The trip home from Weihai was in someways a bit harder then the trip there.. but also a little more interesting. We got on the boat at 8:30pm from Waihai to Dalian..... I managed to get a little bit of sleep... but ended up just walking around to boat watching the water most of the night. So we got to Dalian at about 4:30 in the morning and found a cab to take us to Mcdonald... were we sat for a few hours waiting for things to open. We also hit a Starbucks and Subway while waiting for our train to leave at 2pm.
By the time I got on the train I was completely exhausted..... so I fell asleep before the train even left the station. So when I woke up a few hours later... the first thing I see is this cute girl watching me from the bed across from me and above Chris. So of course.... at so
me point in this train ride we had to talk to her and the other girl she was talking to most of the time.
Her name is Li Dong Mei(李冬梅) and neither of the girls we met on the train speak any English at all... which made the conversation a little difficult... but mostly stayed in the areas of conversation that I have all the time... so it wasn't to bad. We ended up getting their QQ numbers... though I don't think either of us added the other girl... just Dongmei.. hehe. She is about 23 and goes to college in a city few hours north of Songyuan. Pretty cool girl.. maybe we will visit her city at some point.
Since then she has talked to me pretty much EVERYDAY on QQ in Chinese. At first this was REALLY hard... I had talked to a few waitresses a little bit on QQ but not much. In the last few weeks I have noticed a huge increase in my speed a reading and typing in Chinese (characters of course). I have also been working on using our conversations as study materials. When there are words I don't know.. I quickly just translate that word (yay google) and continue the conversation... but later I go back through my chat history and look up all the words I don't know and write most of them down on flash cards to study.. Then take some of the sentences that i don't fully understand the grammar in... and go to one of the teachers at my school and ask them to explain the grammar to me. So far its been working pretty well.. I am learning words that are used commonly in conversations :)
Two weeks ago we had new foreign teachers come in... and my boss always sends someone to go pick them up from the airport.... well usually its someone that speaks English.... well I guess they were all busy, he decided to send Micheal(pretty much the maintenance guy at Joy School). He is a really nice guy.... but he is a pretty big chinese dude and speaks maybe 5 words of English.... not exactly the first person you want to meet from you school when you first get to China
*p0ints to the open door of a taxi* "uuurr uurr... car!" . So ya.. I told my boss if he covered all of my expenses for the trip to Changchun, I would go with Micheal. The agreed with this very quickly.
Their plane came in at 8:30 at night... so we went to Changchun early that morning and spent the day walking around and doing some shopping.... was a slightly awkward day.. for some reason Micheal's mother was with us, and it took Micheal about half the day to realize he needed to slow down a bit for me to actually understand anything he said. (partly my fault... I arranged when we would meet and wear to leave by text messaging him in Chinese... so he assumed my Chinese was far better than it actually is..... at this point I can read and type better then I can speak.... not very common of people learning Chinese).
When the new foreigners got there they were happy to see me.... and I was able to translate enough to tell Micheal a little about them and their trip and some random stuff they wanted or needed. Also Micheal insisted on doing the ordering of food at the restaurant the next morning... but their likes or dislikes with food was very easy for me to translate. So we got them back to Songyuan with no problems and we have to knew pretty cool foreign teachers.... Jason and Alex... (Jason has a ninja turtles tattoo and an Invader Zim one!)
Trip to Chagan Lake(查干湖）
I am going to make this brief and just load in some pictures. We went to Chagan lake today... about an hour away by bus....maybe 30 minutes by taxi... and we are thinking about 3 or 4 hours by bike... which we are hoping to try one day. Today we took the bus (Me, Chris, and Alice from work)
We decided to get a look at everything that was around and keep Alice out of the sun in mid day... so we rented this crazy little bike type thing... me and chris got on the outsides and peddled and Alice sat in the middle and controlled the break.....it had a nice little top that kept us out of the sun.... but wow am I glad this place was kinda empty... Alice wasn't to good with the break.. hehe.
We of course had to eat some of the famous Chagan lake fish..... it was pretty tasty.. but still just fish... definitely not worth the price to do it more then once. I will say one thing... I am getting better at eating fish that still has bones... its so so much easier with chopsticks then with a fork. Alice ended up doing the ordering for us.. because the only thing I could really understand was that everything was fish.... the whole menu was names of like special dishes... so even the ones i could read the characters... still had no clue what it was.
We decided we needed to get on the lake for a little while... so we took Alice for her first trip in a boat... we were calling her Queen Alice for awhile because we did all the peddling on the bike, and now we were rowing her around in a boat.. hehe. It was a pretty windy day... but me and chris managed to row us around for awhile..... I was a little bothered by the fact that they didn't give us life jackets... mainly because Alice can't swim, but we randomly checked how deep the water was with the oar and we never got anywhere more then waist deep.
It was a fun day out at the lake! Even though my hands got a little hurt from the oars.... but I guess that just tells me that they are getting to weak and I need to work on that.
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