Bathroom Saga Continued

Question: How many people does it take to fix a leaky washing machine?

Answer: Six

Mike, Landlord, Landlord's husband, random guy, plumber, and our friend who translated.

Seriously one of these days I promise I'll quit blogging about our bathroom. It was the day our Christmas team came. We were thinking we were going to have a relaxing day to rest up before all the chaos hit, but unfortunately our bathroom exploded once again. I think we've replaced almost everything in there so we should be good to go now. Fun Fact- we found out that our apartment building is only four years old - and yet everything is breaking? That's Chinarific.

I'd like to give a shout out to our friend for helping us have a dry bathroom once again. Thanks JB! If you don't know who JB is I'll give you a hint... It's NOT James Bond, Jason Borne, or Jack Bauer.

Ok one more quick bathroom story. This week I accomplished an incredible feat...Trough squatty pottly... unheated building... in the dark... and I'm pretty sure there was a boy in there.

Theater Comments

Mike and I went to go see a play with our friend a couple weeks ago. It was all in Chinese, so it was a little hard to follow. In true Chinese fashion, someone died a tragic and very dramatic death about every five minutes. Mike and I were feelin a little tired that day so when the curtain closed we were ready to go home. Apparently it's customary for the director to give comments, then about 10 teachers commented, then the director commented on the comments, and then the mic was passed around to random audience members. About 45 minutes into the commentary session I turned to my friend, and of course she was handing me the microphone. Suddenly 700 Chinese people were waiting to hear from me in Chinese about what I thought about this play that I couldn't understand. I looked at my husband hoping he would have some wonderful words of wisdom, but he just smiled at me and said "Go ahead dear." Thanks for the help. Actually I can't blame him I would have done the same thing to him if I had the chance.

Christmas Extravaganza Extrordinare

A normal December might hold shopping, baking, parties, decorating trees, time off etc.. We have been able to enjoy a few of these things but this year but instead of counting down the days till Christmas we have been counting down the days until our team arrives. That's right in about 1 day a little piece of Iowa will be coming to visit us. Woo Hoo! Very soon we will have five students join us in China for the holiday season. We will be blitzing the campuses of our city with Good News.

For about a week our American friends will be meeting students and inviting them to some sweet Christmas parties. We are way stoked about how many people can be reached through a group like this coming and can't wait to see how the Father will use this time for Himself. We are also looking forward to push forward that this will have on the work here. Christmas is gaining popularity in this country especially among young people and it's such an awesome chance to easily tell them the reason for the season (clique but true).

The past week has been filled with preparations and we are already feeling a little tired, so please pr that we will feel whelmed as we continue through one of the busiest seasons here.

A pic of the Easton family Christmas tree. Ok so maybe it's not that impressive but still blog worthy I think.

Pictures? Are you kidding?

The other day my language tutor told me that she was looking at something in Turkish and she uttered the following sentence:

"I can't read it at all. It just looks like pictures."

Pictures??? Are you kidding me??? Have you seen Chinese??? Your crazy language doesn't even have an alphabet because it's made up of characters...i.e. Pictures.

Auchan Playlist

The following songs blared through the speakers of Auchan during Thursday's shopping trip...

Amazing Grace
Can't Fight the Music (Leanne Rimes version)
What Child Is This
God Bless America

Seems peculiar for China.

once upon a pomello

Once upon a time a handsome orange and a lovely grapefruit fell in love. They were married and had a giant baby. They named him Pomello and he was delicious.

He one of my favorite snacks here. He cost practically nothing, he's everywhere, and he's fun to peel. Go to the store and find him. Then eat him. Then report back to me, and tell me how much you enjoyed it

Smelly Kids

Our bathroom is perpetually smelly. We used to keep the window open, but that stopped when the bat flew in. We try to plug our drains and keep the door closed but sometimes it's just not enough. During certain times of the day the smell increases dramatically. We refer to these "high traffic" times as the "peak poo hours." Coincidentally the peak poo hours coincide with the internet running slow. My friends tell me that the smell is due to the inadequate plumbing in Chinese buildings. Initially this was a comforting thought, but as I visit other bathrooms I have noticed that none of them are quite as odorful as ours. There is only one conclusion that can be made here. We are the smelly kids. There, I said it. The one good thing about having a bathroom that is always smelly is that you never have to take ownership of any one particular scent.

Giving Thanks Party

This week we went to campus on Wednesday afternoon to meet some new people and then invited them to our house on Friday night for a Thanksgiving party. We crammed 16 people in our less-than-huge apartment. We played a game called picture telephone. I’m pretty sure the winning team was cheating – we told them not to but it’s really difficult to catch when everyone is speaking Chinese. It’s very common for the losers of a game to have to be “punished” so the losing team had to do a dance in our living room. Kinda random.

Sidenote: On Wednesday we were playing Duck Duck Goose with a group of students on the campus lawn. One guy’s “punishment “ was to write the name of my friend in the air… with his butt. Not sure what that’s about, but it was funny.

Anyway, we also had the opportunity to share the story of the Pilgrims and talk with them about who the Pilgrims were giving thanks to. We read the information in English and had the Chinese version available also. It went well, but now we have the task of following up with everyone. So please pr. for that this week. Some of them have heard the news a few times now and we really hope that they will be making some decisions.

Turkey Day

Horns honking, people haulking loogies, e-bike alarms, neighbors yelling, the cardboard collector's PA.... We woke up on Thanksgiving only to find the regular hustle and bustle of all our neighbors going to work just like any other Thursday. Class wasn't cancelled so of course we went... yeah right.

Although we missed spending the holiday with family, we have a great surrogate family here that took very food care of us. They had a recording of the 2007 Super Bowl, so we got to watch football while preparing our feast. Turkey, two kinds of stuffing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cornbread, rolls, six pies, and fried rice. We deffinitely weren't roughing it this holiday. We love this culture (usually) but we are certainly thankful that with a little creativity a taste of home is always accessible.


We were also able to convince everyone to partake in the traditional Ritzman/Schmidt Family Post-Dinner Thanksgiving Backyard Football Game. Many of us had never played which lead to lots of chaos, cheating, and falling down. So pretty much just like home. The only difference was that my brother wasn't there to to distract the defense by mooning them while I went out for the pass. (In his defense he only did this once - but it was in the front yard.)

We played in the park across the street. But we had to watch out for the sculpture of a giant medal hand playing marbles.