Day 221 – Buddha Mountain and Dinner with the Ding’s

David taught his class this morning and then we met Wu Jun, (David edited her paper a few weeks ago) and her husband.  They took us to Buddha Mountain.  There was a “Mountain Festival” going on that had a lot of local food and activities.  They also had a “dating” service going on.  They hang a paper with their name, and information like: age, weight, height, education level and what they expect in a spouse.   There were probably thousands of papers hanging and lot of people, young and old, male and female looking at them and either taking notes or taking pictures of them.

 

Thousands of advertisements for spouse wanted!

Advertisements for a spouse.

Then we tasted some local food and hiked up part of the mountain.  Wu Jun’s husband wanted to take us to where the blossoms on the trees were really pretty.  We stopped to take a few pictures here and there, but he wanted us to keep going because there were supposed to be some extra pretty ones up by the big golden Buddha.  We were under time pressure because they had a meeting in the afternoon and we had to get back and they wanted to feed us lunch also.  We hiked back down the mountain and then discovered another campus really close to the mountain, called the “South Campus.”  That is where they took us for lunch, the canteen that is on that campus.  The food was pretty good and we had a nice visit.

 

The bought us one of these local treats.  It was pretty good, but I don't remember the name of it.

This was a local comedian.  All in a special Shandong dialect, so if we could have understood the Chinese, we probably wouldn't have been able to understand his dialect....

After they left us at our campus, we went to the street market so we could buy a potted flower to take as a gift to the Ding’s when we went there tonight. 

We got back to the apartment and I was hoping and praying that I would be able to make the video that I do for the Primary Music without any problems.  I got all the music downloaded and organized in a file.  The computer started to act funny again (well really slow), so I restarted it and when it came back up, I only opened the files I need open to make the video.  I was able to make the video while David was doing square dance with his students and then I worked on the captions for the words.  It all went pretty well, but I didn’t get it finished before we had to leave for the Ding’s apartment.

They had a nice dinner for us and we performed the reader’s theater with Alan that we had rehearsed for the last few weeks.  His parents really liked it and of course, they recorded the whole thing.  We continued to visit for an hour after the performance and then we had to get home so I could finish the video and hopefully get it loaded on Dropbox where the rest of the Primary could access it on Sunday.  It all worked, but I am still having some problems with my computer being sluggish if it has been on for a while.  We leave on the Yangtze cruise in the morning, so it will all have to wait until we get back on Monday.