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.