DDR - A universal hit.

Kelly, Katie & Me!

We stood in line and watched in amazement as the Chinese completely missed the point of Bumper Cars. Yes bumper – as into bump the other cars, we knew it wasn’t a miss translation as we had looked up the word to get tickets. Why then were they avoiding the other cars with strained deliberation? Katie burst out laughing when she heard some one apologize for BUMPING another car. Sure enough, we all strained to listen over the music, when someone actually did bump someone there was an audible apology and a greater attempt at avoidance.  

I don’t know what shocked us more the fact that they were being so curteous or their display of ligitamite driving skills. It was as if their daily driving was a giant game of bumper cars and this was their chance to unleash their mad driving skills.   

Oh just wait for the Americans to get in, there were going to be no apologies and excessive force resulting in whiplash. That is the whole point of bumper cars right!   

Nothing like neon strobe lights and blaring techno music to put you in the mood for reckless driving.

I've found my stress release!

Bumper Cars in China are only fun with other foreigners!

To be fair we all did try our best to ensure the safety of the cautious Chinese drivers. A few got into the true spirit of bumper cars once they saw the havoc the five of us were raining on each other. Needless to say Bumper Cars has now become a common time killer!

Maybe someday I will be the foreigner that turns out to be the lifesaver for entertainment. Nothing beats watching a film in the theater, even if the movie turns out to be  bust.

Daria’s Chinese is amazing. She has made arrangements with the theater to begin showing films in English on a more regular basis. A bit of a splurge yes, but oh so worth it. If we can guarantee at least 10 tickets they are willing to show the film in English with Chinese subtitles.

This week’s film was Clash of the Titans. Needless to say I was stoked, come on Greek Mythology nothing gets more twisted and entertaining then that pantheon! About 10 min into the film I realized the writer had somehow miss placed his copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology! Okay  maybe he forgot he was using that one as a doorstop but what about his quick reference guide, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology?Its not like he is writing about the obscure adventures of Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim! It’s GREEK MYTHOLOGY for crying out loud.

The orgins of Perseus was completely off, the reason for slaying Medusea was botched and don’t get me started on the Jinn! They aren’t even Greek.

So the film was not an academy award winner, but English entertainment on the big screen is  nonetheless English entertainment on the big screen. At least the inaccuracies gave me a reason to return home and again brush up on my Greek mythology. So after all my complaining I had an enjoyable night and I’ve finally learned the secret to 3D films, back row seating.

Our new favorite restaurant is a Uyghur Barbecue eatery down a back alley. Katie and Thomas have always been the adventurous ones for which I am most grateful. For their guts have introduced my stomach to some scrumptious food. The latest of which was this Northwestern Uyghur cuisine.     

Thank you for your adventurous side.

Nothing beats a great BBQ

The main dishes are skewers of meat and vegetables.  As the Uyghurs are typically Muslim there is no pork. The meat is typically beef or goat. The vegetableselection is varied but our favorites are the potato and eggplant.   

The restaurant uses a combination of spices that is mouth watering. It is all prepared in front of the restaurant. After 6pm the restaurant often remains packed until well into the night. It is among a few restaurants to remain up open until well into the mornings on the weekends.   

The cooks are constantly trying to keep up!

Tubs and tubs of prepared skewers are constantly being prepared. Once ordered the skewers are moved to the long BBQ in the the front. It is a long narrow channel that has hot coals continually added.   

The skewers are laid across the top, spices are added and then they are rotated to the perfect doneness.   

Anyone up for a game of pick up sticks?

It is not uncommon for the skewer count by the end of the night reach well over 100.    

And before my vegetarian family members comment on that count, its the veggies that contribute the most they come on double skewers.   

My latest favorite is the fried mantou (steamed bread). It’s the closest thing to toast I’ve been able to find in this county.   

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The following pictures are NOT for the faint of heart nor for non-meat eaters. I’ve added these pictures for completeness sake but warn, you view at your own risk.

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I'm pretty sure this was our dinner.

  The meat is often slaughtered and cleaned in front of the restaurant. This is a picture of the goat that would soon become our dinner.     

I had to take a double look when I first saw this.

In America we are often far removed from the animals we eat, in China this is not the case.   

To most American’s it seems meat is just a food group. As we are accustomed to boneless skinless meat that bears little resemblance to the original animal it is often hard for me to stomach meat here that still has the head attached or in this case in the front of the restaurant.

Bei Da Huang has become one of my favorite restaurants. Unfortunately, tonight it did not hold up to all the hype I’d dumped on it when showing it off to Katie and Thomas. They still enjoyed it and promised to return but I was disappointed in the usually fantastic meals. 

One of the reasons I love it so much is the amazing picture menu! You don’t need to know a character to order your favorite food.  I had originally planned the dinner so Wendy and Peter could meet Victoria but Wendy didn’t feel well at the last minute. I hadn’t backed out of the dinner knowing with out Wendy I could still order clearly. That seems to be the catch at trying to restaurants.

Pumpkin Fries dipped in sugar

This dish is the reason to live. Yes, Pumpkin fries dipped in sugar. The two best things to happen to food, a deep fryer and a sugar coating. This is the costomary results of the dish, delightful deliciousness. 

Today however the oil was old and saturated with the previous dish FISH. Yes it was as horrible as it sounds.

Luckily Katie and Thomas knew no better and enjoyed the rest of the dishes immensely. I guess we will just have to return to remedy the bad experience.

The grapevine is a wonderful if not inconvenient thing at times! It is probably best that we discovered this little treasure trove so late as I would have gone broke making purchases and then had no way to get them all home.

Katie had been told by Kelly who had been taken by Charlotte who had been taken by Daria who had been brought by someone to this little painting school downtown.  They produced originals as well as reproductions of contemporary as well as traditional works of art. It sounded too good to pass up so we got verbal directions to a side street without any specific address.

Can I just say if you ever have to find a little place with no address,  only verbal instructions to go by, in a foreign country in which you really don’t speak the language, Katie and Thomas are the two to go with. They can find anything. We hopped on the bus, Thomas found the stop and we began looking in window fronts for what we wanted. We soon found a small school but when we walked in a children’s calligraphy class was in session. The teacher soon directed us further down the street. He didn’t speak English but between the three of us we are getting quite good at charades. We discovered this was an annex of the school but we were looking for the main building.

Just a sampling of what we browsed through

We soon found the main part and headed in. Again as it was Saturday classes were in full swing. Drawing classes downstairs, with still life, and calligraphy classes upstairs. We met the director who turned out to be the contact Kelly had mentioned.

She happily took us on a tour then led us back to the annex to look at paintings.

I was a little shocked when she started pulling out manila envelops with folded paintings. Katie saw my hesitation but reminded me that Kelly said their mounting jobs were phenomenal and all imperfections would vanish in the mounted work. We hungrily sorted through works with Xiong explaining their origins.

Some were originals by local artists or professors others were replicas of the great masters. Katie and I started forming piles of possibles. Prices ranged from ¥10 – ¥80 for the paintings with a flat ¥30 mounting fee.

I soon found two pieces I just couldn’t live without and three small flower pieces that I thought would be a beautiful gift. I arranged to pick up the mounted works the Saturday before I was to leave for America.

(3 graces/Lady with Blue / Flowers)

Second choice was still beautiful!

When I went to pick them up I unwisely  agreed to browse through their new works with Katie. I fell in love with yet another piece and agreed to purchase if they could rush mount it before I left on Tuesday. Xiong said she could and I hastily agreed.

I returned Monday afternoon to pick it up, to find a rather distraught Xiong. She told me she had written something down for me to read as she wanted to make sure I understood it all. She had had to send the piece to a friend to be mounted that weekend because he husband had been out of town. It was mounted and ready to go when her friends shop had been broken into and robbed. My piece along with others and cash had been stolen. There had been two Cherry Blossom works and so she quickly mounted the other and had it mounted to give to me. She felt awful and apologized profusely. She gave me this piece free of charge with an additional flower painting.

Second Choice was still beautiful although that first piece was AMAZING! So now I have no excuse for empty walls. I mean really with the prices hoovering around $12 for portable art lookout next semester.

or should I say Macgyver DVD player

Katie and Thomas came over for lunch and Thomas began tinkering with my DVD player as he promised. It had broken a few months ago and since I so generously got a screwdriver for  Christmas he promised to take a look at it for me.

Here’s what I had to begin with:

1 DVD player with a power problem

1 DVD player that just didn’t work

1 DVD player with a driver problem

and 2  kind friends who had an abundance of patience and apparently a free afternoon.

So as I slaved away giving finals in my office listening to stuttering English Katie and Thomas slaved away in the living room operating like two experienced surgeons. Between finals I snuck a look and wide eyed I tried to take in the scene before me. Three disassembled DVD players with neat piles of screws, cables and fuses.

The Beginning

In the end a miracle was accomplished and a rather unorthodox player was born. So now lets go through the steps.

1. Remove top cover

2. Remove magnetic disc centering holding bar

3.Insert desire disc for viewing pleasure

At least it works.

4.Replace magnetic disc centering holding bar, making sure sides are flush with base, and the magnet is unobstructedly engaged with sub magnet.

5. Press the close button to engage the driver making sure Step 4 was completed properly without an unidentifiable rattling noise accompanying the spinning.  (the loading dock is not functioning but this step is necessary to trick the player into loading the inserted DVD)

6. Replace cover. (to prevent a second layer of dust settling on the inside although it might seem pointless after the layer of dust that accumulated while completing steps 1-5)

7. Pray the TV is on the right channel or take another 10min figureing out which key to hit on the Chinese remote!

8. Enjoy your film, while keeping your fingers crossed, that none of the parts shift as they are no longer mounted in place.

I’ve been to Qingdao countless times yet I always see the same thing: Train Station, Bus 304, University, Church, Bus 5, Jimo, Bus 202.

Since we had arrived on Friday for Christmas we decided to take advantage of a full Saturday. After a restful night surprisingly at the Hostel, we took the bus to the University and met up with Victoria for my favorite and day at a museum!

Victoria had already been and gave great reviews, she warned it was a provincial museum so don’t get lofty expectations she said but she had been presently surprised. For a provincial museum it blew my socks off.

It was huge from the outside but that is the Chinese way, empress with shear size to compensate for quality.

I must admit I was impressed with the translation someone who actually studied English seemed to have translated.

Wouldn't be a real museum without a controversial piece or two. These are Japanese and still claimed by them from what I was able to gather.

Chinese also love their dioramas. This one depicts a historical battle victory in which the besieged city tied bayonets to the herds horns and lit their tails on fire. Letting the rampaging beasts lose on the surrounding army.

It was such a pleasure going through the museum with fellow Art History buffs - Katie and Victoria.

I was quite impressed with their selection of artifacts.

There was also the history section which had the life size dioramas, just couldn't resist the photo op.

Of course the end of the museum had the triumphant liberation of China and the birth of Modern China.

Thomas wandered into a side exhibit that turned out to be a print making center. We all did our Chinese zodiac.

Christmas Day…humm…lets just say it was an adventure.

My first Christmas waking up to an empty house. I didn’t want to get out of bed as there just didn’t seem like any point. The usual hustle and bustle of Christmas morning was not there nor did I have the pleasure of looking forward to it. I finally dragged myself out of bed and over to the computer excited for my Christmas call home. I finally made it through but to my disappointment, as it was still Christmas Eve in the States, everyone seemed busy and some where not even home to chat. I did an unusually short call with and become rather childishly disgruntled by the whole thing.

I finally just turned my attention to the afternoon and weekend in Qingdao! One frustration of living alone is the fact that I have to remember to prepare the house for a trip. Mom thank you for all you do! I hate coming home to a dirty house which means the morning before a trip the usual list includes: laundry, dishes, trash, sweep, organize and close and lock up.

Christmas morning!

A few students dropped by to give me Christmas cards and Wendy dropped off a gift. I sat down and try to recreate a little Christmas opening my gift and reading cards. By 11 I was headed out the door to meet up with the  Gang at the train station.

Katie and Thomas invited a new friend along to join our foreign group for Christmas, no one should spend Christmas alone. The train was crowded as usual. The plan was to have a big familial Christmas dinner then hand out blankets to the homeless. [Last Christmas Victoria had experienced her coldest day in China and was horrified to see homeless people sleeping on the streets under nothing but a sheet of plastic. This year she vowed to correct this and purchased blankets to hand out to the homeless. We Weifangians were happy to help deliver the purchased blankets.]

Americans and Canadians

We arrived and headed to THE DINER for Christmas dinner. We were a merry party! There were about 28 of us in all, and the table next to us was all foreigners too! You felt like you were back in the states. It was interesting to be able to eavesdrop again, to be fair both tables were doing it because we were commenting on each other’s conversations. THE DINER had a wonderfully scrumptious Christmas menu but it was just out of my price range so I settled on a lamb sandwich. Not as good as their steak sandwich but NOT Chinese in the least so I’ll take it. Some days I just don’t want Chinese, Christmas is one of them.

After dinner the hostel hunt began. Thank heaven for Katie and her prepared self or we would have being sleeping on the sidewalk accepting blankets from Victoria. This Christmas was the coldest day in Qingdao and it even beat out last Christmas Victoria said. The BYU teachers headed back to the university and told us they would call when they were going to head out to deliver blankets. The Walk: we decided to forgo the bus and just go for a cab wrong idea. There was no cabs to be found and we were forced to keep walking to keep warm we finally ducked into a hotel and asked the door man to find us a cab. We soon realized we had headed in the opposite direction of the hostel. The doorman returned empty handed explaining there were just no cabs to be found on a night such as this! Oh just keep piling on the frustrations. We were all froze and our brief stay in the hotel lobby only seem to half thaw us. Working from a small google map we found a bus that would take us west and hoped for the best. We got off hoping the map was spacial correct, wrong again. After what seemed like eternity in the cold we found the hostel at the top of a hill. Katie had been unable to book a hostel online due to technical difficulties on the website, “Welcome to China”. Big Brother Hostel’s, yes no lie on the name, dorms were all booked and they only had a 4 person room at 200Y. That is hotel prices by the way and no way were we going to pay hotel prices for hostel accommodations. By the way the dorms had been 25Y so you understand our hesitation here.  Prepared Katie had a back up plan, we ventured out into the cold and by some miracle were able to find a cab within 5min. Mind you we were a double fare but hey we were out of the cold and sardines are toasty when they are packed together. I don’t know if the first passenger was fully aware of what he agreed to when the taxi driver accepted us. Somehow we were able to cram 6 people and all our luggage and bedding into a small cab not using the trunk.

Hostel Lobby

We finally made it to the next hostel when I realized I didn’t have everything that I needed to check in. At that point we were near the train station and I just figured I would catch a train back to Weifang if I had to. The Receptionist was kind enough to let me slide with numbers and a Driver’s License. She was even kind enough to give us member prices and we settled in for the evening. Victoria called and said there were no homeless people out so we would not be venturing out either. We dropped off the bags and headed down to the lobby to chat.

All decked out for Christmas

Okay this is were I go off on hostels! I LOVED THIS PLACE. The rooms were clean and warm once the heater got going, the lobby was phenomenal and the help well I don’t have enough glowing words in my vocabulary to cover how amazing they were. Their English was excellent (boy does that sound snobby) and they were extremely accommodating. We threw ourselves into the center lounging area and were soon joined by a British guy who had been sitting at the other end.

His name was Lew, he took a hiatus from school to study Martial Arts for a year in China. He is a drama major with a growing resume. We all had a lovely chat for the rest of the evening. It is always nice when you can sit and have a stimulating conversation at a normal speed with a normal vocabulary, excepting of course the occasional translation hiccups between British and English. We turned in around 11.

Christmas was an adventure or to be more honest was one adventure after another. But the company and accommodations at the end made it all worth it!

Okay this place is palatial. Here it is.

View of the apartment from the nook to the left of the door.

Living Room, first door on the right. Look at that couch!!

I love the fact that my shower no longer drenches my toilet or vanity!!

Last door on the right, James was kind enough to get me that far table for extra counter space. No excuse not to cook now.

Last door on the left. Kelly's room to be!

(The Office waiting for it to be clean before I take that picture.)

My new bedroom, yes I brought my comforter. First door on the left.

So Apartment 202 is my new home. The size sure makes me feel alone at times but Kelly will soon fill it! I still hesitate and start to knock when I get to the door thinking it is Dantzelle’s house or I skip the second floor altogether.

I can’t believe I can now say I’ve had my own place, and have moved on to my second. I’m not going to lie I’m thrilled I’m getting Kelly as a room mate soon. Not sure I could say that line with too many people, lets face it I’m not a sharer and LOVE my personal space.

So mixed feelings about leaving 401, I came to love the small cozy feeling. It was a perfect fit for a single person and once the radiators were turned on I can happily add cozy to the list of outstanding qualities. I remember my first Lego dream mansion and thinking wow, way to many rooms to clean. I guess it never hit me as a kid once you get a house with that many rooms you usually can afford the maid to clean it. But lets face it I would rather take the loft, clean myself and spend the extra cash on traveling. So goodbye small apartment, with one hour Saturday Cleaning Sessions.

Some things I will miss…

• the free daily, mandatory stair work out.
• quick and easy cleaning.
• the security that comes from knowing if anyone makes it to the fourth floor window three other apartments have most likely been robbed and the cops are on their way.
• (doubt this one is true but is a white lie I kept telling myself) you are above the heavy dust levels.
• No one can look into your apartment, unless they are 300 yards away and by then the view is fuzzy.
• the view of down town Weifang, lit up on a clear night.

No worries I will soon have a list of what I love about living in my new apartment.

So the final round of pictures, wipe a tear.

One last glance around the apartment, with all my stuff out it just doesn't feel the same.

I'm not sorry to leave the chairs in exchange for a couch.

Stripped clean. The bedding went to a student living down in the office, long story.

There is just something so sad about darkened rooms...