Our Nighttime Visitor

A couple nights ago, we were having game night in one of our apartments. It was a pretty typical night: we played some Bananagrams, ate some Pocky, and talked about teaching. It was calm and relaxing. After a while, Jenna left to go get something from her apartment. When she came back, she slipped through the door and said, "I think there's a bat in the hall."

We all had varying reactions to this:  A few of the girls and Soren jumped up to take a look; I didn't really care so I stayed in my spot; Maddie is terrified of bats and she started freaking out.  I was a little mystified as to how the bat got up to our 5th floor hallway, but then I remembered that there are holes in the wall in the kitchen area, the door at the bottom of the stairwell is always open, and the window at the end of the hall has no screen. So the mystery quickly faded.

Soren was the hero.  He went out into the hall and played with the lights, tricking the bat to go towards the stairway.  The bat exited and that was the end of that.

Or so we thought.

The next night, Maddie, Morgan, Jenna, and I were chatting in Jenna's room.  As it was getting pretty late, I decided to call it a night and went out into the hall. Jenna's room is the last one on the floor, so I had a good view of the entire hall. I thought i saw something fluttering in the distance and I was pretty sure our batty friend was back.  This didn't alarm me, but I thought I should warn the other girls.  To avoid frightening Maddie, I whispered to Jenna, "The bat is back.  I'm going to shut the door."

But Jenna wanted to throw caution to the wind. "I wanna see!" She exclaimed and threw open the door. She stepped out into the hall just in time to see the bat dive bomb toward my head.

Seriously, I thought I was going to die.

We both screamed and jumped back into the room. I'd never been that close to a bat before (except at Disney's Animal Kingdom--and that was a very controlled situation). I opened the door once or twice and stepped out into the hall, but it seemed like every time I tried to make a move toward my room, the bat would head straight for me.  We all made a fair amount of noise.

My room was the farthest from Jenna's and finally I decided I just needed to go for it. With nervous shrieks and squeals, I maneuvered my way down the hall. I was to Krista and Morgan's door when the bat came for me. With a short scream, I thrust myself into Krista's room.  Krista happened to be right there watching a movie on her laptop.  She took out an ear bud and asked, "What's going on out there?"  "The bat is back." Was all I could muster.

Unfortunately, all our screaming had disturbed one of our neighbors down the hall. She popped her head out and gave Jenna, Morgan, and Maddie a light verbal thrashing. They told her we'd been spooked by a bat in the hall, but she didn't seem to care. Perhaps in the bat had come flying at her head, she would've started caring a little bit.

This is not the actual bat...but it looked pretty similar

I did finally make it to my room.  My nerves were shot.  I told Soren what happened and he was like, "oh."  He's a calm, brave man. I'm lucky I married him.

The Teachers and Their Students

Teacher Jenna's Homeroom

Teacher Heather's Homeroom

Teacher Krista's Homeroom

Teacher Maddie's Homeroom

Teacher Morgan's Homeroom

Teacher Soren's Homeroom

The Plum Blossom Festival

This past Saturday, our branch had an unofficial activity to the purple mountain for the start of the plum blossom festival. At first I was like, "What's the deal with the plum blossoms?" But as it turns out, the plum blossom is the flower of China and it only blooms once a year.  Big deal!  And super awesome.

So we met at the metro station at 10 am.  We were pretty nervous when we first got there because we had no way to contact anyone if we couldn't find them.  Fortunately, a group of 7 white people standing outside the metro is pretty conspicuous.  Once we were all together (about 45 minutes later), we set out.

It was the first day of the festival and it was packed and the line to the ticket booth was about a mile long. We didn't have to stand in it because Sister Yu, our Branch President's wife, bought everyone tickets ahead of time.  There was a bit of confusion as to where to pick the tickets up, so we ended up waiting around for about another 45 minutes. Eventually Sister Yu came back. We gave her money, she gave us tickets, and we were on our way.

Me and Soren with our tickets

The different groups within the group split up almost immediately and we started to explore.  A few of the branch members gave us some good ideas as to where to go.  We started down the Elephant road which was lined with all kind of different animals.

I couldn't get on the kneeling camel and yet Soren managed to get on the standing camel.

A lot of our time was spent in and around Plum Tree Hill.  The blossoms were beautiful and it was fun to see the Chinese people having picnics under the trees.  Some of them had tents to shelter their skin from the sun.  Others had umbrellas to shelter their skin from the sun.  They love fair skin over here.

After a while, our grumbling stomachs brought us back down the hill.  All I wanted was a sandwich or a salad or something, but they don't really believe in cold meals in China.  All you could buy were warm bottles of water, corn on the cob, Chinese hot dogs, and cup o' noodles.  Soren and I ended up buying cup o' noodles out of necessity, but we weren't really happy about it.  First of all, it cost us 10 Quai (as opposed to 3.50 at the Suguo).  Second of all, it's a boiling hot meal and it was about 85 degrees that day.  But, we ate it and were happy.

Cup o' noodles

Once we finished eating, we made our way to the Ming tomb.  We went through many fun, beautiful buildings, saw little temples, and enjoyed the beautiful scenery.  Maddie and I also spent some time trying to ditch a crazy Chinese lady in a mask who was obsessed with taking pictures of us. It was crazy crowded though.  We had to go through a small, long tunnel with about a thousand other people.  Totally worth it though. We also passed by some giant stone soldiers.

Not to mention the hundreds behind us

We spent a while climbing around the Ming tomb area.  There were a lot of stairs, and a lot of walls pretending to be stairs.  Unfortunately, to leave the Ming tomb area, we had to squeeze through the same tunnel. 

Going back down

Climbing the wall to the tomb

And another wall

It was an awesome day. And to top it all off, on the way out we found some guys who found the perfect place to play poker...under the stone elephant.

  

Teaching

Our Classrooms

The Apartments

Our living Quarters in Nanjing

Highlight of the day...

Emily:

As I was observing Krista's class today I experienced one of those awesome moments that only happen to white people in China.  Honey, one of our students, gave me the strangest look.  Her mouth hung open and she started pointing at her eyebrow. "Teacher--yellow!  Teacher--yellow!"  I bent down until I was eye level with her.  "Yeah, my eyebrow is yellow, huh?" I said, "Do you want to touch it?"  She reached out her tiny finger and stroked my eyebrow.  "Teacher--yellow!" She exclaimed again, and recoiled her hand.  The fact that I have yellow eyebrows is apparently unnerving to Chinese children.

Soren:

So! I am in charge of walking the students from class to class at the end of each period. Today... who was it.... I think it was Cindy... but I might be wrong. (They all blend into each other.) (Eww... that's a strange image.)
ANYWAY! She took my had as we were walking down the hall. As I was thinking, "Oh what an iconic moment!" She looked at my hand and began to pull on my arm hair. "Teacher!" She said, "Teacher- uh!"
I looked down and said, "Yeah, my arm is hairy. Funky huh?"
She then proceeded to scratch her head with one hand and her armpit with the other and then chattered something in Chinese to the students behind her. They all answered with laughter. Apparently I have now become 'teacher monkey.'
In other news I have suddenly become immensely fond of bananas.

The Lantern Festival

 

Sunday turned out to be a day of adventure.  Although the plan had been that after church we’d come back and rest, we ended up navigating our way through the heart of Nanjing’s Confucius Temple.

Getting to Church is about an hour metro trip from our school.  We meet on the second floor of a snazzy hotel.  The hotel refers to us as the “BYU group,” since they apparently can’t post anything having to do with a church. The branch is basically made up of English teachers.  There’s us, a large China Horizons group, and several other freelance teachers.  One member of the branch actually teaches at our same school. 

During Relief Society, one of the sisters announced that the lantern festival would be that night at the Confucius temple.  (The lantern festival is the official end of the Chinese New Year).  Maddie, Morgan, Krista, Heather, and Jenna stared me down as if to say “we MUST go to that!”  Since it was the chance of a lifetime, we decided to go. 

I had one of the sisters tell me what metro stop to get off at and we headed out.  I was excited, but I had two concerns: 1. I was wearing weird Chinese tights that, although warm, were falling off me. And 2. I had high heels on.  But going back to the school for a change of clothes was out of the question, so I just decided to deal with it.

Getting to the right metro stop ended up being quite the debacle. The stop I had gotten from the sister at the branch didn’t match any of the stops at the token station.  We played a serious round of charades with the metro workers until Soren finally got one of them to come over to a token station to help us figure out where we were going.

When we finally got there, we emerged from the metro and got some food.  I shimmied out of my tights, since they were half way down my thighs and Soren put them in his jacket (I think I gave a few Chinese girls a good scare during this process). It was Soren’s birthday, and he was determined to get some chicken feet to nibble on.  He was really enjoying them, but loved me enough to let me have a quick bite.  After filling our stomachs, we entered the flow of Asians heading toward the temple.

Soren's birthday treat

The chicken foot

Me trying a bit

Nom nom nom

 

The temple was in the center of a whole temple-area thing.  It was a neat place filled with shops, lanterns, dragon decorations, and lots and lots of people.  We took pictures of the things around us, but the Chinese people took pictures of us.  One guy finally worked up the courage and asked to take a picture with us.  We agreed and for the next 45 minutes we were stuck there taking pictures with random Chinese people.  Some just wanted pictures with me and Maddie (the blondes), some just wanted pictures with Soren (the tall handsome man), and some didn’t care who they got their picture taken with so long as they were white.  It was hilarious.

Unfortunately, my feet had started killing me at this point.  I was wearing comfortable wedges, but I had been on my feet for about 3 hours, and I knew I had several more hours to go.  I tried to maintain a positive attitude, but I was desperate for a place to sit down.

We tried KFC, but there were NO available seats. We were able to snag one chair and we took turns sitting in it as we ate.

We hung around for a few more hours and finally found some empty “seats” on a round about.  It was a cool festival—we even saw a couple Tangled-style lanterns go up. One fun thing about the lantern festival was seeing all of the fun masks people were wearing.  Maddie bought a cute one, but the rest of us were content just looking at them.  While we were sitting on the roundabout, however, a few Chinese men approached me with a mask.  They indicated that they wanted me to put the mask on, so I did.  Why not?  The men then took a few pictures with me.  That started it all over again, and we were swept into another photo shoot.  This one didn’t last as long.

The man who gave me the mask eventually approached me again, and I took it off to give back to him.  He smiled and shook his hand, indicating that he didn’t want it back and that I could keep it.  It wasn’t as cute as Maddie’s, but hey, it was free!

Getting back to the school was really painful for me.  Soren was a dear and gave me a piggy back for a little bit.

Other than that, it was a wonderfully successful outing and lots of fun.  For Soren, it was a birthday he’ll never forget.  

Preparing ourselves for the festival

Soren is jealous

Soren and the dragons

My mask