I would *love* to be updating the blog with all sorts of exciting and unusual experiences we’re having, but actually our lives this past week have been rather humdrum and in many ways routine. Our typical day consists of beginning classes at 8:30 and ending at 11:30. We go to our apartments for lunch and then for a short nap, usually just a time to cool off and rest rather than sleep. After that we spend the rest of the afternoon planning lessons, cleaning, doing laundry, shopping for necessities, and/or proofreading. Yes, proofreading! Last Monday evening, two teachers from this university invited us out for dinner. We thought it was just a nice gesture on their part. The one had been in charge of us last summer, but his duties here have shifted and we have had next to no contact with him this summer. The other man has a daughter in my wife’s class and has himself attended several of the classes for university students, mostly to get new ideas in the area of teaching techniques. At the end of our meal at the restaurant, they asked us if we could proofread some materials they had put together for testing their students - about 400 pages, 4 copies. We thought we could handle it - 100 pages each, with two weeks in which to accomplish the task. W-E-L-L, when they delivered the materials to us, it ended up being about 400 pages of 4 *different* sets of testing materials = 1,600+ pages to proofread! So, the four of us have each attacked our personal stack of 400 or so pages after keeping up with our regular schoolwork, which is higher on our priority list. Nuff said….

With all our school and paper work to attend to, our big activities have been restricted pretty much to dining out each evening, always with a different mix of people and different hosts. The variety of food has been incredible, and we find ourselves thinking more and more that people back in America only *think* they know what Chinese food is! Below I will place a few pictures of highlights from some of our recent meals.

These are the two teachers who wined and dined us….

Among the items they ordered for us was potatoes covered with some kind of hot caramel. We had to eat it right away before it hardened into a sweet mass. Here’s Ruth pulling some of it from the hot from the plate….

We got to eat twice this past week at one of our favorite restaurants - the JiaoZi place. Not only is the food always good, but also it’s rarely “controversial.” Below is a picture of our of our nights at the JiaoZi restaurant….

Friday evening we were invited to have dinner with two of my students from last summer’s classes - Spring and Peter. Spring invited a classmate to join us, and Peter invited his girlfriend Jessica. I have greatly enjoyed talking to Spring about how much his life has changed since last summer. Below is a picture of some of the group - Jessica is on one side of my wife, and Spring is on the other….

The restaurant to which they took us specializes in food from the NorthEast of this country. I was the “ugly American” of the evening by eating my chicken wing with my fingers instead of with my chopsticks. We reminded them of the saying they knew right away from KFC - “finger licking good” and explained that what I was doing was why KFC has that saying. Below is a picture of some of what we enjoyed, including the bones of a whole chicken that we tore apart….

Jessica was pleased to get the chicken foot. Below is a picture of her pleasure before digging in….

Saturday of this week our “tourism” was shopping here in Haikou. We explained that we had not had time to shop to find souvenirs for our families. So they took us to some great places to find nice gifts. I will not show you any pictures of the shopping because some of it got a little ugly - especially when our hostess Judy battled it out with one clerk to get our purchase down to 40 percent of the original asking price. I was actually tempted to catch that wonderful Kodak moment, but I was afraid it might derail the haggling.

We ate lunch and dinner in local restaurants where the food was not only tasty, but also more than a little controversial. Lunch below included thinly sliced chicken stomach and also pigs’ ears. Can you find them in the picture below?

Mid-afternoon, we had “afternoon tea” at a “cafe” (read: Pizza Hut!) Four of us had iced lemon tea (ah… civilization!), Jean had iced coffee, and Judy had hot tea. Five of us had ice cream, and Yvonne had chocolate ice cream cake. Below is our little group….

After two and a half more hours of “window shopping” (read, for me: hostage situation!) we went to a restaurant where they had taken us last year. Their speciality is NorthWestern cuisine - once again, some of it quite delicious and also some of it controversial. Several of us had by this point “maxed out” on dealing with “mystery meat”. Below is a picture of a few of the delights. Notice on the left their version of a wrap - the cream-colored wrap is made of bean curd, and the meat on the same plate is made of pork. Jean’s hilarious aside to me was, “This puts a whole new spin on ‘pork and beans’.”

After dinner we were entertained by a floor show that was a charming mix of tradition dances and non-traditional things like the theme to Titanic played on a soprano saxophone. Here’s one shot (I’ll spare you the belly dancers)….

This evening (Sunday) Alice, a former student of mine from BJ (who was also a fellow teacher with us here last year), and her fiance are taking us out to dinner. This will be the 7th or 8th night in a row that we will have eaten out (I’ve lost track!) And we’re scheduled to do the same with yet someone else tomorrow evening. Believe me, we’re all a little concerned about the potential expansion of our waistlines. Fortunately, there seem to be plenty of items that we do no more than politely taste.

Well, this entry has gotten almost as long as our humdrum week, so I’ll stop for now. Later this week, I hope to do an entry on our apartments and show you a few more pictures of our students. Thanks for checking in!

Thursday afternoon friends we met last summer came to visit with us for a while. They are husband and wife and both are former English teachers; therefore our conversations were easy and lively. We had a great time of sharing and of deepening our friendships. In the course of talking to these friends, we told them about some physical ailments we’d had since arriving. They have a friend who is a doctor and who was willing to make a house call. Jean has had swollen feet and ankles since our arrival. Because her shoes are tight, she’s had some blisters to deal with. She learned that it’s nothing serious, just a slightly irregular heartbeat with a bit of poor circulation. Below is a picture of Jean being examined by the doctor in our living room.

Yvonne has had the same problem with her feet that Jean has had, also with subsequent blisters from tight shoes. One foot is now almost back to normal, but the other one is still quite swollen. He determined that her heart is just fine, but that she has poor circulation in her one leg. Below is a picture of Yvonne talking to the doctor.

I had cold-like symptoms develop this week (probably I took a chill the other night when the temperature dipped to near 85 degrees). He checked me out and confirmed what I had been suspecting - a sinus infection. My picture is below.

Becka, who is apparently the picture of health, did not have to consult the doctor, and hence she will not be featured in this blog entry, though she can be seen sitting beside “invalid Jean”. The doctor has prescribed a different Chinese medication for each of us to take and will come by with the medications Friday evening. He said the ladies’ stuff will not taste bad, but mine, unfortunately, will be disgusting. Great! But it *will* be nice to feel better. During the course of the consultations at which *everyone* was present, we learned far more about each other than we wanted to know through the doctor’s probing questions.

After our nice consultations with the doctor, our friends treated us to a meal in a restaurant that features food from where they are from in the northern part of the country. Below you will find a picture of the things we enjoyed and a picture of Jean and Yvonne using Chinese silverware.

A young friend who returned from Asia a couple of weeks ago gave me something to whet my appetite for what is yet to come. Here’s a picture of what he gave me….

In case you cannot tell what delight is in the “handy snack pack” above - it’s a chicken foot. Yum!? What a great idea!

In preparation for the Memorial Day weekend, the tradition kick-off to summer, here's some humor for those who might be preparing to barbecue this weekend. Outdoor Barbecuing: the only type of cooking some husbands will do. When a husband volunteers to do such cooking, the following chain of events is put into motion. 1. The wife goes to the store. 2. The wife fixes the salad, vegetables, and dessert. 3. The wife prepares the meat for cooking, places it on a tray along with the necessary cooking utensils, and takes it to the man, who is lounging beside the grill, drinking a tall, cold beverage. 4. The husband places the meat on the grill. 5. The wife goes inside to set the table and check the vegetables. 6. The wife comes out to tell the husband that the meat is burning. 7. The husband takes the meat off the grill and hands it to the wife. 8. The wife prepares the plates and brings them to the table. 9. After eating, the wife clears the table and does the dishes. 10. The husband asks the wife how she enjoyed "her night off". And upon seeing her annoyed reaction concludes that it is just impossible to please some women! quotation... "I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress." - Ronald Reagan =^..^= =^..^= =^..^= Rob Loach in Greenville SC I've heard that a woman has never shot a man while he was doing dishes.

Yesterday was our last day of class. Becka and I combined our classes for the last two hours so that we could do some things together. Becka dictated ten questions to the students in English. After writing them down, they had to answer them according to their lives and preferences. Then we set them about the task of finding other students who had the same answer for a question. The winner was the first one to have ten names written down - a different name by each question. At first the students were quite timid, but by the end they were mixing well and it was difficult to get their attention to end the game. Below is a picture of the students playing our game.

After the game we sang several American folk songs, several French folk songs, and one final song in English, French, and Chinese - Silent Night. Earlier this week we had both talked about holidays and their origins, and so singing this song was quite natural and thoroughly enjoyed by the students. The final hour was spent in a room with a ping pong table that was perfect for enjoying the cookies and Coca Cola we had brought for the students. They did not seem to know quite how to respond since they are not used to teachers doing nice or special things for them. We had a good opportunity to talk to some of them one on one. Many expressed appreciation for our teaching and several were interested in things that are vitally important to us.

After classes were over, we were treated to lunch at a fine restaurant in town. This special meal was going to be breakfast on Sunday, but for some reason it was moved to Friday noon, which was just fine with us. Almost all the same people present had been there in the same room for our welcome dinner three weeks earlier. Below is a picture of the dean and her husband.

On the menu was a special cold soup called YinYan Soup. This must be a challenge to make! In the plate to the right of the soup is something called “fish lungs.”

This morning (Saturday) we were treated to breakfast by the parents of Ruth’s helper, Carter - the little boy whom I mentioned in several earlier blog entries. The restaurant where we had breakfast was huge and there were hundreds of people having breakfast there early on a Saturday morning. Carter’s parents have been wonderfully kind to us during our time here. Below is their picture.

Many of the items were wheeled by the little room where we were eating, and our hosts chose items for our breakfast. Below is a picture of Carter’s father checking out the food “Ã la carte.”

We were *finally* able to try Hainan noodles, one of the regional specialties that, for the entire three weeks of our classes, our students had been telling us about and asking us if we’d tried. Here’s a picture of the famed Hainan noodles:

One of the items on our menu today was the seemingly ubiquitous chicken feet. Becka and I somehow artfully dodged them, but I was able to snap a picture of Carter’s mother’s plate with an uneaten chicken foot and the remains of the ones she had already enjoyed. I have become shamelessly adept at making it look like I’m photographing one thing when I am actually taking a picture of something else. On to the picture of the chicken feet…

After breakfast we did some grocery shopping to get the final ingredients for dinner at our place this evening. We are having our closest associates and friends here in for a meal together before our departure on Monday. The shopping trip was capped off with a trip home in one of the other type of taxis I showed you in a previous post. I would post a picture, but our driver would not allow me to photograph her and, at my most devious, I had no way of doing so clandestinely. Once again, the mind’s images can be even more vivid….

Tomorrow if I am able to, I hope to post some final random pictures. If I’m not able to, I’m sure everyone will understand. Please remember us as we begin our trip home Monday morning. For those of you in the good ole USA, that will be Sunday evening your time. We will spend Monday in Hong Kong, before taking the long flight home on Tuesday. I don’t know how I’ll continue a blog after we’re home. Our daily lives there are so drab in comparison to the colorful life we’ve lived this past month! But then, our experiences have been the result of our time here being a special event - the university officials and Ruth and some of her friends wanted us to experience as much as possible during our visit. Ruth’s normal life here is nothing like what we have experienced, and we could not last for long if we lived year round the way we’ve lived this month!