Birthday dinner

We went furniture shopping the other day for our new apartment and thought this lamp would add the perfect touch. I especially like the little plastic fish down at the bottom. (This picture was not taken in our apartment, that lamp stayed at the store).

I never knew that turning 23 meant that your nose turns green and your eyes go bad, but that is what happened to me. I went to a great restaurant with friends and had yummy food! Next week I will host a party for locals.

Another view in the station. This gate goes out to the buses when it is time to board.

I should start things off by saying that this is not normally the way the bus station looks, it is unusually empty. Whenever I want to go on one of my many trips I come here and buy my ticket. It look easy, but when it is crowded the people don't really know how to stand in lines. So, get your elbows greased and ready to shove and defend your right to get to the front of the line. It is an usual occurrence to be in the middle of buying your ticket when someone else will stick their money through the whole and get there ticket first.

Mosquito Madness

Sitting at my computer tonight I have received at least 10 new mosquito bites. I am about to go insane, they are driving me crazy. I have tried very hard to kill them, but so far they have only suffered one fatality. I don't know that this creation serves any purpose other than to torment men.

Culture Shock

There is nothing like a night on the town to make you feel fat and incompetent. I have been very blessed to have only a few instances of culture shock in my eight months here, but sometimes it's just the normal things that trigger it. Tonight I went to my favorite part of town to try to buy a new outfit for my birthday. I have done a lot of window shopping, but I seldom try on clothing just because I find it a bit mafan (troublesome). In America I like to take several things into the dressing room at one time and then try them on, but it seems that that is not customary here. The dressing room's are very small, there are no hangers, and the mirror is on the outside of the door. Bu Fangbian (not convenient)! To try to make a long story short, I was having trouble finding capris that fit right. In the first store a 27 was a little too small and they didn't have them any larger. The next store they still didn't have any larger than a 27. The next store I went in to had a pair of 28 that I actually liked, but I wanted to make sure I was getting the best deal so I went to one more place. This is where the culture shock really began. It is trivial really, but when you can't fit into the largest size that they have and you can only understand half of what someone is saying, it really makes a familiar and ordinarily fun activity seem very foreign.
So, after buying shirt (those actually fit) I went back to the place that actually had big enough pants and proceeded to do the normal thing of asking for a discount. They gave me a 10% discount, but when I tried to get them to drop the price a little more to make for an even number, I got an aggressive lecture in a language that I really couldn't understand. I wasn't trying to offend her, I was just trying not to be cheated because I am a foreigner. After we agreed to the price the lady kept talking to me and for some reason I couldn't understand a word she was saying so I started to tear up. Riding in the bus on the way home I saw something that topped it all off. On the side of the road and man was kicking his son. He had apparently kicked all he wanted to so the father and son started walking while the little boy cried. Then the father started violently slapping the boy with both hands. This time I did start to cry. Things like that go on in America but in the privacy of people's homes. Though people seldom do it so publicly, I hear that child abuse is normal and accepted here and that breaks my heart. I wanted to jump off the bus and tell the father to stop, so it was probably a good thing that we drove out of sight.

Mystery Dinner

The other night my American friend and I decided that we would try a different restaurant for dinner (since we have fallen into the habit of eating at the same places everytime we go out). When we sat down at the restaurant we could in no way read the menu so we asked the waitress to read it to us. She didn't really seem to want to read it, so she just kind of told us what they had. We quickly realized that this would work because we didn't really understand what she was saying. I know meat and vegetable names, but as far as knowing the names of dishes, I am lost. So we just decide to order two vegetables that we knew we liked and told her to decide how to cook them. We then proceeded in ordering fried rice, but they had many varieties, so we again let her decide. After ordering we said to eachother, "well, it is a mystery dinner." The suspense was a little fun.
Our first dish came and it was exactly what we wanted (green beans cooked a special way), then our carrots and pork came (you can't mess that up). When our rice came though, it was not quite what I was expecting. I don't like eating spicy hot foods, and this stuff was smoking. It also came with a hot dog weiner and a basted egg. Not to mention, it was a ton of rice.
Two out of Three isn't bad. Maybe next time I will remember to bring our food list.

what we take for granted

The other day I was walking to my washing machine to remove my clothes and thinking, "Oh, I wish I had a dryer so that I didn't have to hang these up," when I saw something that made me think. In front of my apartment building is water hose hook-up, and I looked out and someone using it to bathe. This workman was wearing a little pair of shorts so that he could wash the greatest part of his body. Using laundry detergent, he quickly scrubbed his body and lathered his hair while his outer clothes soked in the detergent. He then rinsed and repeated.
Sometimes I complain when our hot water isn't working properly, but I learned that I should be happy for what I have and realize how spoiled I am as an American.

We kept going on for what seemed like forever. It was one of the most difficult things (physically), that I have ever done. Going up got my heart beating, but I prefered it to the way my legs and feet felt as I went down. We really had no idea where we were going. Our guide left us, leaving us to choose paths on our own, hoping that we would end up at a road. We saw a few very small villages down in valleys, many trails, but no road. We would approach each turn and peak with the hope that we would see road on the other side. When I don't think we could have taken any more, we finally reached a peak and saw this beautiful scene. The ascent down was brutal, but we made it to a road. I have no idea how we ended up where we did, but our new location and sad physical state made it evident to us that it was time to go home.

This was our Bunu trail guide. He was wearing jellies and moving quickly, but he was patient with us when we had to slow down or when we fell (which happened quite a few times while walking down). If you look closely you can see the trail we followed on the right side of the picture.

It was a difficult ascent, making me realize that I need to work out more, but it was worth it. When we got to the top the view was amazing and the breeze felt incredible. I could have stayed there for a long time but we had much ahead of us.

After filling up on water (using our filter to pump out of their bucket), we followed our drunk friend up another steep pathway on the way to a main road. You can see my back off in the distance. Boy did that pack feel heavy!

Two boys in the village who were very helpful in trying to give us direction. Often we are only able to communicate with the school aged villagers because they can speak a more standard dialect.

We quickly passed through that village, climbed the hill to the next village, led by the village drunk. This is a picture of a typical ceiling in the houses. Most of the people grow corn and hang it to dry inside.

These men live in the village and were kind enough to tell us the name of the villagers and an estimate of their ethnicity.

A little further along the trail we gazed down and saw a village with several houses in it. I think this is a Bunu village.

After walking for about thirty minutes we decided that it was time to get off the gravel road. Gazing ahead, I saw a path leading up the side of another mountain. I didn't see where the path began, but after asking a few people, we found the head and started climbing. It was very steep, but beauty awaited us at the top. We followed a trail and were met by some goats along the the way. Sometimes I wish I was a goat because they were made for mountain climbing.

About a kilometer down the path we noticed that grandma had already made it to her place of work for the day. She carries a basket on her back with a bag of ferilizer for the crops.

As we leave the village, the teenagers leave for work in the fields on their day off from school.

More houses in the village. Isn't the setting peaceful?

The morning sun comes in over the mountain, shining light on the path down to the toilet. It for village toilets it was a pretty nice one.

The boys pose for a picture while dad has his morning smoke before serving us breakfast. We tried to skip out early, but he insisted that we eat more corn porridge.

Morning chores. I am not exactly sure how many people slept and worked in that house, but it seemed like a lot.

With the animals fed and evening chores done, it was finally time for the people to eat. The man in the village killed a chicken (probably for our benefit), feathered, gutted, and cooked it. At nine o'clock we ate corn porridge, a little bit of chicken, and a few bites of vegetables of the leafy variety. It doesn't seem like much to Americans, but these people gave us their best, refusing to let us help. At about 11:30 we finally settled down for the night in a bed in the middle of their one room house.

Inside the house the grandmother prepares greens to feed the animals. We were a little scared when we saw the what was in the wok on the fire, but no worries, it was for the pigs. While the granmother prepared this grub, the father studied with the last bit of light that was left coming in the door. The village had no electricity so he had to do what he could.

Once within the village, we met a man and a woman coming home from the fields. They asked for some water to drink and we rested and chatted a short while in the cool of the shade. Then the villagers invited us home. Their home was the highest house in the village. This is the view from their porch.

Stairway in Mountain

This is the path we saw that leads up through vegetables. When we got to the top of one portion the village sat before our eyes, nestled among trees and rock.

Adventures in Backpacking

Our journey started out with a change of plans. We had initially intended to return to a previously visited village so that we could bring them some pictures we had taken, but sometimes I am a little absent minded, and I forget to bring the pictures. Minus pictures, we opted to just walk until we found an interesting place to stop. Coming to a fork in the road, we wondered which way we should go, and a motorcyclist came and gave us a good enough answer.
Taking the highroad, we ventured on and met some Bunu people along the gravel path. A little farther along we saw a village in the valley below us, and though we wanted to pay the people a visit, we felt it was a little early to stop, so we continued on. In our continuing on, we saw more valleys with houses in them, but we could not figure out how you were supposed to get to them, so we kept walking. Then, in the shadow of the mountain, I saw a stone stairway winding through terraces of planted vegetables, leading to someplace mysterious. While wondering whether we should ascend, another motorcyclist stopped and told us there was a village at the end of the trail. His answer was good enough for us, so we began our first climb of many.