我们的小朋友

Naturally someone this adorable attracts all kinds of people without even trying.

This is the most recent addition to the Opheim family and one of his most valuable attributes is his ability to find friends for us.  Of course after 8 months here I have many friends, but they lack one thing:  the desire to speak Chinese.  They all want to practice their English with me.  Which means I rarely get to practice my Chinese.

I've discovered that little kids are the best people to practice your Chinese with because they speak slowly, they use simple words, they speak pretty standard pǔtōnguà and are not afraid to repeat something no matter how many times you don't understand.

So when the sun fleetingly made an appearance, me and a few other local laowai ran outside to bask in it, to the horror of the umbrella-carrying ladies who want their skin as white as snow.  Soon we were surrounded by the neighborhood's most adorable children who wanted to play with the little rabbit and talk to the strange-looking foreigners.

So we spent all afternoon being entertained by our little neighbors, and I'm not sure how much my Chinese improved but it was definitely an enjoyable practice session.

"Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."

这里有太多了人

Picture the busiest mall you've ever been in.

On Black Friday.

Multiply the number of people by 3.

Multiply the volume of the music by 10.

It aint got nothin on the Guo Mao when they're having a sale.

I've never been a claustrophobic person but I was about 40 seconds away from dropping my groceries and running after the minor elbow wars we were forced to participate in in order to get a few basic essentials and make it out the door with them.  If you're ever informed that some store in China is having a sale, let me give you some advice...Run!  And I don't mean to the store, I mean away from it!  I'll pay the extra 32元 to go on a normal day from now on.  Although I was ecstatic to find French Vanilla flavored hot chocolate.

"The thing that makes men and rivers crooked is taking the path of least resistance."

我会到澳大利亚去

I had pretty much given up my dream of going to Australia to visit my sister due to financial inability until she had a brilliant thought the other day.  She's only going to be in America for three weeks and I was supposed to be there until the end of August before heading back to China for round number 2.  (By the way I'm officially staying for a second year...I guess I hadn't announced that yet).  Well Sammie found an amazingly cheap ticket from Sydney to Beijing at the end of August and suggested I fly to Australia with her, then fly directly from there to China.  So I just talked to the Foreign Affairs Office and they will still reimburse my ticket up to $1,000 so we're booking the flights right now!  I GET TO GO VISIT MY SISTER!

I'll be in the U.S. from July 1st-ish to August 15th-ish so if you're there, you better plan to see me!

"When you cannot make up your mind between two evenly balanced courses of action, choose the bolder."

 - William Joseph Slim

我的好朋友

One of the great gifts of living in China, is the chance to meet people I would never have become friends with had life not surprised me with placing me in a city I'd never heard of, thousands of miles from home.  At times my head is still reeling with the knowledge that I live  here.  But there have been many wonderful blessings with this opportunity.  It's to a few of those blessings that this post is dedicated.

I knew when I came here that I wasn't going to live here permanently, so I expected to have to say goodbye to my friends, I just didn't realize how much they would mean to me.  I've got so many friends around the world, and I really hate the fact that we can't all live in the same place.  Yesterday I said goodbye to Oswin and Amitha.  Sooraj left a few weeks ago and I'm already missing these wonderful people.

So stay up all night talking to your friends.  Go to the zoo when you should be cleaning your house.  Skip class to fly a kite.  (Did a college professor really just say that?)  Enjoy your time with your friends, they're much more important than whatever work you've got going on anyway.

"No one is a failure if they have friends."

-It's a Wonderful Life

我看太阳今天

The sun was shining

One of my students told me she wants to follow Him

SALSA at the Spar

and good friends over for dinner

Does life get any better?

"The people I used to be surrounded by are getting along without me.  Somehow, that really bugs me."

-Donald Miller

蓝色的和红色的鸡蛋

Sometimes I feel as if I'm losing my English, but that's nothing compared to the atrocious level my Spanish is at currently.  The French professor here invited us to his home this afternoon for tea, to celebrate Easter.  But they don't speak English.  And I don't speak French.  So we talk in Spanish.  Which makes me yearn for the ease of Spanish when I think about my painful efforts of learning Chinese, and also made me realize how out of practice I am.  I could understand most of what they said, but when it was my turn to contribute to the conversation I could hardly spit out a sentence.  Our conversation was a strange combination of English, Spanish, French and Chinese.  I also realized that I still know more Spanish than I do Chinese, and I've lived here for eight months.  That's pathetic.

In other news, www.google.cn/music is the greatest thing in the world.

"Friends will not only live

in harmony, but in melody."

-Henry David Thoreau 

Ancient Chinese Proverb:

"Never shut a door before checking the status of the lock."

Especially if that door leads to your bathroom!

My noisy toilet runs continually, which isn't the most pleasant background sound to accompany conversation, so before Jasmine came over this morning, I shut the bathroom door to block the noise somewhat.  Now I'm locked out of my own bathroom!  And of all the random mystery keys laying around my apartment, none of them hold the magic to the most necessary room in the place.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. 

土豆网

I'm lamenting a loss today.  You don't always realize how important something is to you, until it's gone.  Suddenly there's a hole, an emptiness.  Life is a little less cheerful.  Almost as if it were a vacuum, rather than simply a hole.  It sucks some happiness out with its disappearance.  The comfort of knowing it was available for you anytime is suddenly gone, and in its place is the recognition that you didn't always appreciate it while it was there.

There's a jolly long list of things I could be longing for today.  Am I talking about the disappearance of my dear friend, the sun?  She's been in hiding for so many days that I can't remember when I last felt her presence lift my mood.  Or perhaps I'm yearning for some of my good friends without whom I do indeed feel incomplete.  Maybe the cause of my feelings of deficiency is related to food.  In some way this epitaph is dedicated to all of those things, but please join me in mourning the latest loss:  

youtube

Occasionally certain websites withdraw from our reach here, sometimes they return and other times we will miss them forever.  Xanga still isn't an option, and I'm thankful that most of the time I can blog.  That privilege has on occasion been revoked, but has been restored to me.  Youtube has offended the internet emperor and I wonder when/if I'll once again be able to peruse its vast stores of great songs and videos.  Until then...I'll visit tudou.com and wonder why they named their website after a potato.

"Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens."

-Jimi Hendrix