Well this has been a very good week. Grace has another tooth busting through her bottom gum and that has made her a little fussy off and on, but really she is doing well. Matt and I had our first date tonight… since Grace was 6weeks old. We also had our first Chinese lesson today and learned a lot - even all the strokes in order to write the characters. We don’t have it down yet, but Shu Ting (our teacher) said we made beautiful marks. These strokes however, are not characters, only parts of characters… so, yeah we got a long way to go. But I think it was a good first day.
Well a sweet American girl offered to watch Grace for us so that we could have a night out. We took her up on it. We went to McDonalds. You know it reminds me of those stories of some guy taking his prom date to McDonalds for prom… really though, places you’d never eat in the States become gourmet in China. Its just because when you are trying to decide what you’ll eat each day you must choose between Chinese food or Chinese food, and so you usually eat Chinese food.
Bad food story… Matt and I were at Wal Mart (don’t get too excited, it carries Chinese stuff) and decided to grab a few things for dinner. MAtt got some prepared potatoes & something. So we get home and I cooked a dish and put our food in bowls ready to eat. I knew there was something strange in the potatoes, but I couldn’t really tell what it might be??? I ate a potato, I thought, but after a few minutes I discovered some pork with that one inch piece of fat still attached… that’s when I realized I had eaten a huge piece of fat… YUCK - and I don’t even eat pork, or at least I didn’t. I am still gagging thinking about it. Today at lunch I found out that what we have been ordering as sweet and sour chicken is actually pork… I guess the other white meat fooled me real good. Ha, I know my friend Judi is either laughing her head off or gagging with me.
Back to the date. After eating a hambaobao and some fries we went bowling. It was great! We left one and one - first game Matt had me by 2 pins, second game…. drum roll please - me 148 & Matt 103. Yes!!! Dad, I hope you are reading this! I had a little cheering squad in the next lane - several ladies clapped and smiled each time I knocked down more than half the pins. How encouraging!
Well, guess I should study my Chinese before going to bed. We’ll be hitting the books hard tomorrow. Our teacher assured us that she would bring the workbooks for children so that we could begin writing our characters. This is so much fun!
