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.