Soccer!

Yesterday we went to lunch with Haihua, who was at Carleton last year as one of the Chinese language associates. The food was delicious, and it was neat to meet her family (though we couldn’t talk to them very much), but the most fun was after we were done eating. She has a daughter, Xiaoyu (I think), who is eight, and a bunch of Xiaoyu’s friends came over to see the foreigners and try out the English phrases they knew (Hello, nice to meet you, thank you, how are you?). One of the phrases was “Let’s play a game!” so we went out with them and played hide-and-seek and a game that was new to us that involved throwing a little beanbag and trying to either catch it our dodge it, and then we finished with soccer. It was way fun.
After that, we went home for a while, but later on, we ran into our neighbor across the hallway and she invited us in for tea and conversation. Katrina had just baked a few loaves of bread and banana bread, and our neighbor (whose name I still don’t know) was really impressed that we could bake our own bread (most Chinese people don’t use ovens, I think), so we invited her in to try some. It was a pretty hilarious experience. Our apartment is large and nice and everything, but it definitely has the feel of being inhabited by people in transition; it doesn’t feel like anyone lives here yet. Our neighbor and her daughters tried the bread (they liked the banana bread and might have also liked the regular bread; I couldn’t tell) and then wandered around and looked into our bedrooms and told us that we needed to get real clotheslines put in – we were going to be here for a whole year, after all – and that we really should get all our clothes folded and put away, and we needed to put all the pots and pans away, too. It was definitely friendly of her, but unexpected, and eventually we distracted her by showing her photos of our families (she thinks Katrina’s brother’s hair is too long).
Today, we have free time, we think, so we’re planning on going on an expedition to buy a new kitchen table (there’s a little one in there already, but we could use some more surface space in there). If we feel really crazy, we might even try to replace the missing lightbulbs.