The highlight of any week in the Joseph household is when mail arrives. This week we received our fourth care package in the mail, and the kids were ecstatic! The postal service worker shows up at our door with a notice, asks to see our passport, then leaves us with a slip of paper telling us where to go get the package. Thankfully the post office that receives the international packages is close, so we just taxi over, show our passport once again, and get to take home our package. This one was from Nana and Papa and Mimi and Pop. The picture shows the kids enjoying some of the contents--footie pj's for everyone (except Kevin! Wouldn't we all have loved to see that!) and a new Curious George Christmas movie. We love getting stuff in the mail, especially during this holiday time, as it makes us feel not quite so far away!
Another "new" thing we were blessed by today was our first milk delivery! A friend of mine here discovered a man who delivers fresh milk--the kind we've only been able to get by going to E Mart. I break either a bag or a hand (ha! ha!) pretty much every time I go to stock up on milk, as it weighs a lot and is hard to carry further distances (like from the taxi drop off to our apartment). So I can't tell you how excited I am to have this! And I was even super encouraged by the fact that I was able to communicate enough with the milk man to set up a regular delivery twice a week and a payment schedule (at least I think I did--I guess we'll see how successful I was if he comes when I think he is!).
And we have a new friend to add to our list of praises. I was introduced to a young woman through a friend at the international school. She speaks fluent English, is a little younger than me, and is wanting to grow in ways of being like-minded. She is going to start coming over weekly to join our family for dinner and then have some girl time with me, and I couldn't be more thrilled! We hit it off immediately, and she is a huge answer to my request specifically for a Chinese friend who can also speak English, as I struggle through the language-learning process.
One quick funny story. We have some Western friends that brought us a wonderful beef stew meal right after I broke my hand. We all loved it so much, that I asked for the recipe. My friend gave it to us in both English and Chinese, so I passed it off to my ayi and asked her to make it for dinner for us for Monday night. Our ayi NEVER uses recipes, as all the stuff she cooks is Chinese food (which means no recipes and all on the stove top!), so she asked a few questions and Kevin and I were able to clarify a few things. Then I showed her the Tablespoon measuring spoon and the bag of beef bouillon (which I had just been given and was so excited about because it is really hard to find here--lots of chicken, but not beef). When I got home from class, ayi was about to leave and she showed me the stew on the stovetop, asking how it looked. I was really excited, as it looked and smelled delicious. After she left, I tasted a bite and almost spewed it out immediately! It was the most salty thing I had ever eaten in my life! I went to my cookbooks and started trying all the tricks that were suggested for soups being made too salty (adding vinegar, adding sugar, putting in a raw potato to absorb some of the salt)--all to no avail. We ended up raiding the fridge for leftovers for dinner instead. When I was getting our "alternate" dinner on the table, I ran across the bag of beef bouillon--completely empty! I realized that our ayi had used not 1 Tbls. of beef bouillon, but rather 1 bag (which probably contained 20 Tbls.)! As Eli put it at the dinner table, "Mom, now you have two problems. Our dinner is too salty and you have no more beef bouillon!" I guess from here on out I'll save the recipe-style cooking for my nights and let our ayi work her magic in our kitchen without my interference. . .
