. We’re also constantly trying to teach her manners. So when Sydney and I were watching an episode of Sponge Bob the intro started and at one point Sponge Bob’s name comes on the screen (which has plenty of “snakes”) and he appears in front of it to play his nose like it’s a flute (isn’t Sponge Bob great!) and so when the title to the show appears Sydney starts yelling to me “Daddy, Daddy, “a snake”” and I say “where Sydney?” at this point Sponge Bob is standing in front of his name and blocking all the “snakes”. And so Sydney says in the sweetest voice “Excuse me Sponge Bob” and motions with her hand to move. I was instantly melted with humor and Sydney’s politeness.
Also recently I got up with Sydney in the morning to make her breakfast and to get the day going. For whatever reason this particular morning I was feeling alive and well and decided to start beat boxing a bit, while making breakfast in the kitchen. When I finished Sydney clapped her hands and said “bravo Daddy, bravo”. Again she said it later and me, being the confused parent (because where do they get this stuff?), I asked her where she got that from and she informed me “the Diamond Castle” (which is one of her favorite Barbie movies). Thanks for all your help Barbie.
Till next time,
the petersons
October 15, 2009
The Week That Shall Not Be Named
Yes. We had a miserable week since we last updated all of you. It will be a week that will live on only as a blog post and repressed memories. But none-the-less I will share about it with you, and afterwards it will be referred to as “the week that shall not be named”. Both Heather and I got sick for starters, which if it were only us would have been hard but not that big of a deal. But the reality is that we have kids and they still need us, even when we’re sick (I will bunny trail for a moment to say that parenting truly is one of the most difficult jobs). And again if only one of us were sick, we could still rely on the other to carry the parenting duties. So we had to turn to a third parent to help us and this parent goes by the name of DVD player. For four days we had a movie marathon (ok, to be honest we did other indoor activities, but for the most part we watched DVDs). At one point Heather put in “the Sound of Music” which is one of my all time most hated movies, but it alone takes like two days to watch since it’s so long… which helped pass “the week which shall not be named”. (It also rained outside the whole 4 or 5 days so even when we were feeling slightly better we couldn’t get out of the house… we’re lucky to have survived this week)
Two classic Heather quotes came out of this week though which do make me grateful (and yes she read this post beforehand and is ok with me writing about it). Heather for those of you who don’t know her, can get a bit worried when she’s sick. And since rumors and fears of H1N1 are alive and well here in Xian, it’s immediately what she thought we had, correction, knew we had (luckily for us that wasn’t the case). We went back and forth on it with Heather taking the position of us having it and I affirming her we didn’t. At one point I told her gently it’s not H1N1 to which she replied with this zinger “When we’re sitting in the hospital tomorrow you’re gonna feel stupid when they tell us we have H1N1!” Luckily for me we never had to go to the hospital so I will never know what that stupidity would feel like. She, in another heightened frenzy fired this off “I bet you $100,000,000,000,000 (give or take) we have H1N1!” Again, luckily for us we didn’t have H1N1 and now I find myself with a huge I.O.U. in my pocket. Which is nice, because now when we have a disagreement I can bait her by saying “Do you wanna double or nothing your H1N1 bet???”
We’re all better now and it stopped raining, we’ve turned the DVD player off (and on from time to time) and are again enjoying life outside of our apartment. I got back to teaching today which went great and both Heather and I are resuming our Chinese studies. I have some more to write about my job and the craziness that happens there… but this post is too long. Check back in a couple days for it.
Peace,
the petersons
Two classic Heather quotes came out of this week though which do make me grateful (and yes she read this post beforehand and is ok with me writing about it). Heather for those of you who don’t know her, can get a bit worried when she’s sick. And since rumors and fears of H1N1 are alive and well here in Xian, it’s immediately what she thought we had, correction, knew we had (luckily for us that wasn’t the case). We went back and forth on it with Heather taking the position of us having it and I affirming her we didn’t. At one point I told her gently it’s not H1N1 to which she replied with this zinger “When we’re sitting in the hospital tomorrow you’re gonna feel stupid when they tell us we have H1N1!” Luckily for me we never had to go to the hospital so I will never know what that stupidity would feel like. She, in another heightened frenzy fired this off “I bet you $100,000,000,000,000 (give or take) we have H1N1!” Again, luckily for us we didn’t have H1N1 and now I find myself with a huge I.O.U. in my pocket. Which is nice, because now when we have a disagreement I can bait her by saying “Do you wanna double or nothing your H1N1 bet???”
We’re all better now and it stopped raining, we’ve turned the DVD player off (and on from time to time) and are again enjoying life outside of our apartment. I got back to teaching today which went great and both Heather and I are resuming our Chinese studies. I have some more to write about my job and the craziness that happens there… but this post is too long. Check back in a couple days for it.
Peace,
the petersons
October 5, 2009
Moon Cake Sized Hole in My Heart, School, New Pictures!
First off I have an important announcement. We have changed our picture’s location to a website instead of Facebook. You can find the link to the right and when you go there you will be able to find all of our old albums as well as 2 NEW ALBUMS! One is of our visit with my mom and the pictures she took while she was here and the other is of our time in Hong Kong and our coming back to Xian.
Well my teaching hit another snag when school was cancelled yet again. China celebrates two bigger festivals back to back at the start of October and so the school made the decision to wait until October 9th (which marks the end of both holidays) to start again. So part of the cancelling was H1N1 fears and the other was the scheduling of these two holidays. It’s nice to have time off, but I was really looking forward to getting into a routine, which will now have to wait.
This week was a big week for all of China as they celebrated 60 years as a nation. As you may or may not know 60 years ago was when China officially became a Communist nation. It was celebrated all over China, but nothing like the military procession that they had in Beijing which was unbelievable. Chinese people now are celebrating Mid-Autumn festival, which is another larger holiday here.
For the Mid-Autumn holiday Chinese people traditionally eat Moon Cake. They come in many different flavors some are unnaturally good and others are not so good. The best has to be the Strawberry moon cake which I’ve desperately tried to find recently to no avail. It is said that the Strawberry Moon Cake can cure many illnesses, tests are still pending, but that gives you an idea of how good they are (they don't cure illnesses that was made up). My quest to find them lead me to a local super market named Ren Ren Le. What was funny and sad for me was that I grabbed a handful of them to buy and when I got to the counter the cashier couldn’t find the price. So for 10 minutes or so she’s trying to locate a price or the person to tell her the price and vainly attempting to tell me why she can’t sell them to me. My heart sank when she turned and threw them in a box on the ground next to her and refused to sell them to me (because of not finding the price). I told her I would pay 1 kuai per Moon Cake (truthfully I would have gladly paid upwards of 10 kuai a piece and/or re-named Sydney Ren Ren Le if they would sell them to me). In the end I came home with no Strawberry Moon Cake and a hole left in my heart. Thanks Ren Ren Le.
Thanks always for checking in, we hope all of you are doing well.
The petersons
Well my teaching hit another snag when school was cancelled yet again. China celebrates two bigger festivals back to back at the start of October and so the school made the decision to wait until October 9th (which marks the end of both holidays) to start again. So part of the cancelling was H1N1 fears and the other was the scheduling of these two holidays. It’s nice to have time off, but I was really looking forward to getting into a routine, which will now have to wait.
This week was a big week for all of China as they celebrated 60 years as a nation. As you may or may not know 60 years ago was when China officially became a Communist nation. It was celebrated all over China, but nothing like the military procession that they had in Beijing which was unbelievable. Chinese people now are celebrating Mid-Autumn festival, which is another larger holiday here.
For the Mid-Autumn holiday Chinese people traditionally eat Moon Cake. They come in many different flavors some are unnaturally good and others are not so good. The best has to be the Strawberry moon cake which I’ve desperately tried to find recently to no avail. It is said that the Strawberry Moon Cake can cure many illnesses, tests are still pending, but that gives you an idea of how good they are (they don't cure illnesses that was made up). My quest to find them lead me to a local super market named Ren Ren Le. What was funny and sad for me was that I grabbed a handful of them to buy and when I got to the counter the cashier couldn’t find the price. So for 10 minutes or so she’s trying to locate a price or the person to tell her the price and vainly attempting to tell me why she can’t sell them to me. My heart sank when she turned and threw them in a box on the ground next to her and refused to sell them to me (because of not finding the price). I told her I would pay 1 kuai per Moon Cake (truthfully I would have gladly paid upwards of 10 kuai a piece and/or re-named Sydney Ren Ren Le if they would sell them to me). In the end I came home with no Strawberry Moon Cake and a hole left in my heart. Thanks Ren Ren Le.
Thanks always for checking in, we hope all of you are doing well.
The petersons
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
