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Published: October 18th 2009
NOTE: Something is up with Travelblog and it messed up some of the formatting/words in this entry...and will not let me fix it. Just know I tried...😊
Well, vacation is now just a distant memory...we
e officially back in the swing of things. Teaching last week went well for both of us without anything too exciting to report- the lesson was on Friendship and we played Thank you for being a friend, the theme song from the Golden Girls in our classes...awesome. 😊
Friday night we spent our first night apart in China! I know, gasp. Elyse and Pete are another couple in the program, originally from Illinois & Oregon but most recently from San Diego. Pete was in Hong Kong for a couple days so Elyse invited Cali and I over for girls night. The three of us hopped in her school-provided van after Chinese class and headed out to the other outer district of Shenzhen, Longgang. Whereas Baoan is very industrialized and full of factories, Longgang is actually very green and full of families. It definitely had a suburbia feel to it. Pete and Elyse also both teach Senior 1 at a high school, but live off-campus in a really nice 3 bedroom apartment (clearly the placements aren all equal opportunity, right?). After getting the tour, us girls headed out to dinner at a nearby Hunan (spicy!) restaurant and then as usual, grabbed some beers at a corner store before heading back to the apartment. We walked through a nice park by their house where a bunch of kids were playing on outdoor exercise equipment and women were dancing/working out to music in an ampitheater area. It was pretty cute. We planned on watching a movie, but drinking beer and just chatting about life kept us up until 1am!
Meanwhile, Martin and Jimmy stayed in Futian (downtown) for dinner with a few other people from the program. Our program coordinator had sent out an email inviting anyone who wanted to see the newest Star Trek movie over to his friends house to watch it on a projector screen, so the boys joined in with that and then went back to Yantian to spend the night.
At 10am the next morning, us girls got up, went to a bakery nearby for iced coffee and pastries (I had donut hole-ish things...on a skewer, naturally) and then Cali grabbed a bus back to Yantian. Elyse and I decided massages were in order and headed over to a place shed been to once before with people from her school. For 55 kuai (about 8 USD) we got a 90 minute foot soak and body massage...and it was AMAZING. At the end of the massage, they covered our legs in mashed up ginger, laid hot towels over it and wrapped our legs up like mummies for 15 minutes. It was a weird tingly feeling, but must have done something good! 😊 We went back to the apartment, ate our leftovers from dinner the night before and then got on an airport express bus back to our area of town, and ended up arriving back at our dorm just 15 minutes before Martin came back from Yantian.
Martin, Elyse and I walked over to our little village, Xing Wei, to a Muslim noodle shop that wed discovered just a few days prior. They serve amazing food with homemade noodles for really cheap, and its family run...not to mention they have pictures on the wall, so it makes ordering pretty easy. 😊 We ate and then went to the airport to meet up with Pete, as hed never been out here before and we didn want him to get lost. It took awhile for us to find him (his phone was dead and we weren sure where his other bus was dropping him off) but we finally did and after he got some McDonalds, we took the bus back to our stop and walked home! The four of us stayed up chatting for awhile and then this morning they got up and left VERY early to get back to the airport. They
e off on yet another vacation this week to two other provinces in China, as their kids have military training. Lucky, lucky! 😊 We live just two short stops down from the Shenzhen Airport, so it was convenient, and we got to have our first visitors which was definitely exciting.
Today, Sunday, Martin and I slept in and then decided to finally venture out to IKEA! It was pretty awesome. It took us about 50 minutes to get to the bus stop in Nanshan and then it was a quick 5 minute free shuttle ride out to Ikea. We headed straight for the restaurant and enjoyed rice w/veggies, a garden salad, fresh rolls, cranberry/cherry soda and a slice of almond cake. No meatballs even for Martin! It was nice to be in a familiar place and we had fun just browsing, as anyone does at Ikea. We bought some kitchen supplies- a big knife, potato peeler, spatula, cutting boards, apple slicer, pot holders and a delicious smelling candle just for fun. On our way out, we made sure to hit up the little cafe for 1 kuai frozen yogurt cones- who can resist that?!
As we stepped outside Ikea, we realized it was right next to Decathalon, a store similar to REI that wed previously heard about, so we decided to check it out. I fell in love. They had "normal" size clothing & shoes! Martin got a t-shirt and I got new workout shorts (my last ones got ripped during the infamous bike fall) and a quick-dry shirt to wear both teaching and just for fun. We probably could have spent hours looking in there and will definitely go back- especially because as we were leaving the Ikea parking lot on the shuttle, we looked back and realized another big store weve been wanting to check out, Metro, was right on the other side!
Back at the place wed first taken the bus to, we headed inside a gigantic mall and went immediately toward Ole, a Western grocery store wed heard about but not yet visited. It was also pretty fantastic. Real Cheetos, Doritos, pasta, Hunts pasta sauce, anything you could ever want!!! We had our heart set on finding some delicious tortilla chips but none of them looked too appetizing so we decided to skip it. One of these days, maybe. We got some butter, pasta, pasta sauce, SKIM milk (imported from Germany, of course) and other regular groceries we needed. Ole was inside a typical fancy Shenzhen mall, so we walked around for a bit just to see what was there. I was, once again, amazed at China. Its hard to remember what country you
e in when you walk around a mall with Sephora, Nike, Columbia, lots of higher end named stores I can remember, and an ice skating rink where they
e playing Chris Brown. Oh, China, what is capitalism doing to you?!
Tired and ready to get back to our dorm, we braved the rush-hour traffic and squeezed our way onto bus 327, which we take very often- the bus conductor recognized us, smiled and said "Xing Wei?" as we nodded and she scanned our cards. Im sure we
e the only Westerners that ride that far out into Baoan on a regular basis, and we
e pretty easy to recognize anyway. 😊 Now we are home and its time to lesson plan lesson plan lesson plan...back to another regular week!
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Mom/MD
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sounds like you had a wonderful weekend...and its nice to have some "home" feeling to your weekend as well...and also sad to wonder what capitalism is doing to the entire world...as its getting harder and harder to find any mom/pop stores or any diversity in city to city, state to state, or country to country! Enjoy the start of a new week and know that you are making a change in not only the students lives, but yours as well!