April 21 - Lunch with Dr. Tricia, Tulip Festival, Church and Xueye Lake

She was just too cute to not take her picture!!

This week started off with a lot of wind blowing.  It was very blustery.  As we were walking to our massage place on Tuesday, I was hearing what I thought was a lot of birds chirping frantically.  I looked up at the sky but I couldn’t see any birds.  The wind was blowing really hard, and as we got closer to the sound of the chirping, we realized it was all of the motorbikes and scooters parked on the sidewalk that had been blown over in the wind and set off their anti-theft alarms!  

 

All the scooters and cycles were standing at the beginning of the day.  The wind didn't care! It was just funny to hear all the alarms going off.

Wednesday evening, David had his English Corner, but only had eight there.  They still had a good time learning and talking, but he had hoped for a few more than that.  

We had planned to have lunch with Dr. Tricia on Friday, so we went at 10:30 a.m.  She had the old orthopedic surgeon take a look at my knee again and was able to get me more Celebrex for my arthritis.  We had a nice lunch and a good visit.  Then she sent us home in a taxi, so we could have a rest.  Instead of a rest, we prepared for our tutoring time with Michael and Stone.

 

Snickers with hot chilis?!

A girl who audited my class last fall, contacted me and wanted to meet with me.  She has really good English skills, but wanted to take a class from an American.  Scarlett is trying to get into graduate school in the US and wanted some advice on what to do.  She also brought along a former student of David’s, his English name was “Pancake.”  We talked over what might be of value to them and some ideas for almost two hours.  It was a pleasant visit, and we’ll be meeting again with them.

Ever since David had been to Red Leaf Valley last fall and heard about the Tulip Festival in the Spring, he has been trying to make sure that he gets there.  A young man, Anthony, that has been coming to our Sunday lunches had said that he would take us in his car, but as seems typical with a lot of Chinese, it is a last-minute thing to set up.  We had talked with Eva, and she was able to get us set up with the woman who has organized other trips to Red Leaf Valley for us, and she got a small group together so that we could go.  Jay and Tresa Wilkins came with us and four Chinese women.

 

This was our group, from the left, Eva, one of the Chinese women, Tresa Wilkins, Jay Wilkins, Zina, David, and the other three Chinese women. These are the stairs that lead up to the gate to go into Red Leaf Valley.  With my trusty cane, I made it to the top, but I didn't want to count the steps!

Some of the flowers were planted in the ground and some were just potted.

They arranged for a fifteen-passenger van to pick us up from our campus.  The four other women and Eva were waiting at a place closer to their homes.  Traffic was terrible because of a lot of construction.  It was almost two hours before we got there.  It should only have been about an hour. 

 

Replica windmill.  Everyone stops to get their picture taken by it.

The token wooden shoe.  Little kids want to play in it.  One little boy peed in it.  They have the split pants to wear until they are potty trained.  He was in his split pants and it was time to go, so he did.

Lots of stairs to get to these places.

There were several saxophone players scattered throughout the garden playing beautiful music.  David and I even danced to the music for a little bit.

Here we are dancing to the saxophone music.

This young man was very curious about me.  A gentleman was sitting next to me, who is also a professor at Shandong University.  He had started talking to me and so this boy came over and started asking the question he wanted answered.  Then he got his little sister and brother over by me.  Then we had to take a selfie. 

David and I paid for the ability to ride the carts that they have to take you to different areas, so we got there first.  Eva, Jay, and Tresa walked and saw some great sites along the way.  David and I had time to climb to nearly the top of the tulip area.  We rode the cart down to an area that we thought they would meet us at, and then we waited for about an hour.  During that hour, we had lots of interactions with the kids and some of the adults who got there after us.  

 

As we were sitting in the pavilion area waiting for the others, these two little girls kept trying to get up the courage to come and talk to  us.  The one in the yellow shirt knew a little more English, and she finally got the courage to ask us some questions.  They still never came up close to us, but they sure kept popping up in places around us, sometimes hiding in the bamboo that was growing to the side of the pavilion.

This girl's mother kept prodding her daughter to speak English to us.  She was hesitant at first, but finally got the courage.  She asked where we were from, what our favorite colors were, and what our names were.  Then she recited lines from a dialog that she has to memorize and repeat at school.  She did very well, but I wondered if she really knew what she was saying and what it meant.  Her mother asked, through the daughter, if we could understand what she had said.  We told her it was very clear and very well said.

We decided to ride the cart to the next stopping area, and that is where we found Eva, Jay, and Tresa.  They had taken a boat ride! We grabbed a little lunch, and then it was time for us to get on the bus and go home.  All-in-all it was a wonderful day spent in the mountains enjoying the beauty, and the peace and quiet.

 

A pond by the pavilion.

This man had seen us sitting to rest for a while, so he came over and wanted our picture with him. He was very excited to do that.  I later learned that he was the father of the man that I was sitting by who was an English professor.

Sunday the teachers at the Hanlin were all gone except for Sue Stubbs, so we held church at our apartment.  It is halfway between the other two apartments,  so it made sense.  We also had lunch here afterward.  Aaron Tran wasn’t able to make the meeting, but he did come for lunch and brought three unexpected guests, Anthony, his wife, and another woman, Emily.  We had a great time and a good meal with good company.

David’s Chinese oncologist, Dr. Yang, had invited us to go with him and some of his colleagues to a lake that is south and east of Jinan.  The area has recently been annexed into Jinan, and they are building it up as a resort type area. 

Dr. Yang and one of his friends picked us up at 3 p.m.  The ride out to Xueye Lake took about one and a half hours.  It was nice to once again get out of the city and be in the mountains and by the lake.  Dr. Yang had his friend take pictures with this super nice camera.  We walked along a path by the lake and looked at the sun setting on the water.  I’m not sure what the purpose was of all the pictures of David and I walking with Dr. Yang, we may never know, but it seemed like he had a purpose for the pictures in mind.

 

Dr. Yang showing us this huge table that we were going to have dinner at.  It was beautifully carved underneath the glass.

Dr Yang watching David.

Sunset on Xueye Lake.

They are building this artificial waterfall near the lake.

Another view of the sunset.

Eventually seven of his colleagues and a daughter of one of them joined us by the lake, and we went back to the first place to have dinner.  Because it is by the lake, the majority of the dishes were fish dishes - fish dishes with bones in them - fish dishes that we have a hard time with the bones in them!  We tried toasted cicada bugs and toasted grasshoppers, well, I tried the grasshopper, David said he had squished enough of their bodies, that he wasn’t going to try them.  Now I have tried them, and I don’t need to try them again.  We also had turtle for the first time in our lives.  I guess if I was starving, I might eat it again, but only then.

 

Turtle feet.  It was really hard to get any meat off of them.  Very chewy.  Had to swallow it fast.

Roasted cicada for dinner also!

Let's not forget about the grasshoppers!  You pull the legs off before you eat them.

After the dinner, and lots of toasts (orange and peach juice or water, only a couple had wine), Dr. Yang asked us to tell some funny stories from our lives.  Being put on the spot, we struggled to come up with some really funny ones, but we did have some cute pictures of our grandchildren to show and tell stories about them.  After eight o’clock, we were driven home by Dr. Yang and his friend.  It was too late at night to write the blog and post it then, so it had to wait for Monday.

 

David is sitting with Lingling's daughter Sisi. Lingling is part of Dr. Yang's nursing staff, head nurse, I think.

April 14 - English Salon, Botanical Garden, and Library

Pink snow!  The blossoms are falling to the ground and it looks like pink snow.

After classes on Monday, I went to the acupuncture by myself.  David had to stay at the apartment so that the cleaning guy could come and clean.  The acupuncture went well.  I had a good talk with Kristen, the doctor’s student.  She is in her fifth year learning traditional Chinese medicine.  She has been trying to study English on her own, so she was thrilled to be able to talk with me, so she can improve her skills.  She mentioned how hard it was when one word could have four different meanings.  Take the word “address.”  She was amazed that I could just name off the four meanings so quickly.

During one of David’s classes on Tuesday, he called on a student to come to the front and read.  She jumped up with enthusiasm and came to the front.  David mentioned to her how he liked her enthusiasm.  She said back to him, “I like you!”

Tuesday, we had rain, not just a little rain, but lots and lots of rain!  We have to cross a street in order to get to our classrooms.  The street was a river!  It seemed like at least one and a half inches of water.  I walked back and forth along the edge looking for a possible shallow place to cross, but finally had to give up and just go across.  Got a little wet on my feet, but not as bad as I thought.

As we were coming home on the bus that afternoon, there was a little girl about four years old sitting in the seat in front of her grandmother, who was sitting by me.  I kept getting her attention and smiling at her.  After a few smiles back at me, she started singing the “ABC Song.”  She did as well as any four-year old would say in the US.  She started to sing it again, so I joined in and sang it with her.  She stopped in amazement that I finished the song.  The grandmother was thrilled that I was able to understand her and interact with her.

 

Lunch with Eva, Zina, David, and Jane.

We had our usual lunch with Eva, but had a surprise join us.  Five years ago, we had met Jane.  She was the one who arranged for me to be on the baking show at Christmas time.  Jane had gone to Canada shortly after the baking show was over, and we hadn’t seen her, because she decided to go to school and live in Canada with her husband and son.  She is back now to teach at SDU, so it was great to have lunch with her. 

Wednesday evening, we had the English Salon at Qilu hospital.  It was a fun evening.  We talked about all the holidays in the US and then answered questions about football and cooking a turkey.  

Jinan has a beautiful botanical garden, and the peonies are in full bloom right now.  We had moved our usual Thursday massages to Friday, so that I could have another session of acupuncture on Thursday.  The botanical garden is on the way home from the massage place, so it seemed like a great time to go see the peonies

This is near the peach and cherry orchard area of the botanical garden.

 There is a KFC in the middle of the gardens, so we stopped there for lunch.  We had been to the garden once last year and David had gone there with the Wilkin’s earlier this year, so he was pretty sure where to find them.  He was right!  It was beautiful!  So many beautiful blossoms and the aroma was wonderful!  

I call this "A Kiss of Color."

Japanese Maple was too splendid to pass up.

As we were walking toward the exit, we saw this children's play area.  There are tons of pigeons here, they know that people will feed them.  There is even an older woman who is paid to keep the pigeons in this area.  In the middle of the group of people standing there was a little girl that was trying to catch one of the pigeons.  

Friday afternoon is the tutoring with Michael and Stone.  We are having a lot of fun with the boys, and they seem to be doing quite well .  

On Saturday morning, David and I went to the children’s library that we have gone to before.  We sang some songs, and then I read a story to them.  Some of the children talked to us, but more of the mothers wanted to talk to us.  It seemed like the time flew by, because soon the guy who runs it was saying that it was time to go.  They can only be open for certain hours, and we were about fifteen or so minutes past that time.  

Sunday, we went to church with our Jinan “Twig.”  Had a fun lunch afterward.  They are moving the teachers at SDNU from the apartments that have been used for many years into smaller temporary quarters, so that they can remodel the old rooms.  At least they hope that the new rooms are only temporary.  We are dealing with China after all.  The new rooms don’t have any kitchens or clothes washers, so they have to use a “community kitchen” and a common laundry room.  It is a little awkward for them with the community kitchen, but they are adjusting to it.  Rather glad it is not us. 

Just had to get a picture of this jacket.  I'm not quite sure they have it right.

April 7 - Acupuncture with Moxibustion, David's Cold, Qing Ming Festival

Qing Ming Festival is similar to Memorial Day in the US.  We don't know if the university put the flowers there or the people who were descendants of these men that did it to honor them.

We had talked to Ms Jing, the mother of one of the boys that we tutor, and she had suggested that if I wanted to try acupuncture, she knew of the best place to get it done.  It is at a traditional Chinese medicine hospital.  I wanted to see if it might work for me, so we asked her to set it up for us. 

Monday afternoon, she rented a minivan taxi to take us to the hospital, so she came to our apartment and picked us up.  The line of cars trying to drive into the hospital parking area was quite long, so the driver drove around the line and dropped us off before the entrance, and we walked into the hospital.  Miss Jing didn’t know exactly where to go, but she soon found out that we were in the wrong building, so we headed over to the correct building. 

The acupuncture doctor knows a little bit of English, but her student assistant knows more.  Miss Jing was the main go-between, but when I was in the room with just the assistant, she was able to tell me what was going on so that I would know.  I was so grateful for her!  Her name is Kristen. 

 

The needles are in place. 

The doctor is starting to light the "marshmallows" of the Chinese moxibustion herbs.

The whole process took longer than we thought it would.  Miss Jing had told us about a half hour, but it was over an hour total.  David got really bored just waiting.  He had a hard time breathing the fumes.  There was a fan that was kind of taking away the smoke, but not that much.  Kristen did bring us some masks after a while, but we had already breathed a lot of it.  I did feel that the treatment brought me a good deal of relief for the next few days.  Miss Jing also got a minivan taxi to take us home in.

 

David being bored as he sits in the hallway waiting for me to finish my treatment.

After we got home, David didn’t feel very well and after a while, came in the office complaining that he was cold.  We tried to turn up the heater as much as we could, and he had his jacket on, but there just wasn’t any way to get him warm.  His back muscles were also very tight.  He decided that the only way to get warm was to go to bed, so he went to bed about 8:30.  He slept for about an hour, and when he woke up he was warm.  We both went to bed then, but when he woke up at 10:30, he had a fever.  It seemed to come on so fast that it scared me that it might be pneumonia. 

I was able to get him to take an aspirin and an antibiotic about 1:30, and he went back to sleep.  Then I prayed hard and asked our family to pray also.  I was finally able to go back to sleep.  When David woke up, most of his fever seemed to be gone, but he still had a cough and his back muscles hurt also.  He went to teach his classes.  The back-up plan was that, if he couldn’t finish teaching, he was to bring his class into my class, and I would finish teaching for him.  We do the same lesson plans, so they wouldn’t have missed anything.  He made it through teaching, so we didn’t have to use the back-up plan. 

Tuesday afternoon was our afternoon to go to the massage, so we went there. David mentioned it to Xiao Ya, the girl who usually works on him, that he can a cough.  She suggested doing a cupping and some guasha on him with a little thing that looked like a mini chimney.  Since the cupping on my legs takes an hour, he figured that he would have time to do it and be finished about the same time that I was done.

This is the cupping on David's back.  First the cups are put on certain areas that will effect the muscles that need to be worked on.  Then they are moved back and forth over those muscles.  After you are sufficiently rubbed raw with the cups, then they place them in certain areas. When the time is up on the cups, Xiao Ya placed a "chimney" on top of David's back with some Chinese herbs and he had to lay with that on his back for about 20 minutes.

David's back after the cupping, but before the moxibustion heated herb b\poultice.  It looks like it hurts, but at this point, it doesn't.  It sure took the soreness out of his back muscles!

I finished with my treatments and then waited for David.  Xiao Ya came out of the room that David was in and said in her little bit of English, “Wait a moment.”  WeChat has a feature that you can translate what people are writing to you. Xiao Ya had sent some pictures of what she was doing to David on our WeChat group with Carol, David, and I, so I asked if he was still alive.  Xiao Ya thought that was pretty funny, so she came out of the room and laughed.  She had to tell the other people at the massage place what she was laughing at.  We entertained ourselves with comments back and forth until David was finished.  He did start feeling better, and the tightness that was in his chest from the night before was mostly gone.  He still has a little cough, but he feels a lot better.

David had planned to have an English Corner with his students on Wednesday evening, but as we were having our usual Wednesday afternoon lunch with Eva, he got a message from his class monitor that was setting up the classroom for the evening.  He was trying to tell David that he couldn’t get the classroom for some reason.  We didn’t quite understand, so he showed the message to Eva, and she didn’t understand it either.  She called the student and was able to get an explanation from him.  When you book a room for something, you have to have a permit of sorts from the university that it is an event that you can hold.  David likes to have the English Corners on varying evenings, because some students’ schedules don’t allow them to come, if it is on the same night all the time.  He changes it from week to week.  That caused the problem, so he didn’t have English Corner that evening, which was probably a good thing, so he could rest more after his fever and cold.  He now has the classrooms scheduled, so he can hold English Corner on the evenings that he has planned.

David forgot to tell Ray that English Corner was cancelled.  He was the building supervisor from last semester at Qianfoshan Campus that unlocked the building for us.  David invited him over to talk since he had come to this campus for the English Corner.  Ray is preparing for the IELTS test of English.

Thursday afternoon, David and I went back to the traditional medicine hospital for another acupuncture/moxibustion treatment.  He sat out in the hallway, because he felt like the smoke had affected his lungs from Monday.  Kristen and I had a nice talk getting to know each other more, and she also told me more about the little “marshmallow” looking things that were sitting atop the acupuncture needles.  They are a circular stick of compress Chinese medicine that is meant to be lit on fire to release the healing properties.

 

Let's have some flowers to look at after the acupuncture and Guasha!

The weather is starting to warm up! 

Friday was Qing Ming Festival.  We have never been in Jinan on a day when there has been a festival, we were always traveling with the BYU teachers somewhere.  There were plenty of people out and about.  We didn’t have our massage on Thursday, so we went for our massage on Friday morning.  After the massage we went to see if we could get some nutmeg from Mike Qi’s baking store.  He speaks a little English, so when we have things that we can’t find for baking, we ask Mike, and he can usually get them for us.  He didn’t have some in the store, but he can get some, but not on that day, because it was a festival day.  He said he could get it on Monday for us. 

David invited Jackson over to talk that evening.  The nights are still a little cool here in Jinan, and the radiators are all turned off.  These cement buildings get pretty chilly.  Not everyone is willing to turn on the wall heating and cooling units in their apartments.  Jackson’s roommate doesn’t want to turn on the heat, so Jackson is rather cold.  We figured, if he came over for a visit, he could get warm here.  We are not afraid to turn on a heater or two, if we are cold.

A few weeks ago when we had gone to DaMing Lake with the Wilkins’, we had met a family on the boat ride, and the little girl seemed to really take to David.  The grandfather had exchanged WeChat ID’s with David, and we received a message from him, that he wanted to invite us to dinner with his family for Qing Ming Festival.  We set it up for Saturday lunch.  The little girl’s mother and father came to pick us up in their car.  The little girl was shy at first, but soon warmed up to us again.  The husband was the son of the grandfather.  I wish I had names, but I don’t.  The daughter-in-law is “Sunny,” and the granddaughter is “Linli”.  Sunny knew more English that the rest, but she was a little rusty, because she hadn’t used it much since she graduated from college a few years ago.  We had a nice conversation between Sunny’s ability and the use of translation apps.  It was a wonderful dinner and a nice family. 

 

In the car with Sunny and Linli.

Dinner with the family.  David, the grandfather, the son, Sunny, Zina, grandmother and Linli.

Sunday, we had church and a nice dinner afterward.  David wasn’t feeling too well, so we didn’t stay for a long time after lunch.  He came home and feels better after a nap.

This video clip is from the dinner with Linli's family.  The Chinese rhythm talker came in and wanted to entertain us.  It is fun to watch him, but we don't understand a word.  We asked the family what they had said afterward and they just said that he was complimenting David and me.