Lots of text, no pictures.

We decided to be adventurous and try new things during dinner one day and found ourselves eating a meal that consisted of some moderately unpleasant fishy greens and a plate of steaming hot pork fat, after which we decided to try only one new dish at every meal. That may have been the same week that we were served liver-and-stomach-lining soup at lunch after teaching elementary school.
Mr. Ren invited us to borrow some bicycles and he would take us to a temple that was very very close; prior to departure, we said that gee, we hoped it wasn’t on top of a mountain, but hey, Mr. Ren didn’t seem like a really serious bicyclist anyway and we couldn’t imagine him riding up a mountain. We were sort of half right; he still doesn’t seem like a serious bicyclist, but he does own a motorcycle, so while we huffed and puffed and panted and eventually pushed our bicycles up the tallest mountain in the area, he cruised along on our motorcycle. The temple itself was interesting; we met the caretaker and he invited us into his home for water and fruit. He house is built into the mountain; it has rounded walls and is very warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Coming down the mountain was exciting, too, as we discovered that the brakes on the bike that Julie rode only worked when you didn’t really need them (she made it down all in one piece and without falling off and is now perfectly safe, but we have decided that when we buy bikes, we’d like the kind with brakes).
Other than that – things are going all right. My friends who are not lazy bums like me spend an awful lot of time working and not as much time relaxing, and I spend not quite enough time working and a little too much time lollygagging, but I imagine sometime we’ll work out a balance. I’m a little frustrated lately with lesson planning. We had a meeting last week with students to discuss their ideas about how to improve classes for grades 1 and 2, and most of the advice for me boiled down to “Please talk slower and louder, and pleeeeeeaaaaase don’t give us any more boring articles,” which all made pretty good sense. Shortly afterwards we had a meeting with our boss in which he suggested that I should try to teach more articles straight from the Gao Kao (the college entrance exam). The kids aren’t learning English because they’re interested; they’re learning it because of the test pressure, so I should concentrate more on preparing them for the test (I’m oversimplifying his suggestion, but that’s basically it). It feels like pretty much the opposite of what the kids asked for, and I’m not sure what to do with that combination of suggestions. It’s not a super urgent problem, though, since starting next week we’ll be rotating grades every week, so I won’t see my kids again for three weeks.
Oh! Other exciting news items – one, we all got packages from home in the last week, so it’s been a week filled with chocolate and books and prunes and thinly sliced salami and parently love, which has made us all very happy. The other thing is that we have a friend! We’ve been calling him Baozi Man for a while, and last week he invited himself over for dinner (we went to his shop for dinner and he sat down with us and said, “Hey, don’t you think it’d be a good idea if you had me over for some American food? How’s Monday for you? You can just cook whatever you would eat at home,”) so last night we made pizza (by “we” I mean mostly “Julie and Katrina”) and he came over and ate our pizza and said we forgot to put something in it that may have been iodine or may have been alkaline or probably was something else altogether; we never did quite manage to understand each other. He bullied us into eating more than any of us wanted and when Katrina refused to eat that last piece of pizza, he said something to her that I translated as “You’re… something,” forgetting that even when we speak our secret language (English), other people can sometimes understand a little, and for the rest of the evening he told us that we either were or were not “something” based on whether or not we did what he said.

General update

We're super-busy these days. Last week we had our first days of TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) prep classes and activity classes (I'm teaching folk tales, Katrina's teaching poetry, and Julie's teaching journalism) and we started taking tai chi classes in the morning's, so now we're spending lots of time trying to prepare lots of lessons every week and do research on what the third-year kids should be doing to try to get into an American college if they want to try that, and Mr. Ren wants us each to write some sort of research paper about our teaching. Oh, and there are some students forming English clubs that they want us to advise (one of them might have up to 400 students in it; I have no idea what we could possibly do with 400 students), and we're maybe adding another two hour middle school lesson on Sunday afternoons (we did this week, actually, but there was only one student who came, so it was pretty informal this time).
On Saturday Marilyn, one of Katrina's regular students and my TOEFL student, invited us to go look around the city with her for a while. She took us to a church that was built by some Americans who may have been from Carleton, and she had us try a local snack ("Not food," she told Katrina, "snacks!"), stinky tofu. Stinky tofu is... stinky. We ate it with a moderately delicious sauce, which is good, because, as Julie observed, stinky tofu tastes like horses smell. After that, Marilyn invited us to her home for a fruit smoothie. The smoothie was.... amazing. It was perhaps a distant cousin of what you might think of when you hear "fruit smoothie." She chopped up some fruit - apples and pears and little oranges - and some jello, then she microwaved a bar of chocolate with some yogurt and poured the mixture over the fruit chunks. As a final touch, she added some little gummy candies. It was tasty, but unexpected.

Pictures!

So we did in fact go on our trip to Pingyao, the ancient walled city. We took the bus down for an amazingly inexpensive 10 kuai each (about $1.25), though we had been warned away from the bus (a cab would be safer, we were told). The bus was actually pretty great; we made friends with some Chinese students who were traveling to Pingyao - it was kind of too loud and bumpy for conversation (and also none of our linguistic skills were really up for it), but they asked if we had pen and paper and we spent a long time passing notes to each other (I am a beautiful girl, they are nice boys, and we have an invitation to visit them at their college if we have time). Eventually the girl sitting on my other side got in on it, too, and wrote a note saying, "I want to communicate with you, but my spoken English is very bad. What is your name?" which maybe expresses the spirit behind most of our interactions with anybody in China. She lives in Fenyang (the guys we were talking with don't; they are going to college somewhere nearby learning to be PE teachers) and is going to the medical college to become a nurse, though it is not her dream. I don't know what her dream is; she was going to tell us, but the bus got to a bridge we couldn't drive across (there were giant piles of dirt and mud in the way) so we had to get off, walk across, and switch buses ("Don't lose the foreigners!" says the driver), and when we got on our new bus, she wasn't sitting next to me anymore.
Anyway. Pingyao was beautiful. Here are some pictures.Once upon a time, the city was prosperous - it was the site of the first bank in China - but it became less prosperous and was never modernized. Now it is famous as the best-preserved walled city in China, and it's prosperous again, though now as more of a tourist destination than a hub of trading. The center of the old city (there's a newer, modern city outside the walls) is a pretty-much-no-motor-vehicles zone.
At night, the city is lit with red lanterns. The whole time we were there, it was raining and cold, and at night, everything glistened. It was nice.

This is silly and blurry; that glowing thing behind me is the Market Tower (or something like that, we think).

Two views of the courtyard of the hostel we were staying in (Yamen Hostel; it was recommended by the Lonely Planet). The first is at night and the second is when I woke in the morning and snuck out of the room to find breakfast before my roommates woke.

In addition to breakfast, I found a friend.
That day, we bought a ticket to get into most of the museums in the city. It also let us through the gate to get up and walk along the wall, and we walked around from the North Gate to the South Gate. It was easily my favorite thing that the ticket got us into; it was quiet and peaceful and offered a different view of the city.
After walking outside in the cold and wet for a few hours, we stopped in a different hostel and ordered some hot chocolate that was expensive but was also made with real milk and chocolate and, more importantly, was hot.
We spend two nights in Pingyao. The second morning we took the bus up to Taiyuan, the provincial capital, where we did nothing but buy cheese and butter.
Annnnnd that's what we did with our National Day holiday. More later.

Holidays, weather

Hokay, so.
Mid-Autumn Festival was last Tuesday, and we had the day off from school (no one knew that we were getting the day off until Monday morning, though, which seems like awfully short notice, but it was definitely a happy surprise for everyone). We didn't do anything super exciting, but Mr. Ren invited us to his house to make more dumplings (carrot and mutton filled) for lunch, and he had us over again that night to sit with his family and eat fruit and watch the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival tv program. People kept telling us about how the festival was a day for being with family, so we sat on the couch with Mr. Ren and his family and missed home a bit (well, I did, anyway), but it was a nice evening and it was very sweet of Mr. Ren to invite us over.
Monday was National Day, China's 58th birthday, so everyone except us had the Monday and Tuesday off (we had to teach elementary school in the morning both days, but we have four days off starting today to make up for it), and one of Katrina's students, Marilyn, invited us to go see the world famous Fen Chiew (Fen Jiu) distillery. Fen Jiu is the local hard liquor (when we had lunch at Haihua's house, she gave us each a little shot to try, but it was not delicious, so at the end of lunch when her brother was cleaning up, most of our fenjiu was still in our glasses. He looked at them for a second and then poured them out to use to clean and disinfect the table), and the distillery has really beautiful green gardens as well as rooms full of liquor. Apparently our tour was a little short, though, 'cause they've closed some areas to prepare for the upcoming Alcohol Festival.
Elementary school classes are a little nutso. I have it easy - my classes are a middle school class and one of the older elementary classes. The middle school kids are so easy to deal with, and even though the elementary kids are pretty rambunctious, at least they can already speak some English. Katrina and Julie both have younger kids, who I think must be even harder.
The kids don't have much of a sense of personal space or property; they're curious about us and they dig into our bags pretty much whenever our backs are turned (if they take things during break, though, they always give it back at the end). Some of them got my camera out of my backpack on Monday, so.... here's a few of the kids in my elementary class. The classes are hard, mostly because they're a pack of energetic kids who don't really speak English and we are inexperienced teachers who don't really speak Chinese (we each have a Chinese person helping us, too; if we didn't, Sunday classes would be impossible). On top of that, we teach in some unused rooms in another school, and the classrooms are pretty minimal. There's chalk, and a chalkboard, and desks. My classroom doesn't seem to have electric lights I fiddled with the light switches for a while before noticing that there weren't even lightbulbs in most of the lights. Some of the kids need glasses; very few have them. There's a pair of twin boys in one of my classes who share one pair of glasses. There weren't classes last year for the really young kids, so Katrina and Julie have to figure everything out as they go along.
The weather here has been fantastic (I am the only person who thinks this). It's been damp and cool and just like home; I was talking to one of my students and she said that there has never been weather like this in Fenyang before. It's been drizzling for about a week. The roads really aren't designed to handle water, so there's standing water on all the streets and the back roads are in really awful condition (they're in pretty awful condition even when it's dry).
Today is the start of a four-day weekend for us, so we think we're going to go to Pingyao, which is supposed to be lovely, and also probably Taiyuan (where we can buy cheese!) and maybe Taigu (where some folks from Oberlin are teaching). Anyway, I'm off to start my day. Bai bai.