Other Things We Did This Weekend

Weekends are the best!  The week days can be a little rough, because we are still learning to herd the children and get them to behave and such.  But once a weekend comes and we are free, we realize that all the hard work has been worth it!

As you know, we visited some beautiful parks this weekend.  Here are a couple of other things we did!

We explored a street in our city.  We got off a random stop and just walked around.  We didn't really find anything cool, but we did have fun!

We got some more Muslim noodles!  We took another picture with the owners, and printed them off a copy.  They were so touched!

Monica took us to a clothing market!  Well, clothes were on the first floor, shoes on the second, and random stuff on the fourth floor.  I could seriously spend all day there!

I bought a dress and some pens, and Bailey bought this cool coat.  The guy was asking 999 kuai at first, and we were like no way, but the guy really wanted to sell it to us.  Bailey talked him down to 300 kuai!

On one random street exploration, we bought some puffed corn from a guy (who kept exploding them), and Bailey got a taste of royal living.

Monica and her husband took us to dinner!  We trusted their choice in restaurant and good thing we did.  Holy cow - best Chinese food I've eaten in my whole life!  I guess authentic Chinese food can be delicious!

I have really grown to love these amazing friends Bailey and I have made.  We are so blessed to have other married couples on this trip with us, and even more blessed that they are awesome people!

Hongmei Park

The other park we hit was Hongmei Park, just down the street.  It is a more popular, and sometimes crowded park.  Probably because it is right next to the Tianning Temple, which we have yet to hit (you have to pay like 80 kuai to visit that temple and its grounds, so we are going to wait for a sunny day when we have more time).  Hongmei Park, though, has a similarly built (but smaller) temple.  And we just so happened to hit the plum blossom festival, so there were blooming pink trees everywhere.  They were gorgeous!

We were able to walk up to the very top of the smaller temple on some seriously steep and narrow stairs, which we shared with the people who were coming down from the top.  Because of that, it took a while to get up there, but the view was so worth it!

The grounds of the park were also beautiful.  There was a reflecting pool and all sorts of classic Chinese architecture.

As always, people were snapping pictures of us as we passed them.  Some people try to be more discreet, and some people wave and smile to get you to look at them for a picture.  An old man and a younger man approached our group, and the younger man said, "my teacher wants to ask if you will model for us".  We agreed to, as long as they'd send the pictures they take to us over WeChat.  They whipped out their nice cameras and started posing us!  Haha Bailey was not so comfortable with it.

The photographers really had a problem with Bailey's posture.  They had him sit up really straight and put his chin down.  This picture cracks me up, Bailey looks so funny!  And I'm not quite sure where I'm looking.

The evening ended with some cotton candy.  It was not very sweet, but I quite liked it.  It was a tasty ending to an amazing day!

Dongpo Park

This morning we hopped on the bus to downtown Changzhou to meet our friend Monica, a member of our Suzhou International Branch.  She is the coolest and cutest lady!  She is from Mexico, and has been here for the last 2 years.  She was just here to teach English, but met her husband, a Chinese National (who left the country to meet with the missionaries and get baptized!) and has been here ever since!

We started with a healthy meal of McDonald's.  I haven't grown weary enough of Chinese food to appreciate McDonald's yet, but I can say that they have some seriously delicious soft serve!  We then were off to Dongpo Park.  Monica was a great tour guide, we would definitely have gotten lost without her!

We hadn't even gone in the park when my breath was taken away by how beautiful the park was.  I love being by so many rivers and canals, they are so pretty!  And the pollution, on a good day, can pass as fog which is totally mystical.

We went in the park and it was so nice and quiet.  Monica said that Dongpo Park is her favorite because not many people go there, so it tends to be peaceful.

There were so many cool things to see that it was hard not to take lots of pictures!  I feel better knowing that the park is just in our city, so we can go back as many times as we'd like.

We did run into a few people, of course, like this guy who wanted a picture with Petro and Bailey.  In one of the pictures, Petro was doing a typical Hawaiian sign with his hand, which is actually the same sign the Chinese use for the number 6.  So the guy thought Petro was asking for 6 kuai, and he started pulling out his wallet to pay us!  Haha!  It took a while to explain that we don't want his money, and that the sign is just an American thing.

Shey and I decided that if people just want to get random pictures with us, then we could just get random pictures with them.  Like with this giggly group of girls!

The last part of Dongpo Park that we hit was this serene little courtyard attached to two temples, which of course you shouldn't take pictures in.  Though dark, they were very intricate and beautiful inside, with large statues looking straight into your soul.  Very intimidating.  Every time I visit places like that, I'm grateful for our temples which give such a different feeling.  But of course I love to visit these!

I'll for sure be going back to Dongpo Park before we leave in June.  We also hit another park today, but that calls for a whole other blog post!

The Night Market

We were blessed with very cool head teachers.  They are a married couple from Texas, not too much older than us, and tons of fun to be around!  On Tuesday night they took us to the night market, and we've been back every night since!

It is seriously so close to our apartments.  Probably like a 10 minute walk.  At this night market you can find socks, underwear, plants, cell phone accessories, and food.  Did I mention food?!  Seriously, so much food.  All of it is super cheap, and from what we tried, all of it is pretty delicious!

Picture courtesy of my cute new friend Shey, whose blog can be found here.

It has been tough eating at the cafeteria knowing that we could just walk down the street and get a couple of exceptional and inexpensive meals.  So we've just been picking at our cafeteria food and then eating everything at the night market just a few hours later.  We've eaten flavorful flatbread, Chinese burrito things, noodles, potstickers, french fries, dumpling soup, and of course, fried squid on sticks.  Delicious!

We get a lot of funny looks as a group of white kids, but everyone is super friendly to us.  This one guy was making waffle cone-type things, and we spent a good 8 minutes trying to explain that we wanted to only buy one, instead of the whole bagful he was trying to sell us.  He really didn't understand, so then a huge group of people started gathering, trying to help, and other vendors were yelling to the cone guy, also trying to help.  He finally understood what we were asking and said, "one??  FREE!" and cheerfully gave us a whole cone for free.  What a nice guy.  It was tasty.  But everyone on that row was laughing at us.

Tonight I bought some adorable socks.  One pair has little sailors on them, and the other pair has cows and fences.  I'm obsessed with socks!  After some haggling, I bought the most beautiful embroidered blue tunic shirt for 40 kuai (about $6) which I'm very happy about.  I also bought some earmuffs because that's what all the cool Asians are doing these days.

The fun does't end there!  I've never seen games at Chinese markets, but I guess it is a thing!  For just 10 kuai you can get an armload - and I seriously mean an armload, packed from shoulder to wrist, of wooden rings which you can throw on objects.  Whatever your ring encircles, you get to grab and keep!  I won two teapots on the first night, and Bailey and I both won a couple more things tonight!  How could you say no to 10 kuai games is what I'm wondering, especially when you can get some sweet teapots!

Bailey also shot some balloons with airsoft guns.  The prizes weren't as cool for that game (he won a deck of cards), but he likes those shooting kinds of games.

Oh how I love the night market!  That's all I have to say about it for now, but I'm sure we will be back!

The Food So Far

One thing I was nervous about for China was the food.  I LOVE food, and I love ethnic food... for the most part.  But the two weeks I spent in China a couple of years ago got me dreading the food I'd be eating for the next few months.

But you know, so far it hasn't been that bad at all!  We are fed every weekday meal in the faculty cafeteria, and it is pretty decent!  Breakfast is my favorite meal, which is funny because I generally dislike American breakfast food.  But it is always very bready here which I appreciate.  We usually get these buns filled with meat.  Tasty.  Today we had egg roll type things which I filled up on because I loved them so much!  Yesterday we were basically fed yellow cake for breakfast, so that was fun.  Probably my favorite breakfast are these things: I don't know what they are called here but they are definitely mochi filled with dumpling filling.  SO GOOD.

Lunch and dinner usually consist of a mystery meat, some kind of soup, boiled greens (which I eat lots of - yum!), and rice.  Good old rice, keeping us alive these days.  You can never go wrong with that stuff!  Other things can disappoint, though, like the super tasty egg drop soup I was eating the other day.  Well, Mitch just had to go and point out the baby eels in the soup!  I picked one out so that you can see its squishiness and its little eyes.  I stopped eating it immediately, but will always remember the particular chewiness of baby eels.

Sometimes the mystery meat isn't so mysterious after all.... check out these chicken feet (those nails!!!)

I couldn't get myself to try them but Bailey did.  You bite off the meat, chew it up, and spit out the nails.  He said they taste just like chicken wings.  I hope to find some fried chicken feet, because I would try those... but boiled?!  Ew.

So really, the cafeteria food isn't that bad.  I can always find something that I like, and leave feeling mostly full.  Plus I'm not about to complain about free food!  But sometimes we just can't do it, so we hit our favorite restaurant for some handmade Muslim noodles! Best $2 meal you can find around here (that we know of at least).

The noodles have the most delicious chewiness that I cannot describe!  I don't know if I've ever had handmade noodles before, but even if I had, I'm sure these ones would take the cake.  Plus the owners are super cute and nice.  The lady is the chattiest person, she doesn't even care that we can't understand her, she will just stand and talk and talk to us and we just nod.  Actually, the first time we walked in she got really excited and ran us to the back of the restaurant so she could show us a picture of two white kids our age.  Haha, probably some other ILP teachers that frequented her place!

Of course, when the food gets really hard, there's always that big bag of French fries in the apartment freezer.  A whole bunch of fries and some American soda will suffice for a meal.

Church: A 12-Hour Ordeal

Yes.  Church was a 12 hour ordeal today.

We woke up before light, 5am to be exact.  We met our group (about 15 of us wanted to go to church) and we were out by 5:40am.

First we walked to the bus stop.  Luckily yesterday's adventures prepared us with the knowledge that we needed to get everyone to the right stop.  And luckily Rachel (seriously the best person to travel with) had done the research on what stop to get off for the railway station.

We got off our stop and started walking... we walked for quite a while then learned from the locals that we were probably going the wrong way.  Of course, we couldn't know for sure because we don't actually speak Chinese, but in the end it turned out that the station was much closer to where the bus dropped us off than we thought.

We found the right train tickets to buy without much problem, and were soon on a bullet train.  It was super nice and went 175 mph!  It was crazy fast!  It was fun to watch out the window, but when other trains passed us coming from the opposite way, missing us by no more than an inch, I seriously thought we would fly off the tracks.

After we got off the train we headed to the subway station.  We were stuck at the machines there for a little bit, once again held up by our lack of Mandarin speaking, when a gift from the heavens appeared to us!  Brother Keebler (I think that was his name), a member from our international branch, spotted us, a group of dressed up white kids, and knew exactly what to do.  He helped us get our tickets, took us on the two different subways, and then on a little bit of a walk.  At 9:30 we found ourselves in a nice home in beautiful Suzhou, sitting down for sacrament meeting!

Church was very interesting and enjoyable.  There is no intermingling of Chinese Nationals and foreigners allowed when it comes to religious affairs, so it was just a whole bunch of people from around the world in there.  A girl from Thailand spoke as did a woman from the Phillipines.  It was a very cool experience to be there with members from all different places, and very comforting to have a meeting just like the ones we have at home!

After church we got the subways, train, and the bus back home.  It was an extra long journey because places tend to be busier in the afternoon than at 5am...

But of course, taking the time to travel back and forth from church was worth it.  I actually can't wait to go back when we have more time to explore Suzhou!

Downtown Changzhou

All week we have been so curious about downtown Changzhou!  We didn't think it could be too far away, but I don't think any of us were prepared for how big Changzhou really is.  So Bailey and I decided to check it out, along with 2 other married couples that we befriended (Sheyanne and Petro, as well as Rachel and Spencer).

Rachel did some research on how to get to the city, but we couldn't find the bus we were supposed to get on.  So, instead of bus 320 we hopped on bus 302 because those are basically the same numbers, right?  We hopped off when Rachel's phone said we were by a Wal Mart, because a Wal Mart is obviously the mark of a downtown center.

Instead of going to Wal Mart, though, we went through an odd looking alleyway which opened up to a beautiful park!  It had a temple with some cool golden statues in them, lots of other amazing buildings, more statues, an exercise park, old ladies dancing, and of course, men gambling.  We didn't explore it all, so we need to go back!

We then found a McDonald's, which to the boys meant food, and to the girls it meant ice cream!  Mmm!  It was in a mall, and also in the mall was a creepy monkey looking dude.  He had us get a picture with him, but then started asking for money to pay him for it.  Definitely an awkward situation when there's a huge language gap.  With the help of some local teenage girls, we found out that he was asking 100 kuai (about $14)!  What?!  Definitely a tourist price.  Shey and Petro were super smart and booked it right after the picture was taken, but the rest of us didn't anticipate the monkey wanting money.  Luckily, he was satisfied with watching me delete the pictures off my phone.  He followed us for a little bit to see if Petro and Shey would appear, as he knew they had pictures too, and it was a huge relief when we lost that creepy dude.

Next we found Changzhou's ancient city wall!  It was beautiful!  That is one amazing thing about China.  There's so much city and urban life everywhere, but there are also always reminders of China's rich ancient history.

We also found a cool bridge (there's lots of rivers and canals all over this place) and some old looking buildings with cool shops in them.  I wish I could have spent more time at that art supplies shop!  But the sun was starting to go down, and we wanted to find a Wal Mart before heading back home.  So at that, we called it a day!