the national team

last friday night jarred and i went with some of our good friends here to see the men's national soccer team here play against syria. we didn't really know what to expect, but we were pretty sure there wouldn't be popcorn and nachos waiting for us. we have been in the middle of a week-long downpour so the field was more like a shallow swimming pool, making for some pretty ugly soccer, but we were thankfully dry since the stadium seats were covered. the night ended up being really awesome because we rarely do cool things here like go to a huge soccer game with thousands of other people in a stadium in the big city that we didn't even know existed. it was also awesome because the south african vuvuzuelas have invaded this country as well. i am pretty tempted to think that all of south africa's were exported from here. and as if those things weren't bad enough through the tv at the world cup, they are way worse in person. especially when your friends buy them! and then the 4 guys with us (my husband included) deemed it their responsibility to introduce the people of this country to the art of celebrating a goal by taking off your shirt (or all 3 layers if it is really cold) and waving it around your head. as if we didn't already stick out enough, people all around turned to look at the foreigners going crazy with their shirts off. cameras started flashing, aimed at our boys and not at the field. thankfully they were cheering for the home team (although it did make us a little nervous to cheer against syria). the night was great, even if there were zero concessions, no mascots, and no band or cheerleaders. actually come to think of it, i think it was better without cheerleaders. much better. it did make us miss football season in america, although it was a decent substitution. the fun things we get to do living here!

i didn't have my camera, but check out the picture below i yanked from josh and danielle's blog:

coffee on the porch

this year jarred's and my schedules aren't quite as matching as they were last year. with a change in a lot of things we have been scrambling a bit more to pencil in things like phone calls to america and quality time with each other. a couple weeks ago we sat down for a bit and looked at each of our schedules to try to figure out our mutual free times. and when we finished we had instituted a new weekly event in our schedule: coffee on the porch.
once or twice this summer we both grabbed a cup of coffee and headed to our porch to chat with each other and read. and so when we were looking for time in our week to get quality time together and realized we have most saturday mornings free, we wrote in coffee on the porch.
so the past number of saturday mornings we have been sitting on our porch together in what is becoming brisk morning air nursing our cups of joe and hanging out. and it has become our new favorite time of the week.

fun washing dishes

tonight jarred and i had a kitchen starting to pile up with dishes and we planned into our schedule doing the inevitable: actually washing them. remember, no mechanical dishwashers here.

and when i mentioned washing dishes tonight my husband replied with 2 words: bob segar.
not that he EVER listens to bob segar, mind you. but if you have ever walked up to the klein house in norfolk about 9 pm on a weeknight you might have heard bob segar blaring from the kitchen. and that means that my dad is doing dishes. if it lasts, it means the floor is getting mopped too.

so in our recreation of pamela place (since it is a really fun place and we haven't been there in awhile), we pulled up my itunes, hooked the computer up to speakers, and blasted some classic rock as we got to work.

our playlist:
katmandu- bob segar
devil with the blue dress on - mitch rider
bad moon rising- ccr
fortunate son- ccr
born in the usa- bruce springsteen
glory days- bruce springsteen
rock and roll never forgets- bob segar
mony mony- billy idol
a day in the life- the beatles
roam- the b52s
walk this way- aerosmith
wheel in the sky- journey
kashmir- led zepplin
don't stop til you get enough- michael jackson (ok, so we veered a little...)
reelin' in the years- steely dan
take the money and run- steve miller band

and we had an awesome combination of dish-washing and dance-partying in our kitchen for the next hour. thankfully, i got to dry which is way more conducive to dancing. max got scared and left the room.

i thought i would serenade jarred with arabian nights from the aladdin soundtrack which he dubbed torture and retaliated by making me suffer through one minute and 19 seconds of no rain by blind melon. why do have either of those on my itunes? and bubba sparxx miss new booty somehow made it into the rock genre too so i gave him a whirl. jarred told me i needed to start treating my itunes like an email inbox and going on a deleting binge every so often. maybe a good idea.

i definitely have the most fun husband ever! only he could make washing dishes so fun. our night left us wishing this guy was our neighbor. [sorry no sound, it's way better with sound] and speaking of neighbors, hopefully ours don't hate us.

rock on.

guys' weekend

Shelley is out of town with friends for a retreat this weekend, so Max and I are on our own here at the house. So with nothing to do this morning, I decided that we would go for a hike in the mountains nearby our complex out where we live. I look at these mountains every day, and have always wondered what was beyond them, so we were up and at 'em early to beat the sun. The hike was really peaceful, and I think Max really enjoyed being off the leash for a while. I can't believe how beautiful the land is beyond the mountains. I could literally see our apartments from the mountain top, and had no idea that this much beauty was this close. If you face towards our apartments on one side of the mountain, this is what you see:

All of that was farmland only 4 years ago. Now it consists of 8 university campuses and 5 new apartment complexes with multiple 6 lane roads and a subway under construction. I literally live in the game Sim City where you build an entire city on your computer. It isn't a gradual development into a city. They are literally building an entire brand new city in the course of 5 years. What took Charlotte 50-60 years to develop, the government here is doing in 5. It is unbelievable the pace of construction, but that also makes for a lot of noisy dumptrucks and consistently changing closed down section of roads. The amazing thing is when you turn around in the same spot on the mountain top 180 degrees, you get this view:
That is miles of pristine farmland. Those terraces were probably cut in the land hundreds of years ago and are still being farmed today. This was the part that Maximus loved in particular, all of this open land to run on. I stopped under a tree to do some reading and listen to some music while he ran non-stopped for a solid hour. It was a great way to tire him out. The whole time we were on the trail Max and I only ran into one lone friendly farmer and his dog on the way to the well to get some water for the day. Here is a picture of the trail:

And here is one happy pup.
I am still not sure what kind of dog Maximus is. He doesn't love the water like a retriever, but he does love open grass fields, particularly sniffing out birds and chasing a frisbee. He looks nothing like a bird dog. He can run wide open at what I think is 18mph for 5 minutes nonstopped (I clocked this because he likes to race me on the electric scooter, but I'm not sure if my electric scooter speedometer is right or not. I have been going faster than Shelley before and my scooter says I'm doing 34 kmh while hers says she is doing 50kmh. Somebody's is way off.). They say that mutts make the best dogs. Maybe Pedigree puts steroids in their puppy chow. Who knows? Either way, he has the energy of a 24 pack of Red Bull 100% of the time he is not asleep.

All in all this was a great guys' morning getaway, and something I will definitely take more advantage of in the future!

The Middle of Autumn

This past week marked the arrival of the annual Mid-Autumn holiday here in East Asia, the rough (I mean very rough) equivalent to our Thanksgiving day in America. This is Shelley and my 4th Mid-Autumn holiday, and by now we have learned the ins and outs of celebrating this holiday. However, even in the midst of our Mid-Autumn experiences, there are still some things that remain a mystery:

1. Not once has this holiday fallen in the middle of autumn unless autumn starts in July. It is late September, people in America just stopped going to the beach. I am still mourning the loss of summer and they are wanting me to celebrate the arrival of autumn. I think the pumpkin spice conglomerates are behind this somewhere.
2. Making up class. This does not only apply to this holiday, but to every holiday. The government determines which days everyone is allowed off from work or school to travel around these holidays. You get the actual DAY off, but you get to take a few more days of vacation around that day. However, you then have to make up the work or school missed for the vacation days over the weekend. Why they don't just move the vacation days to the weekend when people would already be off of school and work is beyond me. Therefore, no one goes to class on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, but then they have to go to class on Saturday and Sunday to make up Wednesday and Friday. Thus, you don't actually get a holiday. It is screwy, and no matter how much I try to assimilate to this culture, this one I will never get.
   
3. Where does this holiday originate from? Nobody knows. Last year, I read 2 stories- one about some pagan goddess who is exiles herself to the moon, and another about a rabbit who sacrificed himself in a fire so some pagan god could have a meal so the god rewarded him by putting him on the moon. My teacher told me that neither of these are true, and she didn't even know where this festival comes from. Every other culture celebrates a festival around this time because that is when the harvest comes in, but apparently here, it has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with... anything. "It is just our tradition" one student told me.
   
4. How in the world this holiday started the tradition of eating these:
   

That is a moon cake. Not a moonpie mind you, but a moon cake. A holiday that celebrates by eating lots of moon pies would be like Christmas come mid-autumn, but be not fooled. This is nothing like a moon pie. The moon cake originated... well, much like the holiday itself, no one seems to know where the moon cake originated either. These babies come in 2 flavors- salty and sweet. If someone asks you your preference, you want to go sweet here. Salty means a cake with egg, tofu, or ham in the middle. Sweet means a fruit paste that is kind of like a fig newton, only worse. It doesn't matter which flavor is advertised on the package, the fruit paste is all the same, like a fig newton, only worse. With enough water or grain alcohol, you can choke down a sweet mooncake, you can only choke back up a salty one. When you hold a moon cake for the first time, you discover that it is a lot heavier than it looks. That is because each of these handheld cakes packs a 700+ calorie punch. Take that Little Debbie. Typically, they come wrapped in a decorative packaging like above. However, some of the cheaper versions come wrapped in wax paper, kind of like a sausage biscuit from Hardees, only half the size and twice the calories. The ones in wax paper are usually dripping in grease. Shelley received one last week, and she couldn't put it in her bag to take it elsewhere to regift it because it was so greasy. In an effort to regift it, she decided to leave it on top of a trashcan in hopes that someone would come along and take it to regift elsewhere. But what about the slim chance that the person who regifted it to her came by that trashcan? Certainly she would discover that the foreigner didn't love her regift, and leaving it on a trashcan is not an acceptable way to regift yourself, thus, her friend would be heartbroken. So, Shelley was forced to do the unthinkable, throw it in the trash

When you unwrap them, they look harmless:
But break one open, and you see where the weight comes from:

That's a lot of "strawberry paste."

When you are a foreigner in this land, you are sure to receive a ton of mooncakes from the natives. Don't be fooled. They aren't seeking to bless you. They are usually just re gifting them. there is no shame in regifting here. The other day a friend invited me to his dorm room. Upon arriving, he discovered that the school left him 3 mooncakes on his desk while he was away. He immediately gave them to me, a classic regift. Once you get experienced enough in this culture, you lose your inhibitions and guilty feelings and learn how to regift yourself. My wife is very experienced at this, and managed to regift 100 percent of her mooncake take last year. Impressive.

This year, we spent the holiday with friends, regifting them many mooncakes and eating none ourselves with a smile on our face. However, when we arrived at home after dinner, we discovered that we had one mooncake remaining. FAILURE! Or not so much... only because we found one who loves mooncakes and who will never regift one:



Happy Mid-Autumn Holiday Maximus. And happy Mid-Autumn day to all of you. Now we have to get ready go to class.

recents

1. a new year= a new teacher. and our teacher is awesome. she is nice, sweet, kind. younger than us, strange enough. but she awesome and we love class with her. that is the good news. the bad news (maybe?) is that i don't foresee jarred and her getting in fights in class over whether or not you can hike up a mountain when it is cloudy, whether all or only some pandas are envoys, and whether or not a teacher should address her self in the first person. but less funny stories should mean more enjoyable class time for my husband.

2. baking. last weekend i tried out my new cake decorating stuff. those things are so fun! we had a cookout with some old and new friends. and i made these incredible key lime cupcakes with key lime buttercream icing. unbelievable. i definitely recommend them. check out this recipe minus all the coconut stuff and this icing. yum. the gooey-ness in the middle is delicious. i am having technical difficulties getting a pic of the final cupcakes up, but i'll keep trying.

and this is some of us at the cookout:

3. lamps. last weekend i also took 2 of our old lamps in our living room that were just looking kind of ratty and covered them with some fun and funky bright red fabric. not sure where i got the idea, but i got the how-to's here. howcast.com is my new favorite website i think. it seriously has the how-to video for practically anything you can think about. check out the before and afters:

a domestic birthday

3 of my birthday presents have given me high aspirations for domestic development for the coming year.

1. my grandpa gave me money for this sewing machine.

a year ago i said that if i had money to spend on being creative, i said i would buy a sewing machine. my mom is seamstress galore and her mother was seamstress galore and so i figure i must have inherited at least some of those genes somewhere. i am telling myself they just haven't been developed yet. it took me approximately 10 hours to get the machine set up to sew. it quite possibly tested my patience more than anything i have ever done. and i only cried twice in the process because it was making me so angry trying to figure what the heck was going on between the poorly translated user's manual and a bajillion strange looking knobs on my machine. at that point i also think i was cursing norfolk collegiate for not having a home ec class and forcing me to learn to sew anything at any point in my 13 years there. and then i went a week ago and bought fabric for some first projects including placemats and a tabecloth. we're starting simple here, folks. and my goal is to do them by christmas. then my mom will be here and can hopefully fix them along with all the rest of the problems i will probably be having. i tried watching some youtube videos but jarred said that if sewing made me talk like the people making the videos then he was going to throw the machine out the window. i'll stick to the user's manual. who knows, maybe a quarter century from now i could sew my daughter's wedding dress too?! but right now i'll just work on those placemats.

2. my in-laws bought me a cake decorating set.

my mother-in-law made awesome cakes for jarred's birthdays growing up, so i hope that by the time i have kids that are old enough to request a hamburger birthday cake 5 years in a row i will be able to deliver. and between the accompanying cake-decorating direction book and a practically-professional, cake-decorating friend down the street, i should get lots of opportunities to learn and practice this year.

3. and my parents bought me a bread machine.

granted, my first loaf turned out absolutely awful. we'll just call that a practice round. this week i will be making some adjustments and trying again with an asian-proven, altitude-adjusted recipe. bread here is just not good in my book. and jarred loves a homemade recipe i make for bread. however, i, on the other hand, do not love the all-day process of kneading and letting rise, punching down and letting rise, etc. that homemade bread requires. so...the solution: a bread machine. what sounds better than dumping in a bunch of things, pressing a couple buttons, and coming back a few hours later to delicious bread? well, that's if i can get it working a bit better. check back for how it goes. the major problem: the manual has no english. this could be a process. i am pretty sure, though, that the idea of waking up to fresh bread or having a sandwich on normal-tasting bread is so motivating that i cannot be stopped.

here is to 26- the year of honing my domestication skills.