Happy Halloween

On Halloween we got to have a party at our school! It was a fun and crazy night jam packed with little children all hyped up on sugar. We all dressed up and decorated the school the best we could. I was surprised at how many students came that weren't dressed up. I was happy that we had at least a few that got into the Halloween Spirit.  We had four different rooms with different activities. In the first room we had Halloween Musical Chairs. The second was Monster Twister. In the third they got to make Halloween masks and in my room we played Halloween Bingo. We finished off the night with the Adams Family Movie.... but had to turn it off because some of the kids were too scared...  so we went with Charlie Brown Halloween!

Laurel made Jack O' Lantern Oranges!

 

Co- Worker Sean

Laure & Paul carving pumpkins!

Halloween Bingo!

Shelly!

Trevor got to come and help me

Thomas

Jim

Lucy and her little brother and friend

We were so happy to have the help of our Chinese Speaking husbands!

The aftermath.... Poor cleaning lady....

Our very late dinner at Paris Baguette! Yummy Pizza bread!

A steamy date night!

Steamed buns anyone?

(We knew Taffy and Garth would enjoy this)

***

We are very proud to say that we have a new found hobby making steamed meat buns! It was one of my favorite things to eat in Taiwan and Katie's favorite now since we've been here in China.  We bought the biggest steamer we could find and found the recipes online and have had a lot of fun with it!  Katie is a wrapping queen making perfect folds around the bun that makes them look super legit.  We decided to give the Chinese buns an American twist and substituted the mystery meat with barbeque chicken, cheese, and pineapple.  I ain't gonna lie, it was pretty awesome!  We even treated ourselves to a little A&W root beer that we found at a local import store.  God bless America! It was a really fun date night and we were definitely stuffed to the brim. 

 

The cheese cost us our plane ticket home but it was worth it.

Hot Buns!

Do you know the street value of this stuff?

 

 吃饱了!

 

AHOY!

Last week Trevor was spending a lot of time studying for his HSK Chinese proficiency test so we decided to take a break one of the days to go boating on XuanWu Lake next to us.  They have a small boat dock that you can buy a ticket and than take out their electric boats for an hour.  The boat maxes out at about 5 miles an hour but it was a lot of fun to ride around the lake and enjoy the scenery and some good company.  The north side of the lake sits against the Nanjing wall and there are a lot of cool pagodas and Buddhist temples lining the wall.  Our favorite was to see the contrast between the traditional buildings and than the giant sky scrappers towering up behind them.  It was a really beautiful day out on the water and it is definitely starting to smell and feel like fall.  It felt good to escape the crowded city and sit by ourselves on a wide open lake.  Sometimes you just need some space.

Some lunch at the Park

AHOY!!!

Nanjing Wall against the Lake

Getting some fall colors!

Sailing into the Sunset

Fiesta!

One day we missed America so much we decided to make salsa! 

Fresh.Homemade.Salsa

a fresh mess

real live tortilla chips

taaa daaa!

***

Then we realized that salsa is from Mexico!

Still North America, right?

The Chaotian Palace & Nanjing Wall South Gate

 This last month FLEW by. I can't believe its already December! We have almost been here for 4 months now. Crazyyyyyy. So sorry we have been terrible at posting our adventures lately. I warned you when I started this blog that I might be bad at it... But here is what our end of October & November looked like!

 We went field trippin and found ourselves at,

  The Chaotian Palace

This was a Palace during the Ming Dynasty, but now it is a museum. There are thousands of cultural artifacts everywhere! It was amazing. There were sculptures, pots, coins, jewelry and beautiful robes. It was so amazing to see the kinds of things they were able to make and how much detail they put into everything. I wish I had their crafting skills!

The front gate to the Chaotian Palace

The guardian gate keeper!

Statue of Confucius

We found the secret garden!

***

Nanjing Wall South Gate

Nanjing is surrounded by a huge wall as you have seen from previous posts. It is huge! On this field trip we got to see the South Gate. This gate was surrounded by water so the only way to enter the city was boat. We actually learned that way back in the day water was one of the main means of transportation throughout the city. Pretty cool to imagine I think!

 One thing that we learned here that I thought was interesting was about the stone bricks that make up the whole wall. Each brick has characters on it telling exactly where the brick came from and who was responsible for making it. When the wall was being built the new bricks would come in by boat and two soldiers would try to bang them together to test the quality of the bricks. If the bricks broke the first time they would be sent back to where they came from and who ever was responsible for them would have to remake them. Then the bricks would be sent back a second time and if they didn't pass the test again the soldiers would go directly to where the bricks came from and would kill those responsible for the weak bricks. So, it was important to have the names and location on each brick. I don't know about you but I definitely wouldn't have wanted to be in the brick business back then....

Trevor got to try his archery skills at the gate!

He's pretty legit, 

Happy Field Trippin!