Can You Have Seafood?

July 30th, 2018

I will not lie, today was pretty uneventful. Though I must say even an uneventful day in China is still different from any day in America. Sarah was the highlight of my morning since she walked in with little rain booties to protect her shoes from the rain… proof to the right. The school day flew past in a blur with yet another dictation quiz and plenty of note taking. Mason showed off his new Taurus shirt as seen below with these wonderful “style photos” as Mei Mei likes to call them. We also had very interesting lunch conversation about the types of swim suits that boys wear. Speedos are a very polarizing subject.

For lunch today Li Laoshi stopped us before we could walk to Tea & Brown saying that we weren’t allowed to go there anymore because of the construction zone. We begrudgingly listened and walked back to the activity room where no one else was. After a while people started filing in with Tea & Brown drinks in their hands. I don’t know how they got out there without being stopped like we were, but I guess it gave us plenty of time to enjoy the half an hour xiuxi (break time) we had. Our cultural activity for the day was dancing. We met the prettiest ballerina who had us divide up into groups and the boys all got to sit on their phones while we had to learn a whole dance routine. I just kept having flashbacks to the eight years I spent doing dance and the mean girls that bullied me every day in class, so yeah that was fun… Luckily, Sarah and I were in the back so we didn’t have to put on a smile and pretend like we knew what we were doing most of the time. They even gave us giant fake flowers to hold during the performance which really brought me back to my first ever recital as a little bumblebee.

Finally it was time for the boys to learn their dance. They were all given red satin pieces of fabric that looked more like arial silks than dancing props. They had the easiest job in the world. All they had to do was jump up and down like they were little birds and flail their ribbon hands in the air. I don’t understand how they got such an easy dance, but it was fun for us to watch so I guess we’ll let them pass. Meredith and I just laughed while filming them the entire time. Once it was time to combine the two dances everything went crazy. They told the girls to do the splits as a pose at the end if we were able to, (a surprising number of them can) but then Jordyn went down into hers and said that she pulled something in her leg. Nurie and Livvy could do it with no problems and the rest of us just knelt in the back. We were going over our 4:00 xia ke time (end of the school day/class) and Meredith and I just wanted to buy some tea. We ended up walking through the construction zone, because nothing can stop us, and over to Tea & Brown. I ordered the feng mi ning men cha per usual and then walked back to the school’s side gate to find Mei Mei. Today we would go straight home to finish homework and tidy up the house. I ended up finding her at the bingfen stop by school where she was finishing a bowl with her friend. We discussed how to best spend our evening since I had a lot of homework and some college emails to take care of, but Mei Mei wanted to play basketball. I told her I would love to, but I have priorities and school comes first.

We had tu dou si (shredded, sautéed potatoes), chao bai cai (sautéed cabbage), niu rou tang (beef soup), as well as sautéed oysters and clams for dinner tonight which is probably the most different of all my meals at home. It was really nice to eat at home because I feel like it has been a while since Po-po cooked for me. I told her that I really wanted to learn how to make the dishes like she does and we agreed on some of my favorites. Despite this being a seafood dinner (which I did not know if it would be a good decision considering the past few days of my stomach just hurting 24/7) it was one of the lightest things I’ve eaten and meant that my stomach could handle it. I spent the rest of the evening just working on homework and other tasks for school, but made sure to tell my parents that I needed to film a video of me asking them permission to do something. They said okay before leaving to go who knows where and eventually (3 hours later) they returned home. We drove to the second house and I asked Ma Ma if we could film the video then. She told me she had work to finish, which seemed reasonable so I decided to wait for her and retreated to my room to catch up on the many blog posts I’ve needed to write. Once I was decently up to date I looked at the clock and saw that it was 11:30. I wanted to go to bed more than anything else but I still needed Ma Ma to film this video with me. I trudged downstairs and found her and Mei Mei in the living room with a drawing of a woman with motivational quotes on it behind them. I’m not really sure what “work” just transpired but I came there with a mission and I was bound and determined to take this video. I explained to Ma Ma what we had to do and gave her the script, even though I wrote in pinyin which she absolutely cannot read. Sure enough we finished filming the video and at 11:52 I had to use her wifi hotspot to try and send the video to my teachers. Not all midnight texts are good.