November 14

Great evening. Mark Driscoll. Luke 12:21?

Finished up our Practicum. It snowed all day! We saw children building snowmen out our window on the 20th floor.

Jodi's mom's coming in about 15 minutes!

This is one of Gordon's students: he brings Gordon a sound card (because he doesn't have one on the PC provided by the apartment), and he found a USB that locks for Gordon.

:D

Buckle your seatbelts: Last weekend:

Thursday night: Date night turned into Hotpot with teacher friends
Friday night: Bolognese Pasta Dinner with 7 other Teachers at our apartment
Saturday morning: Life Education Class

For Saturday lunch, Gordon and I decided to venture off campus to eat something new. We were in a hurry because we had a ping pong appointment with some teachers. Gordon decided to ask a passerby in Chinese, "Where's that restaurant?" I rephrased it for him, "Where is a good place to eat?" She pointed us to a restaurant nearby and we went toward it. Next to the one she recommended, we saw a Korean restaurant with a huge red carpet coming out of the main entrance. We went in and were seated upstairs. We noticed it was a hotpot restaurant and we knew we didn't have much time to eat. The server said we could order dishes if we liked, so I hurriedly looked through the menu (not really knowing what anything said). I assumed that there were beef dishes scattered throughout the menu because the name of the restaurant had the word "steak" in it. I asked the waitress to recommend some good dishes, and she didn't really recommend much, so I randomly picked a meat (rou4), a tofu (dou4fu3), a veggie or kimchi cucumber (huang2 gua1), and a pancake (bing3) type thing.

We were hungry, and were in a hurry, not only that, were kind of stressed about how busy we were, so our faces looked pretty grumpy, plus the food was taking a long time to arrive. Finally, I saw the waitress bring a plate of meat on top of lettuce with some hot bean paste condiment on the side. We dug in. As we chewed the meat, I was like, hmmm, this beef doesn't taste as awesome as I would like. Really? Did I pay 36 yuan for this? Gordon chewed and he said, yea, it's not the best, it kind of tastes like lamb, but not really. I then casually mentioned that the menu said that this meat was cooked in the dog meat style (whatever that means). Gordon busted out laughing, "dog meat? did you order dog meat?" I just sat there and had no clue what was going on. Gordon asked, "Did you know that Koreans are known to eat dog meat? What did the menu read?" and I replied, "Gou3 Rou4" I started to realize what I did. We had not planned to be this adventurous today, but hey, now is as good of a time as any other.


We ate what we ordered and as we payed for our food, the clerk told us that there was a discount, we realized that this was the grand opening to the restaurant. The owner, latched her arm around mine and asked me in Chinese "so how was the food? It's a novelty that there are any minorities (foreigners) that could even possibly come to my restaurant. Please tell me what you think of the food." I told her "The food was good, but I couldn't read the menu very well and didn't know what to order." She said, "oh! you didn't know what to order? You must come back and I'll treat you." We said, no it's ok, we'll come back and try your food again later.


Saturday afternoon: Ping Pong with Teachers
Sunday morning: Go to the nearby church with students