On Wednesday all of our electricity and water shut off in the morning. By lunch time, it still wasn't working, and our ayi went to investigate! She found out that both were supposed to turn back on, but not until 7pm. We decided that it was best not to open up our fridge at all which made lunch a challenge, since all of our dining options were inside! We thought about just doing a lunch of peanut butter crackers (which we have a decent supply of thanks to wonderful Christmas care packages), but decided we all wanted a little more substantial. Since there aren't any quick options here within a half-hour walk, we decided to attempt our first ever McDonald's delivery. No drive-thru's in China--but you can get Mickey D's delivered to your door! So Kevin practiced his ordering before calling, assuming that he would need to do it all in Mandarin, then called the number he had been given at school by one of his teachers. After several minutes of trying to explain where we lived and being so confused as to why it was so difficult to locate us, Kevin passed the phone off to our ayi. After a few minutes of her attempting to give our address, too, our ayi hung up, laughing, saying that they were located in Shanghai! Our immediate reaction was relief that they didn't decide to deliver and stick us with the bill!
We called back and discovered that we did originally have the right number, but the way it works is they route your call to the right place after the call goes through Shanghai. We did eventually get our order to the right city, and enjoyed a lunch of Big Mac's and chic
ken nuggets within a half an hour!On Wednesday night we had Kevin's friend Leif from the baseball team come over for dinner with his girlfriend Rebecca. We had a great time visiting with them, and were even excited to find that they loved western food as well as Chinese! (I had cooked some Italian pasta to go with the Chinese food our ayi had made because Rebecca had previously told Kevin she liked western-style cooking.) They had dinner and then helped us put the kids to bed, even reading to them in their rooms before "lights off" time. The kids loved it (and so did Rebecca and Leif!). They stayed after the kids went down and shared with us awhile more about their lives. It was amazing to hear! Leif has lived in the sports complex for the last 8 years. He is 22 years old, and he loves baseball. But there's no telling how long he'll be able to play. The government hasn't even told the professional teams yet if there is going to be a baseball season this year. Baseball was voted out of the Olympics for 2012, so that means that in China, where sports is all about what it can do for the country as a whole, there is a decent chance that it's future is dim. If baseball is shut down, or if Leif's career comes to an end for any other reason, he'd really like to pursue international business. A great goal, but as we asked more questions, also a seemingly long shot. The last 8 years he has been in the sports academy, he has had NO OTHER SCHOOL--other than baseball twice a day! Leif is in a better spot than most of the athletes, because he has taken the initiative to study English on his own (pretty much every day), so he has more language ability than others. But Kevin and I were blown away by the prospect of someone in his place in the States. Can you imagine being pulled out of school when you were 12 or 14 to do nothing but play sports? And we think there are problems with "jocks" in middle and high school getting away with too much in the classroom just because of their position on a school sports team! Talk about taking it to a whole other level! Anyway, we had a great evening and will hopefully get to spend time with Leif and Rebecca again soon. And Kevin and I were once again reminded of our burden for these players who have so little to offer them hope!
