Friday was Josh's birthday. He was turning 19! His school was taking us all to dinner and buying him a cake. I was super excited for the party! I ended up going to another birthday party that day. In China they celebrate a baby's one month birthday. Orange took us to her nephew's party. She told us that we would be getting steamed buns. Alyssa and I were both picturing a small gathering of ladies cooing over a baby. Oh no. We went to a fancy hotel and had a fifty course meal. There was also fifty million people there. I had another opportunity to eat the poisonous fish that everyone seems to just love and makes you eat tons of it even though you really just want to vomit. It was a lot of fun though. Lots of drunk people coming over to toast the white people. One of the drunker guys that came over to toast made me laugh super hard, just because of his unique bald spot. It was a perfect circle in the middle of his head. The unique part is that hair was surrounding every side of the bald spot. It was awesome.
Josh's party was even more fun! Orange took the three of us to a restaurant and we got a private room. Orange ordered the most amazing food. My favorite was a dish of chicken that tasted and looked like orange chicken in America. That plate of food got cleaned up the best. The cake was my favorite part. Oh man just thinking about it still makes me drool a little bit. It was a white cake with layers of the pudding stuff they seem to really like in China and whip cream. On the outside was chocolate like you would find on an eclair and almonds. I had two slices. They were pretty little though. Birthdays in China are very different from American birthdays. We ate cake first. I kind of thought that was weird but then I started wondering why don't we do that in America? I never have room for dessert in America but in China I did. It was brilliant! Also, we had traditional Chinese cake and I use the term cake loosely. Mostly I just say cake because that's what they say because it in no way, shape or form resembles cake. Basically it's scrambled eggs except not really very scrambled. It's egg. Very good egg, it was delicious, but not what I would consider cake.
We left early Saturday morning for Shanghai and got there around noon. There was basically no sight seeing that went on the past weekend because we went for a District Conference and that took most of the time we were there. We finished up with meetings around 5:30 and the lady that was housing Alyssa, Josh and I sent her driver (Does that tell you anything about the people we stayed with?) to pick us up. Her and her daughter actually ended up coming with to meet us. Her name is Norma, and I have to admit with a name like Norma I was expecting an older woman and her husband. Norma was actually younger than I expected and had 3 younger kids. She was also Hispanic and made us tacos and Mexican rice for dinner. The tacos were great and so was the rice but I've had A LOT of rice so that one didn't satisfy as much. Her house was amazing. Four floors and everything had been brought from America. I flushed toilet paper AND I was able to rinse my toothbrush with tap water. It was so weird. The mattresses were also from America and so they were a lot softer than what I've been sleeping on. I actually didn't enjoy that one as much. It was hard to roll over!
They had an 18 year old boy from Africa living with them doing an internship in China. He was very nice and took us out that night to look around. We came back to Norma's house and finished up the night by watching Madagascar and eating popcorn. And it was actually American popcorn! It tasted amazing!
Sunday was great and everything went lovely until the last meeting went long and we had to hurry to the train station to make it back in time to catch the last bus to Yangzhong. The subway took us too long so we had to take a G train instead of a K train to make it back in time. The nice thing about this was a K train takes 3 hours and a G train takes an hour and a half. The not so nice thing, a K train is 38 yuan and a G train is 110 yuan. We were able to make it back in time to catch a bus and made it back safe. Poor Rick and Sarah, the married couple living in Yangzhong, did not though. They just barely missed the bus after taking a G train and had to catch a taxi. The bus is 17 yuan and a taxi was 150 yuan. That was an expensive weekend for them.
Andy's birthday was on Tuesday and our school did dinner and bought a cake for him as well. That dinner wasn't super good. Lots of weird foods I didn't really enjoy but the cake tasted amazing. This one had lots of fruits on top and also had chocolate. There were a ton of people at Andy's party, most of whom we didn't actually know. There was one guy that came over to talk to me that I actually did know, what I don't know is why he was there. It was the director of the education department from the high school that I went and visited a few weeks ago. He came over a toasted me and then sent people to get me to come to his table for more toasts and lots of handshakes. He's a funny guy.
After dinner some of the random guys at the party took the 6 foreigners and two teachers from our school to KTV (Karaoke Television, basically the cool thing to do in China. They have KTV places EVERYWHERE!). They opened KTV with my special friend, the director of education, doing Taichi to a song while another guy sang. Even drunk this man had amazing balance and it was awesome to watch him do Taichi. We sang for a long time and it was a ton of fun. I didn't have much of a voice afterwards but it was worth it!
This next week is a holiday so I get Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off from school. I got Thursday off special too. Tomorrow morning I'm heading to Southern China to a city called Guilin. It's a 19 hour train ride there but it will be so worth it.
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