Lovell Family Blog

Hurray! The internet has suddenly gotten faster today and I was able to sign on to the blog. I do apologize for the lack of update but I am hoping that I will have better access to the blog the frequency of updates will increase.

The other part of the deal is that not much has been happening but I will give you an update. The weather here in Huayuan flip-flopped this week. It is kind of funny actually. Monday morning it pouring cat and dogs here. Actually I think I should add elephants in there because it was coming down super heavy. It was probably the most rain I have seen in a long time. Best of all it cooled things down quite a bit. Unfortunately, it is now the hottest that we have experienced this town and we have resorted to closing windows and doors and running the AC. Life is good with that cold air.

This weekend was an uneventful affair. Friday night we went out and bought some food. This is this new place that we discovered this place where they take a sponge cake batter and mix it with banana and then bake it in these banana molds. They are absolutely delicious and Jordan’s students like to call them “boo-yah” bananas. Classic. Saturday it was super hot and seemed like the rest of the town agree because there wasn’t much going on around town but we throw some stuff off a bridge. 🙂

Since I don’t like to leave a post picture-less, I decided to post the one above. This is a vehicle that we came across when we visited Liye a couple of weeks ago. When we arrived and were going through the town on the bus we had no clue what they were. After a while it his us that they were the taxis and the are electric. Since the town is focused on one road and the town itself is pretty small, I suppose there is no need for gas burning taxi. Good thinking on their part. And since they are bright green, you can’t miss them.

I am going to dedicate this post to the dental hygenist at Dr. Cutler’s office. While I do not remember her name so I will name her Emily and tell you more about her.

About one week after I got home from my mission I went in for a teeth cleaning and check-up. As the dental hygenist, Emily, came in to start the cleaning, I noticed that she was gorgeous and immediately commence the flirting after I noticed that she did not have a wedding ring on. 🙂 As I was doing my customary confession of non-flossing ways, Emily told me that she has offered many people that if they come in right when she got to the office (6:45 a.m.) that she would floss their teeth but not one had taken her up on the office. I told her GAME ON! and I was there next morning to her surprise. As added bonus I got to flirt with her some more.

Fast forward a year later and here I am in China. People’s teeth here, well, aren’t so nice. It is understandable because it seems modern dental work is not widely available and America seems to overly obsessed when it comes to teeth. But if you do have a cavity, there are places to go.

I don’t think it is needed to explain because, frankly, the picture above does a good enough job for me. 😛 I love this place!

 

Well, neither did I. Well, at least until yesterday when we discovered the wonder of it. This country seems to have an obsession with this KTV, which basically karaoke. Even though the trend has long died out in America it is booming here and we were invited to go this past Saturday.

We had a group of students the met with us and since we don’t know what to do in this town that 16-year-olds would enjoy, we told them to choose and they choose KTV. KTV is kind of an interesting experience because right as you walk into the building it gets really dark and little LED lights are everywhere showing a bajillion different colors. To be honest, from the entrance it is hard to tell between this and a place that could be a lot more shady.

But besides that, I was quite amazed with the way that decorated the place. Very unique. 😛 So as you walk down this hall there is still very little light but with that light you can see into dark rooms as you pass by them. As we walked into the room that the students led us to there big leather couch and a lot of dim lighting. Then we fully realized that it wasn’t some shady Chinese lounge but a karaoke hangout place thingy.

The way that the Chinese do karaoke is simple. Enough flashing lights to put someone into a epileptic seizure, oursized and super loud speakers, an ash tray and a bunch of crappy songs. 🙂 It was awesome. Jordan and I sang to some Britney Spears, Michael Jackson and some N’SYNC, among others. Thankfully the music was so loud you couldn’t hear our amazingly great singing.

It definitely was an experience to be had and a lot better then I was expecting. I can dig it, ya hear? Oh, and catch a fun pic of Jordan if you click the little link that is blue with your little clicky thingy that you might be using right now.

Continue reading “KTV? Know what that is?”

So when 9 p.m. comes around, we find ourselves in a rut sometimes. We have fully checked out craigslist, maybe watched a TV show or two, and our eyes are hurting from staring at the computer screen. End result: we’re painfully bored. So what one do?

Well, we have found solice in those two items in the picture above; a laser pen and toilet paper.

First, the laser pen. One night about three weeks ago we were at this big market event and there was a cheap Chinese made laser pen for 1 RMB. So since our apartment is on the 7th floor and there is a supermarket for students at the bottom of the building. At night when we are bored, we bust our laser pen and have some fun. It is so funny because they see it and look up to find where it came from and can’t find us. We do suspect that some know where it is coming from but we went to see how well you could see someone standing in our window and it is almost impossible at night. Awesome!

Next, the toilet paper. This one was discovered tonight. Being bored and wanting to have some fun, we thought of ideas and came up with toilet paper. The premise is simple; take a wad of TP, get it soaking wet and throw it out the window. The wet wad of TP hits the ground with a thud and a splat; a “splud?” Anyway, this one is the best because when the student are outside the shop, they never think to look up so we don’t have to hide after we have thrown it and can laugh at what they do. Classic!

Toilet paper + laser pen + boredom + innocent teenage students = A lot of fun being menaces. 😀 Does that make us bad people?

Sorry about the infrequency of updates on this blog. The problem has been the internet. As I have mentioned before, the internet can be really slow sometime but luckily it loaded tonight so we will see. If there are some pictures that haven’t been attached but mentioned, I apologize ahead of time.

So for the past couple months it has been recommended to us to go visit a town called Liye. We were told that is was a good day trip so went there this past Saturday. One the more memorable things that happened was the bus ride as it was our first time finding and riding a bus without help. At about 9 a.m. we went to the bus stop and all we had with us was a paper with the Chinese characters for Liye. After asking multiple times where we buy tickets for the bus, we were directed on to the bus without having paid for our ticket and we sat down a little confused.

Eventually a person came around and we did pay for our bus ticket with was really cheap; 2.5 US dollars for a 2 hour bus ride. The bus ride was relatively normal. None of the spitting that people talking about but there was smoking and on the way back I was woken up by person yelling into their phone right next to my ear. But nonetheless, I enjoyed it because, as always, there is so much to see along the way.

When we got to the town, we noticed that it was like other Chinese towns but this one had some touches that made it unique. Compared to Huayuan, there were a lot more markets selling goods. There was also a really cool themed area of town that is in the above picture. The decor added a unique touch to the town and to be honest, I felt like I was going to a Disney land ride around every corner. 🙂 There was also a ancient city ruins display but unfortunately it was closed.

As often happens, we seem to attract people around us and yesterday was no exception. This time is was a group of about 30 high school students and we had some fun with them. Jordan showed them some magic trick and they really really like that too. The kids in general were not as outgoing as they are in Huayuan but we did find (or I should say they found us :)) a group of little kids that were not shy at all and just wanted to say right by our side. They were super cute and I snapped a picture with them below:

Yep, it’s true. Your eyes aren’t playing tricks. That is indeed a bona fide bunny and Jordan just bought one. 🙂

This past Sunday (the 17th) was Jordan’s birthday! HAPPY BIRTHDAY BUDDY! And it was a lot of fun. Since there were some cool pictures I am going to do a short update tonight about his party day.

Since is was Sunday we didn’t go out and do anything but the day was good nonetheless. While we were tuned in for Church, I got a text message from Zoey saying that she wanted to give us something for Jordan. Without telling Jordan what was going on, I led us on a different way back from the cafeteria by the school gate where we met Zoey. As we met her, she gave Jordan a massive bouquet of flowers and a equally massive cake. We joined with some of the students that gave Jordan gifts and ate the cake tonight.

Later on Sunday night we visited Class 104 and 105. Since they knew that it was his birthday, they sang him happy birthday in Chinese and in English. The funny part was when they sing it in English the repeat “Happy birthday to you” in place of where you are supposed to say “Happy Birthday, dear Jordan.” It cracks us up every time that we hear it. In those classes Jordan was given some homemade birthday cards, a bunch of food and a giant, noisy power ranger-like toy. It was cool to see how nice they were. On Saturday night Jordan was given a new watch and just tonight received his birthday package from his sister.

I also learned tonight that Derek and him are the only ones that have had a birthday outside the United States. But despite being so far from home, it seems that fun birthdays are still very much possible. 🙂

This past Saturday was another fun filled one. This past week we have been teaching and visiting a lot of classes that we normally do not teach so we have met a lot of new friends. This particular week a group of girls wanted to take us to park and we happily obliged. Because I have written about the park before I will hit on some of the highlights.

The girls that we were with was a group of five 16-year-olds and their spoken English was pretty good. The had an obsession with our cameras and would take our cameras from us to take pictures. The picture at the top of the post was of us when they wanted us to make a heart with our arms above our heads. Yeah…

The above picture is of these really cool ladies that we met while walking by the library. The get up that they had on was traditional celebration outfit and, according to our students, is very expensive. It was pretty cool so we had to get a picture with them. The picture actually turned out quite well.

 

The picture on the left is of these three super cute kids that we met by the library as well. They were not shy at all and kept coming up to us. They did know a little bit of English and some other phrases that they had been taught in school. Strangely they would ask us questions like “how are you?” but when we asked them the same questions they weren’t able to respond. We were able to get them to share their names and the only English name was David. 🙂

The picture on the right is of a kid urination off a wall. I thought it was kinda funny so I snapped a pic. It isn’t that uncommon of a sight to see a child doing that on the street. Gotta love this place. 🙂

So today we had a really fun day with some of the students at our school. We went to the park and had some fun doing things there. Those things I will write about tomorrow. But for this entry I will write about an experience that we had with them tonight and it revolves around that picture you see above.

As we were walking home we were asked by the group of girls that we were with we were going to eat for dinner tonight. We told them that we were going to cook some noodle and they found this to be no good. The girls insisted that they will cook us food, despite us telling them that they had already been nice enough today. The conversation somewhat suddenly got changed to the topic of give people flat tires while walking and we were able to get off the topic of food. We didn’t bring it up again hoping that they would forget about it.

Fast forward to tonight as we were eating our noodles at about 9 in the evening. Suddenly there was a knock on our door and there were the group the girls that we were with today with food in tow. Because tomorrow is Jordan’s birthday (HAPPY BIRFDAY BUDDY!) they also had brought him some girl. Now before I proceed let me assure you that what they did was really nice and sweet of them.

The food was the awkward part of the night. The brought us a bowl of rice with different food on top and some really good cucumbers, which, unfortunately, were the only good thing about the food. The rice was topped with a bunch of stuff. The best part was this meat called lei lo, which we like but it goes down hill from there. Other stuff included pork liver, giant nasty looking mushroom, mini prawns (yuck!), chicken with thick skin attached, big chucks of fat and a some vegetable that was really crunchy.

As we are not allowed to have students in our apartment, we were hoping that they would leave so we could stop eating. They didn’t leaving so we just ate like normal, for Americans. As we were standing there talking and eating, one of the girls said that we don’t need to be gentleman. Confused we asked what she was talking about and she told us that is OK to shove the food quickly into our mouths like the Chinese. :S

A quick moment after that another girls said that we should eat very quickly because in China if someone brings you food you eat it quickly to demonstrate that you like it. :S x 2. So we picked up the pace to what our stomachs would allow. Desperate to find a way to get rid of some of my food, I pretended to be looking out the window while tossing my food. I later found out that Jordan dumped most of his into a bowl in the kitchen and hid it. I later added to his pile and we were able to “finish” our meal.

Don’t eat pork liver.

So yeah, the internet got the best of me last night. I got my post finished, uploaded the pics and the internet decided to stop working right as I was about to insert the last picture. So I have changed the previous post and you can now look at all of them. 🙂

As for my day, it was like any normal Wednesday. I had my class in the morning (the trouble class). They were better but still the same old things. Lunch was good. Some kind of meat and some vegetables paired along with rice. Later in the day we had classes at the junior school off of campus.

The most interesting thing about my day happens to deal with laundry. Because we do not have a dryer, we have to hang our clothes on the balcony to dry. As I was hanging up my clothes, I managed to drop a sock on to the covering that went out from the building by the balcony below us; it ends up being about 3 feet out of our reach to get anything that might have fallen on top of it. Since we have like five mops, I decided to use my Chinese skills to do “mopsticks.” I used two of the mops to pick up my sock. I felt pretty awesome.

Later in the day when we were at the outside school I had another adventure with my clothes. While we were teaching the first class, the back side of my collard shirt got soaked in water. In the next class I got little spots of ink all up the side of the shirt too. I have not a clue how that all happened but it did. The cool thing was that a bunch of students came up to me try to get it off with those stain removing pens. Although it didn’t do much it was sweet to see that they were so willing to help.

Laundry > Lee