At church… we had a party to celebrate the organization of the Relief Society (our women’s organization). We accidentally ended up with too much cake… but really, can there ever be too much cake!?!
Church
China Life – a guest post by B
This year for Spring Festival there were these public service announcement posters telling you to not set off fireworks because of the pollution they create.
The last of the three trains we ride to church every week. We get on at the terminus of the line, so we can get seats. We ride one stop like this. Most of the ride is like the next pictures.
Many of the church members who live in the westernized eastern suburbs talk about how difficult it is to have events at the church building because traffic can be bad and a drive to church could take over an hour. This is our typical Sunday morning commute. It’s 90 minutes each direction.
Before you leave for church, you have to decide if you are going to carry Squidgems the entire way there or none of it. Once his feet have touched the ground in the filthy outdoors of China, you cannot have his shoes come anywhere near your clothing. For most of our time here, I’ve carried him from door to door, but he’s larger now, and we don’t always get seats (although signs tell passengers to give up seats to children, not everyone does, because they need to be sitting down to watch their TV shows on their phones). So Squidgems rides his scooter to church most weeks now. It helps with the transfers (which can be hundreds of yards long), and it helps him have a place to sit when no one gives up his seat for him. This is what his ride is like most weeks.
Our local Korean place is full of jerks who can’t understand anything we say or gesture. So when I wanted bibimbap a few weeks ago, we had to go to the next-closest Korean place, which is called Cosmic Korean Restaurant (their translation, not mine). While there we were served water bottles with large labels reading, “Hotel Exclusive.” We were nowhere near a hotel.
Lots of these little two-seater cars are around China. This one, evidently, is three-quarters of an Audi.
Last week, my wife and I rode our electric bike to Walmart. On the way we saw the “no horse-drawn carts” traffic sign as we were approaching Fourth Ring Road. We commented to each other how it seemed that sign was no longer necessary. That evening, on the way home from Walmart, we saw this horse-drawn cart, parked two blocks from our house. People were selling red bell peppers out of the back. The horse was just, like, “Whatever.”
I’ve been intrigued with the cultural differences in perception of beauty. It seems the Chinese women that Western men find beautiful are not the same women that Chinese men find beautiful. Which I guess is a win-win: Chinese guys get their “hot” wives and Westerners take the “homely” old maids off the market. My wife said, “I don’t see any Chinese men that I find attractive.” I said, “I see good-looking guys, but they aren’t the ones China thinks are good looking. They are rugged, fit manual laborers with messy hair and stubble. They’d be male models in the U.S., but here they are ignored because they are poor.” Male beauty here is very much tied to wealth. This subway ad features an “attractive” man. How do I know? Because look at that expensive cat bag he has!
Or you can just go the Japanese route of making viewers say to themselves, “Wha?!” Somehow this llama is supposed to make you want to buy shoes.
This nonsensical statue at least got anatomy right where it counts.
Our local lingerie store is selling these pajama sets. I’m not sure what the emoji is supposed to signify. Is Islamic State genocide all about the lulz here? China is very lax on blood and violence. While a recent TV show was re-edited to obscure the historically-accurate cleavage, R-rated violence is shown on the subway TVs all the time. One Sunday our ride to church featured all the “best” kill shots from the film American Sniper. A TV show I was watching last week had CGI-added blood spurts. Public TVs in China have aired Islamic State beheading videos on repeat. I think this clothing company is taking the 21st-century’s closest thing (so far) to the Holocaust and has turned it into a marketing slogan that’s supposed to make young women feel comfortable.
My wife and I were supposed to meet some colleagues for dinner at a new Indian restaurant (Raj Indian Restaurant). I felt like I was cheating on my favorite Indian restaurant (Ganges), but my love of Indian food made me go. Before dinner, we saw the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower. This is us with the Bell Tower. While the first Bell Tower was built in 1272, this version was built in 1745. (Verdict on the Indian restaurant: nicer restaurant than my favorite, but slightly worse food, comparable prices, and much more difficult to get to. I’ll stick with my favorite place.)
Walking home from church on Sunday, my wife went full Chinese and had her toddler pee in the bushes on the edge of the sidewalk.
A lizard on a support column on the fifth floor of my office building. Later in the day I doubted it was real, so I sort of poked at it and it ran around for a while.
Easter
4/4/15
The Primary had an Easter activity.
4/5/15
Hunting for Eggs on Sunday around the apartment. He’s looking at a list telling him which eggs are for him to find. Funny thing, it’s not colors or pictures, but words, so the list is unreadable to him.
We also didn’t have baskets so he used this Thomas backpack. He’s been wearing it, backwards and full of eggs, all week.
I failed to get a picture of the kids all dressed up. It wasn’t anything special anyway. We didn’t have baskets. Thankfully, the Primary activity supplied us with eggs and we stuffed them with tiny Dove bars, snack sized Snickers, Skittles and sour gummy worms.
Tie Dying
PS’s church Young Women’s activity this week (4/7) was tie dying t-shirts at the young women’s leader’s apartment. The shirts all turned out great and everyone had a fun time. One yw was out of town (-1), the leader’s niece was visiting (+1) and there are three leaders (-3). So, only three of these are actual young women in our branch. Actually, the two branches are combined (-1), so only two of them are yw in our branch. 🙂
Church Relief Society Party- Chinese style
3/21/15
For our Relief Society Birthday party at church, one of the Chinese women somehow arranged a building at Olympic Forest Park with some traditional Chinese performances. As the planning went further, they decided to invite families since there would be a magician the kids would enjoy. Bet none of you have this exciting of a Relief Society birthday activity!
Olympic Forest Park is pretty far north of downtown Beijing. It’s near the Bird’s Nest but we were too tired to walk further to see it. We went to the South Gate Forest Park subway stop (line 8) and then walked further north.
Our building had a little balcony over the water and a broken down bicycle that didn’t stop the kids from riding it.
Four different people performed martial arts… dances. A woman played a Chinese zither. There was a magician who did traditional magic tricks. Before the show started, there was massage and something where they poked your ear and attached stickers to massage for a week (I was told it was painful, so we skipped that).
Then a Chinese dragon dance!
Squirt loved the lions dancing, not so much standing next to the lions. PS and I didn’t realize we were accidentally being photo-bombed.
Afterwards, the Relief Society president sent out pictures taken by a photographer that was there. The two top, right hand pictures are the W family, the other homeschooling family in our branch.
Playing a Relief Society trivia themed hot potato game.
A few videos: https://youtu.be/ACMy6iBSpJ4
Walking back to the subway park through the beautiful park with all the trees starting to blossom. We walked with the Ws.
Church Christmas Party
Our bus got stuck in traffic and we were late, missing santa, but the rest of the party was fun too. We ate. There was an impromptu nativity play with Christmas carols and parts picked based on papers taped under certain chairs (Princess Sparkley was the angel). Then there was a gift exchange that was actually pretty fun. 12+ in one circle, grab a gift and pass it around while “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” is read and every time you heard “left” or “right,” you switched the direction you were passing the gift. They did a simplified version of this for the Primary kids.
Around Town
Riding to church on the subway and home from church on the bus.
Girls Camp: a guest post by PS
This is an awesome guest post my an awesome person AKA me AKA P.S. 😉
Girl’s Camp was awesome. The first night mom dropped me off at Annika’s house and then Annika , Paris, Ellie and I had a basically sleepover. It was fun. We woke up sort of early the next morning and then packed the car, ate yummy tater tots for breakfast, and drove for a long time. Then we stopped in Shunyi while the Shunyi girls packed, which was awkward, because we where just standing there being cold while they packed. Then we all got back in the car and drove some more and I almost peed my pants. I can’t believe I just put that up on the internet. Don’t blackmail me. Then we drove to the Huangyaguan pass of the Great Wall and went to our hotel, which was really more of a motel.*
We rented out the whole motel. I shared a room with Ellie, Annika and Paris. Our room had a non-pit** toilet, which I was very thankful for, and a TV, but we never used it.
Our room (Notice Annika posing, she was the only one who noticed I was taking a picture).
Then we unpacked and went outside for a lunch where everyone brought something to share. My lunch was 25% cookies. Then we did geocaching, and my toes almost froze off, and my group won because we got back first. Then we did fire safety. During fire safety one of the things we decided was that a bad idea was throwing a baby in the fire. Don’t ask. Then we did crafts, and made microwave bean bags, and decorated winter hats, and made T-Shirt scarves. (My scarf was quite cute if I say so myself.) Some of the girls made jewelry to donate somewhere but I tried and I couldn’t get any of the types of string they had to thread through the beads, so I gave up.
Ellie took a picture of me with my hat I decorated.
Then we made a fire, went hunting for sticks, bravely passing the angry dog in his weird cage. Some of the girls made like five bean bags but after my first one I went outside and sat by the fire talking with some other girls. Then I accidentally started an Orion Pie roasting craze.*** Next we had dinner, which the leaders made, I think, I’m not quite sure WHAT it was, but it was yummy and warm.
Then we had S’mores, and they turned out to be Paris’s first S’mores (she’s from Australia). Then we sang awesome camp songs, like one about a guy with an Afro. Then we all went to bed. The rooms had heating, so after we got that working, it was nice. The girls in my room only stayed up until 9 because we were tired, but the girls in the next room over said they stayed up until 2 AM. The next morning we got woken up my a leader teaching us the hand jive. We were in charge of breakfast, and we made breakfast burritos. My job was to microwave all the tortillas. And something cool happened, when they turned on the gas burner thingy to make bacon, it caught the towel under it on fire, but then they put it out. But it was the only time I’d ever seen something in real life that was not supposed to be on fire, I think. 😛
Ellie and Annika making breakfast.
We ate those, and then we got ready to hike the Great Wall, but first we made a giant poster that said #ShareGoodness. This was our camp theme. Supposedly, one of the leaders sent a picture of it to someone in the Young Women’s presidency. My dad says that it is the kind of stuff that will be in Conference or the New Era church magazine, and that would be SO cool if it was! 😀
Making the poster.
We all signed it.
Then we sort of all marched down to the parking lot, holding it to let it dry, which led to lots of Chinese people taking pictures of us. Then we got to the bottom, and took pictures of us with the Great Wall in the background, and the poster, and some random Chinese people took pictures of us doing it, and then came and got in our pictures. It was weird. When the poster was dry, we rolled it up, and I squished in a car with Alice, (the only youth in her Tianjin branch), Paris, Annika, and Ellie. We drove up to the Great Wall, got tickets, took pictures with a statue and the poster, and started hiking.
We got these pictures from one of the leaders and we can’t make them bigger.
We went up to the closest small room thing on the top, and took a stair case to the top. It was really far down to the bottom. Then we had to go back down, but the stairs were almost straight down steep. I went forward, being super careful, and Ellie came down on her bum.
SO STEEP!
(This picture is looking up, the blur at the top is Ellie, attempting to come down without dying.)
Then we started hiking. I stayed behind with Ellie. We hiked for a while, stopped and ate a little bit of lunch, and got separated into groups for what year at camp you were. Ellie, and I were with two nice Shunyi girls. We hiked for a LONG time, and then stopped and read the scriptures on the Great Wall, which was very nice, even if a bunch of tourists were walking by us. Then we hiked more. And more. The Great Wall is like 90% steps.
Selfie on the Great Wall!
The good news though was that even though it was really cold at the bottom, we were all so hot that I didn’t even use my sweatshirt after awhile. Finally, we started to get to the bottom, which was 99.99% steps. Steep steps, but not as steep as the ones in the tower thingy-ma-bob. Hah. I just said Steep steps. 😀 Anyway, then we got to the bottom and Ellie took a picture of me.
FINALLY DONE!!!!!
We walked home to the motel, and we were one of the first groups to get back, even though we were the last group to finish. Then we made a fire and waited for everyone else. When they got there we started doing a Dutch Oven challenge, which was to make cobbler. The people who rented the motel after us showed up, so we packed up all our stuff and dragged it outside. We did knots, and I can almost tie a square knot the right way. Then we did skits. They where fun, but the people who rented the motel after us recorded us on their phones, and a leader saw them re-watching it later, so my Dad says we’re probably all over Chinese Youtube. Which is bad. I don’t want a video of me doing a weird rain dance to a cow witch (part of our skit) on Youtube. After the skits, we roasted hot dogs, and ate them with and chili and roasted leftover marshmallows. Then we ate the cobbler, which was SO stinking good!
We were running out of time, so we had everyone say what they are thankful for instead of a testimony meeting. The leaders all took like 5 minutes. I said “I’m thankful for everything, but especially the cobbler.” And mine was not the shortest nor the strangest.
Random Picture from at some point. The board from Geocaching and markers where left out and people drew on it. The Chamber of Secrets bit is a long story.
We packed up, and everyone was confused about which suitcase went in which car, and one of the leaders gave the lady who owned the motel her baby to hold for awhile, and we sang camp songs on the way down, like the one about the guy with an Afro, and then we all got packed up, and hugged each other, and got sad, and then we drove away. I almost puked on the way back because I forgot to take Dramamine on the way out.
We were stopped by a guard and had to show him our passports. We got stopped a second time and did the same thing. I fell asleep for a while, until we dropped off Ellie. We dropped off Paris and her mom, and then Annika’s mom dropped me off in front of the mall right by their house. Dad was waiting for me. We got on the subway, and we each ate half of a yummy pecan pie from Paris Baguette he got in case I hadn’t eaten, I drank some Plus C and we went home. We actually got home before the subway closed. THE END!!!!!!!
*It was a Chinese hotel rather than a western hotel.
**She means a non-squat toilet.
***Orion Pies are sort of like Ding Dongs but more marshmallow-like in the middle.
Halloween in China
These uploaded in reverse order, so here goes:
Actual Halloween night. We lit them but didn’t put them out or go Trick or Treating.
B’s school had a field trip on Halloween so their party and pumpkin carving contest were after school on the 30th. Only a handful of students and teachers were dressed up in addition to our kids but several students carved pumpkins.
PS had a church youth activity across town where she carved her pumpkin.
The Saturday before Halloween (was a bad air day) and there was an unofficial Halloween party at church for the kids.
Our decorations.
Ritan Park
For a church activity, the girls (mainly Princess Sparkley) wanted to learn about photography so we met at Ritan Park, took pictures and then had yummy Beijing-style noodles at the Stone Boat Cafe in the park.
These are a combination of pictures taken by me with my cell phone and PS with my camera.
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| PS did this photo effect on the same picture. |
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| This bottom right hand picture is the Stone Boat Cafe. |
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| The tall skyscraper in some of the pictures is the tallest building in Beijing. |
I wish I’d thought to take a picture of the yummy noodles. Beijing-style noodles and yummy gyoza (dumplings). The noodles were a little bit like this: Old Beijing Style Noodle
Chinese Mileposts 