So for those of you who have been anxiously holding your breath. . . here are the results of the baseball quiz from the last post!
1. Rickey Henderson--LF
2. Michael Young (or Schmidt; he like them both!)--3B
3. Joe DiMaggio--CF
4. Chris Carpenter--P
5. Alex Rodriguez--SS
So how'd you do? This past week Kevin and Sam had a few more guys come for the first time, so there are a few more names added to the list. They had another smashing success during the English class, and we've been encouraged by the relationships that seem to be deepening due to the time Kevin has with them on Tuesday afternoons. We're hoping to have some sort of a Christmas party for them in December before we leave town, and are hoping we have a better turn-out than our previous attempt to invite these players into our home! We're still realizing how different this group is in general compared to our teacher friends who we spend most of our free time with. As far as language and culture go, they are definitely what we consider more "hard core" Chinese, making it harder to break into their world and more difficult to communicate with (not proper speech or dialects like we've been studying). Pretty different from our teachers, who are also all Chinese, but have spent a decent amount of time around westerners due to their job of teaching English. So after Kevin and I talked last night, we agreed that the athletes, while more difficult to build relationships with initially, sure seem to be strategic for us in the sense that they really don't have any other outside influence coming in to meet them where they are and encourage them to seek out things of significance. We're so hoping we have the opportunity to be that voice!!
The first two photos are of the team practicing using these sticks that they were having to jump over. Kevin found it amusing!
This weekend was a blast. We went to McDonald's for breakfast on Saturday morning and let the kids have the run of the place for an hour, entertaining the relatively small crowd of Chinese people who were there. It was cold and windy, and our crew is up early, so there weren't nearly as many people there as usual. Normally, we either can't find a seat for all 6 of us together or we have to wait for quite some time until somebody sees me standing there long enough to stop reading or working on whatever they're doing and get up from their table (the concept of fast food in China is quite different--most fast food chains are treated more like Starbucks where people sit and linger over their meals, or don't even order at all but just kind of hang out there!).
Saturday night we had a group of 12 teachers and a few other national friends come over to have a dinner and movie night. The plan was to watch the Mel Gibson movie "Signs", so we decided to do an alien theme. The kids spent the afternoon making decorations (stars and planets to hang out the walls, alien faces to put on the tables). We ordered a bunch of jiao zi from a nearby restaurant and I fixed several vegetable side dishes, as well as cookies and brownies to go with our fruit serving for dessert. Kevin planned out two games for entertainment--the first was a UFO toss (using a frisbee and our basketball hoop) and the second was for our friends to divide up into two teams (boys and girls) and dress up Eli and Hud as aliens. It was hilarious! We had purchased a bunch of random supplies earlier that day at the super market, and we were so impressed with how cute the boys looked when they were finished! The only problem with the evening was that the movie was not a good copy, so we eventually had to take it out and switch for another one. It was a little disappointing, as Kevin and I had spent some time preparing questions and practicing the Chinese vocab to go along with the originally planned movie, so we had to scramble a little bit for the discussion aspect. But we're trusting that in spite of our change in plans, He knew what was going on and was not thrown off by the whole thing like we were! We are certain, at least, that everyone seemed to have fun and get a lot of laughs at our little martians running around the house!
