It is Saturday morning and we were asked to have a picture taken with Crystal, a student who we met at English Corner at our university. She graduated with a BS in Public Health and a minor in Criminal Law. She is going on for her masters and has a chance to study in Canada at Memorial University in New Foundland for 2 years. This will be after her first post graduate year here and if she gets a high enough score on her English test. She has 2 "brothers", Bear and Tiger, which are her pet dogs.
Note the short nylons Crystal has on. They are like knee-high nylons but they only go to the ankle. Everyone wears them and they come in several colors. I hate to admit it but I bought a pack of 3. I only wear them with pants, tho, I am still not completely one of them.
I taught my last class yesterday and ate lots of chocolate to celebrate. It is a relief and really nice to have some free time to just do nothing or wonder what to do. I was asked to decide if I would consider teaching 16 hours next year which is an additional 4 hours. They will be short several native English speaking teachers in the fall so James and I both will be teaching more. I will make the decision this weekend and see if they really were giving me the choice or not!
The weather is becoming typical for here in mid June. We were graced with abnormally cool weather the first part of the month but today the humidity is 100% with fog/smog and about 85 degrees at 10 am. We will be ready for the humid MO weather.
I went shopping with Nadia yesterday. It was fun but we got a late start and both were tired. We will go and try again on Monday starting earlier. She bought pants and a big yellow leather bag for her sisters. The prices are about a third as much here as in Russia which is much more than in MO so her family gives her money to spend on clothes for them. The linen pants she bought were about $25 and the purse was about $20. It doesn't sound that cheap but it was a nice store with good quality stuff. We can get "chinese" stuff for much cheaper but the quality is not always as good. We ended the night by meeting James at a Korean restuarant. The food was good but we ordered too much and ended up bringing a whole dish home. It was a traditional Korean dish with a bowl of noodles with match stick sliced cucumbers, carrots, cabbage, and peppers layed on top. There was a dish of spicy bean curd sauce that you poured over and mixed the whole works. Quite tasy. James got the same type but it also had some small pieces of meat on the side and a fried egg on top. We also ordered a corn pancake the size of a small pizza. It was yellow and had corn kernals and was supposed to have pine nuts in it too but we failed to find any. Nadia got a very large typical garden salad with tons of thousand island dressing on it. After dinner we went back to Isetan, a large expensive department store run by Japanese people. Nadia had decided to buy some sun glasses that she saw there the day before. They were very expensive - 1500 yuan which would be about $210. After looking at them the 2nd time they weren't as enticing so she passed them up. That is where she bought the yellow bag. I tried on a pair of black sandles but of course they were too small. They were leather and would have been about $20. More on shopping after the Monday trip. That will be to find a small cut dress for Kelly!
A retired couple from the Chicago area will be returning home in July so they invited us down to look at what they are getting rid of before they leave. I came home with 3 chinese style bowls and 3 small saucers to match and assorted spoons and knives. Never can have enough spoons. This couple, Connie and Vince are 72 and 78 and were here as volunteers teaching English classes. They are quite amazing people and Connie said the experience was really good for them because it keeps their minds and bodies active. You would not believe that either was as old as their stated ages. I saw Connie running back to the dorm a month ago because she forgot something for class. As she ran by she said " I don't run as well as I used to." I hope that is us in the future.
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