October 21 - Dentist, and Lily and the Kuzmich's

Students performing the readers theater about Rumpelstiltskin.

Toward the end of the cruise, I started having some sensitivity in my teeth on the upper left side. Aaron Tran, a Vietnamese member of our Church, is here in Jinan getting advanced training in oral prosthetics.  He is a dentist with his own practice in Vietnam.  I talked with him, and he made an appointment for me on his day off.  He is usually at the dental hospital on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings, but that is when I teach, so I couldn’t make it then.  It was so kind of him to do that. 

We couldn’t make it on Monday, because of our heavy schedule that day, so it was Tuesday afternoon before we could get to the dental hospital.  David also needed to go to the medical hospital on the other side of the street to get registered to have his blood drawn on Friday for his next PSA test. Aaron and I waited for David to get the registration done, which wasn’t long and then Aaron escorted us to the hospital.  

When we were here teaching five years ago, I had one class of 1st year freshmen dental students.  They are now in their fifth year of their program which puts them working at the dental hospital now.  When Aaron talked to the person that he borrowed a workstation from, so that he could take care of me, she knew who I was.  Several of the students remembered me, and word got around that I was there.  None of them were brave enough to come and say, “Hello,” but that is their way.  They get shy about talking English, because they haven’t really kept up what they learned when they were my students.

When I was talking with Aaron on Sunday, he told me that one of the questions that the student’s asked him was about the size of my mouth, “Was it bigger than Chinese mouths?”  Aaron chuckled and said that in general, people of European descent have a smaller mouth than Asians.  It was interesting to hear.

This is the dental hospital.  There is the option of private clinics also. They are a little more expensive, but you get a little better and more customized care.

Looks like a dentist checking out my mouth.

Aaron adjusting the light.

Aaron found that I have several small cracks in my teeth, and that some of my old fillings are starting to not have a good seal.  They will have to be replaced.  He also suggested that one tooth may have to have a crown put on it.  Not good.  We are trying to decide if we should do it here in China or wait until we get home in January.  The Sensodyne toothpaste will only take care of the sensitivity for so long. 

David had his first meeting with his class monitors on Tuesday evening.  He taught them some games that they can use for English Corner and also to brainstorm, if they can find a place that the English Corner can be held each week.  They had a nice meeting.

There has been work going on under our building for the last week, replacing pipes.  We hope that it will make it so that we have better heat from the radiators this year.  We had to spend a lot of money last year just to stay warm with our electric heaters.

Thursday evening we went over to have dinner with the Wilkins at Pizza Hut.  Food was good, and then we went to their apartment and played a card game.  Really enjoy them being here!

On Friday, we were able to have lunch with Eva at the canteen.  It was good to see her, because we have been gone for so long and not able to meet her for lunch.  We showed her our pictures and told her stories of our travels.  We missed her!

Friday evening, Lily came to our apartment with the first BYU China teachers that she had met.  Six years ago, John and Roslyn Kuzmich were riding the bus to church.  They decided to ask Lily, a complete stranger to them, if she could speak English.  Lily could, she graduated from Shandong University as an English Major, but she was reluctant to speak.  Lily shyly said that she could and a great friendship was formed after that.  Lily was a great help to John and Roslyn, so that they started to enjoy China more.  She would help them get tickets for places and sites they wanted to see, and would accompany them to different places when she had the time.  The Kuzmich’s bought tickets for Lily the following year to go on the Silk Road Trip with the BYU teachers.  Lily met us and Stan and Nancy Pace on our first Sunday in China to make sure that we could get to our Church meetings at the Hanlin Hotel, even though she couldn’t attend.  We included Lily in our activities, dinners, game nights, etc. 

We were thrilled to meet John and Roslyn, that Lily had talked about so much.  We went to the canteen to have dinner, but we got there a little late, and there wasn’t much variety in the food.  That’s the way these canteens work, they only serve food for certain hours and when the time is up, they don’t make any more food.  We had enough to eat though. 

We had plans to go to a violin concert on our campus after dinner.  The violinist was Zhuo Pin.  He was really good.  There was a pianist to accompany him named, Wu XiaoLiang.  They both did a wonderful job.  The room was packed.  Fortunately, an artist that the Kuzmich’s knew had saved seats for us all.  People were standing along the walls, sitting in the aisles, and I’m sure there were many out in the entryway just trying to listen. The thoughts that kept going through my head were, the fire marshals in the US would NEVER allow the aisles to be filled like that!  It was a great evening.  We parted at the end of the evening so they could catch a taxi to their hotel, and we could go back to our apartment.

Saturday was a day that I had set aside to do catch-up.  I was behind on the blog, some classwork and some churchwork.  David had some of his students contact him, and they wanted to come over.  They came about 2 p.m. and brought all sorts of food: bananas, oranges, tiny jello cups, potato chips and Goldfish crackers.  They played games, sang and talked for over two hours.  I joined in a little in the singing, but kept working on all I had to do.  They are a fun group of kids.

 

These are the students that came over.  They stayed for about two hours.  It was fun.

Performing the readers theater, Shiro and His Master.

We went to a new pizza place that is outside the west gate of campus.  We had hoped that because it was a pizza place, they might have some English.  No.  One guy was able to communicate with us a little, enough to get our order.  It was really good pizza thought, almost like home.  The Chinese like to put corn kernels on their pizza, I’m not a fan of that.  

 

Chinese goldfish flavors: honey & milk, BBQ or Shish-kabob (not totally sure which), seaweed, and tomato.

Two unusual flavors of Chinese potato chips.  The yogurt ones were okay, but the cucumber were just a little too strange for me, and I'm someone who likes cucumbers!

Sunday we made our way to Church.  The reception on the phone was really bad and there was a lot of dead air space that we were listening to.  Oh well.  We still felt the Spirit.  We had an extra large group.  The Kuzmich’s joined us and then after our meetings, Lily and Patty (Aaron’s friend, but now a friend to ALL of us) were there.  It was an enjoyable Sabbath day.