Sunbrellas & Mopeds, Basketball & Chopsticks!

Hi again!

We are still sweating up a storm here in southern China! It's so warm and humid and the building our friends live in doesn't have AC everywhere. Their apartment has some AC, in the bedrooms, but not the living room, and the main room of the entire building doesn't, nor does the stairwell, which we hike up and down from the 5th floor a few times a day.

Besides the heat, we have enjoyed soaking up the scenery. It's a mixture of buses, taxis, cars, a ba-jillion Mopeds and motorized bicycles, and a ga-zillion people walking around with their Sun umbrellas.

The past few days we have spent with our friends helping them unpack. The first day Mitch helped them put together their couch from IKEA. Also he built the girls' kitchen play set and a set of drawers.

Beautiful couch set and play sets!

We've gone to a few different stores. Mitch has gone with Dadda in search of their gas cook top stove, hanging laundry racks, shelves/drawers, and to scope out some furniture and carpets. Alice has gone with Momma and the girls to find groceries, snacks, shampoo, soap, and other essentials. All of these trips start with a short walk to the bus stop, a fairly short ride on the bus, which usually has AC thankfully but a ton of people, and then the trek into the store. Once we get into the store we always get some strange looks, often stares, in our direction. The guys are both over 6 ft. so they tower over many of the people here. And the girls have pretty blonde hair and cute little faces that attract tons of people asking to take their pictures. Basically we can't even pause in a store because people come up to talk to the kids and try to take pictures of them or all of us. We're basically celebrities here.

Last night we had so much fun playing with the kids here. We started with a modified game of volleyball, boys vs. girls, where you throw the ball over and the other team has to catch it. It was surprisingly fun and exciting. Then the guys stayed outside and played some basketball while the girls took a break inside and played a modified version of the card game spoons. The only modification -- chopsticks.

The basketball game was getting pretty intense, Mitch was using his height as an advantage but these guys had some pretty good skills of their own. Look at the fierceness!!!!

The game of spoons/chopsticks was pretty awesome. Somehow I was left to explain the game to the girls, but the only words I knew how to say were "4 the same, 4 the same" and then I motioned the rest. Thankfully I think some of them knew how to play because they all talked to each other after I clumsily gave my explanation.

After the games we had some nice relaxing cool down time in the girls' bedroom, with the AC cranked to high. They're so cute and silly :)

We did some laundry today. The laundry set up is pretty neat. Everyone in this building, and the surrounding buildings, have a balcony/porch area where their washer is hooked up. So you do laundry out on the porch in the washer and then hang it all up on suspended drying racks. Good old fashioned line drying how my Dad used to do it when we were growing up. The only problem is, it started raining as soon as we hung up our clothes! That's ok, it's not blowing in on our clean laundry too much.

Well, we're having a great time here, enjoying the sights, & loving the kids, talk to you later!