Here's What's Been Up Lately

      Tuesday in one of my younger classes we were explaining to the kids about the egg hunt/ fun house we're having for Easter.  The kids were like "What's Easter?"  So my Chinese Teacher told them, "Well, it's all about Jesus." The kids then asked "Who's Jesus?"  One of the little girls tells them in Chinese "Oh, he's very famous."  Well yes, I think Jesus is pretty famous.  Good job, Loretta.  Now they think we've got a celebrity coming to the egg hunt, we're hoping for a big turn out!
   
     I've been missing baked beans lately, pretty hard core.  I can find re-fried beans here, and although they're quite hella expensive, I can eat them when I need to.  Chili beans, black beans, gangs all here.  Where are the baked beans!?  And tortilla shells.  I need some tacos in my life.

    I was craving a blizzard, the ice cream, not the wintery storm.  Sadly there are no DQs around.  I saw one in China, but was an id and didn't get any ice cream.  Anthony got me a McFlurry instead,  I was pretty happy, but I miss Dairy Queen.

   Projectile vomit.  I had my first experience with it yesterday.  Luckily, it didn't get on me.  Deacon was eating uncharacteristically slow during snack time, and when it was closing in on 10 am and he still wasn't finished with his oatmmeal, I said "Deacon, why are you so slow today?"  He looked up at me with wide eyes, his spoon in hand, and some oatmeal dripping on his face.  My HRT, Kylie, (the Chinese teacher who teaches the 2nd half of kindy, in Chinese) said "Yea, he's a little sick today."  Hm.. ok. So I started class without him.  Not 2 minutes later, I look to see Kylie pulling Deacon up and rushing to open the bathroom door.  Not... fast.... enough.  Boom. Oatmeal vommed all down the door and on the floor.  Poor Deacon, he really was sick!  If only he had made it INTO the bathroom.  So Kylie mops up the mess... but... not the door?  It was just sliding down the door the rest of the class, and it smelled.  When I had to take the kids to the bathroom I just shoved them in and tried to avoid the area.  Oh, and Deacon continued with the rest of class, and had some dried puke on his shirt.  Why they didn't change his clothes or send him home, I can't tell you.  I mean they have spare clothes for when they pee themselves of puke, maybe this wasn't extreme enough.  I didn't ask questions, just avoided any contact with him.

Sorry.. no pictures this time!

The Lazy Bird

       

      It's time to let you in on the secret of The Lazy Bird.  Anthony first discovered it hidden about 4 blocks down and one block over from our apartment when we were still new to Jhongli.  He was just out walking looking for somewhere to eat, and saw a place called Rebels, they had hamburgers and Mt. Dew, so he got some food.  We he told us about it, he said down the street further was a place called The Lazy Bird that looked similar, and we should try it.  So one day we did.

       The Lazy Bird is fabulous because it has a whole mess of American food items, plus the only place I've ever found Dr. Pepper!!  A wide range of styles of hamburgers, omelets, quesadillas, breakfast foods, and recently added steaks and ribs and salads and such. A favorite of mine is the Mexican Breakfast Burrito. No, it's definitely not traditional Taiwanese food, it's a taste of home!  All week I eat at various local food shops, often places that seem a bit sketch but are recommended to be wonderful, and they usually are, I don't eat at McDonald's every day, though am sometimes tempted, so I look forward to eating here. 

        Not much more than a few weeks after our first experience of The Lazy Bird, Abe mentioned eating at a place with Bird in the name that had really good hamburgers.  We knew they must be one in the same!  Plans were set to eat there the following weekend.  For at least the past 3 or 4 months now it's our Sunday routine to get up and go for "brunch" at The Lazy Bird.  Sometimes just us and Abe, other times many of our other friends come too and we have a table of 10! Sometimes we don't go until 1 pm when we can finally peel ourselves from bed and feel like death from a long night our clubbing at Search and we can all meet to discuss the events from the night before, or other times it's earlier and we feel much more chipper, maybe even catch a movie after.  Everyone loves The Lazy Bird.

        There's a word in Chinese "gwan-chee" which means like the relationship or friendship you have with others.  We definitely have "gwan-chee" with the manager of this place and she knows who we are and is always so friendly.  Her English is pretty great too.  Abe is a man of routine and he always orders the same thing, cheeseburger (don't forget the mustard) with Sprite.  One time he ordered coffee, but they still brought him Sprite!  We went there the Sunday of Abe's birthday and she gave him a free piece of cheesecake, well I guess I'm not sure if that's what they do always for birthdays, so maybe it wasn't special.  This has proved to be a bad thing though because now I know how fantastic the cheesecake is and I always want to get some but must restrain myself.  It reminds of Cheesecake Factory cheesecake!

A bit blurry, but it capture's the joy of Abe opening his birthday gifts at The Lazy Bird.  Plus, you get a small glimpse inside as I haven't any other photo's from in there.  It's decorated really neat, with US License plates scattered around, there's one from Minnesota!!!!!!!!! and some other cool signs.  Plus, this picture shows that the place MUST be good, I mean there's Chinese people eating here (don't you guys watch Friends?!)

          Also, through teaching a number of classes filled with both pre and pubescent boys, I've learned that the word "bird" is slang for penis here.  At first I just thought they liked birds, this one class always wanted to be team "Little Bird" and would laugh when I tried to draw a picture of a small bird.  Then one kid filled me in, by  shouting from the back of the room, "Teacher Annika bird is.... " and pointed it out to me.  Oh great.  Well no more team bird!  The exception is that everyone is really obsessed with Angry Birds here too, the kids don't seem to laugh about that.  I, however, find it funny.  So to sum up, we always eat at The Lazy Bird, and often Abe will either say or send texts like "wanna hit the bird?" Pretty great.  

     Oh, if you're wondering about Rebels, the place that led Anthony to find The Lazy Bird, well none of us besides Anthony have ever eaten there, we'd feel like traders! 

Hey, Hi! Shanghai!

      February 28th is Peace Day in Taiwan, this year it fell on a Tuesday, and our wonderful school decided to give us Monday off as well, making it a long weekend!  For our trip to Beijing we needed to get a double entry visa, which meant we still had one entry to China left.  Although our last trip wasn't aaas wonderful as we had hoped and China had left kinda a stinky memory, we decided to use our last entry and return to China!! Actually we had booked this trip before our first trip, so we were stuck going, regardless.
    I had an open mind though, no biases.  This time we were venturing to Shanghai, south of Beijing the weather would be not as freezing and I'd heard good things, aside from it being one of the largest cities in the world with a population of 23 million!
    We arrived Saturday evening, and immediately found friendlier people than in Beijing. We needed help getting from the Metro to our hotel as our directions didn't pan out.  A group of people were trying to googlemap it on their phone, when that didn't work they called the hotel, got us a taxi and told them where to go in Chinese for us!  So wonderful.  The first evening we went to The Bund, what the waterfront area is referred to.  There's an amazing view of the city and it's really beautiful.  We walked around, found something to eat, that was about it.

      Sunday we set out to see some things.  The first stop was the Jade Buddha Temple, pretty much just another temple, but there's a large white jade statue of Buddha that's neat and a big pond full of huge Koi fish that you can feed and people were touching them, though I'm not sure you're really allowed too.

Not the jade Buddha, but some other interesting statues.

   









      Next was the Yuyuan Gardens.  It was really nice, with a lot of detailed rock sculptures and trees, and absent blooming flowers since it's February.

      Then it was time to visit the Oriental Pearl Tower, this is essentially a mix of the Eiffel Tower and the Seattle Space Needle.  Apparently Shanghai is referred to as "The Paris of the East" which..  is I guess believable.  They have a lot of high end stores and luxury things, I guess their fashion is part of what gives it that name.  So this tower is 1,535 ft. high and has a number of observation levels.  Near the top is a revolving restaurant, similar to the one in the space needle.  We decided to be big spenders and eat the buffet up there.  There were tons of different styles of food, including a dessert fondue bar!  After lunch we went down to another level where there's a glass floor that goes out overlooking the city, and you can even see the base of the tower you are standing on!  It was really scary to walk out there.  Part of the floor was wooden, and then it turned to glass, so you could stand on the wood and then jump out and look down like you would just plunge through and it was very frightening!

Eating lunch









                A view from the restaurant

eeee on the glass platform!














   




     After this we went next door to a large aquarium that was full of fun facts and neat creatures! We even got to touch a shark!  Well, a white-spotted Bamboo Shark, I think it may have been dead or asleep, and it felt like a potato.



     
   

I was obsessed with these jellyfish.  I could have stood and watched them all day. They were in a tank that kept changing colors.  It was beautiful.

    Then we went back across the river to The Bund to get a view of the city line during daylight.  Here we got tickets to take an hour boat ride down the main strip.  It left at 6 pm, so we got the very end of daylight and then part of night.  It was a nice scenic ride. Then we went to a shopping district, walked around, ate, and that was Sunday!

City line in day time and the other side of the river on the boat at night.





      Monday was the only day we booked a tour as we wanted to venture to some smaller towns outside of Shanghai.  Our tour guide, named Frank, was very friendly and very interested in us because A. we are Americans, and B. we teach in Taiwan.  He asked a lot of questions about the education systems in both places. There were 6 people on this tour. First up was the city of Suzhou (Sujoh) about an hour and a half outside of Shanghai.  Here we went to the Master of Nets Gardens, renamed from the 10,000 Volumes Gardens.  The guy had a huge library here but renamed it after a fisherman saved his son from the waters.  It looked pretty similar to the Yuyuan Gardens.  Then we got to experience another silk factory.  Now I've been to 3, I know all about silk worms and silk!  Then we ate lunch, where some lady sang at our table then got angry and went bad mouthing us to the other people in the restaurant because we didn't want to pay her.  We also got to see an embroidery factory which was amazing.  We saw the masters at work stitching pictures that take forever to complete!

The Master of Nets Garden

      We then went to another city, Zhujiajiao, or "The Venice of Shanghai."  They like nicknames for their cities.  This is a water town over 1700 years old! We walked around by the water and took a small gondola ride through the streams with a woman navigating the boat.  This lady also wanted to sing for us, but we said no.  Then it was back to Shanghai.  We passed a lot of fields with workers in the cone shaped hats that make me think of China, but I don't think they were harvesting tea.

     Once we were back in the city, Greta and I set off to do some more shopping, but were disappointed in the market we arrived at.  We met up with Anthony back at the hotel and set off together to the Jin Mao Tower.  Another huge building, with the tallest bar in Shanghai on the 88th floor called Cloud 9.  We went there for a drink and a nice view of the city.  We saw a lot of different views of the city on this trip.  I had a classy martini, and it made me miss the martini lounge in St. Cloud.  After this we tried to go to a Snow Bar, where it's -10 C and they give you fur lined North Face parkas to wear and serve over 150 different types of vodka.  Sadly it was closed.
     Our flight left for Taiwan Tuesday afternoon, so we checked out in the morning and went to another shopping market before we needed to leave.  This one was better, and we got some I heart SH shirts! SH standing for my mom, those are her initials, oh and Shanghai too I guess. I also got some jewelry.   And then back to Taiwan!