Wednesday
My second class went awesome. The students were active and talking and moving around and hopefully expanding their vocabulary. Although, I’m not very good at getting the attention of the class when they’re all loud and won’t shut up.

After class, I went to the Martyr’s cemetery with Jenna, Caroline and Bryan. We walked there and it took more than 2 hours. On the way there, we stopped in a park and let China come to us in the form of babies and old folks as we sat.

The cemetery was very large and unlike most places in the Shiz, very clean. The actual cemetery had the plots next to each other with flowers growing on top of them. The most surprising thing to me were the Indian martyrs that were recognized there. I didn’t realize there were any. There were several including one doctor who had his own statue. There was also a very large statue near the entrance, similar to the Washington monument.

After the cemetery, we took a taxi back to Caroline and Bryan’s campus. Walking down the street, we definitely heard a Snoop Dogg song from a long time ago. On the way to the cemetery, I think we passed the same store and that time it was playing “It’s a wonderful world.” We went to a hot pot restaurant and had an interesting experience there. After the hot pot we went down the street a little bit for some after dinner beers/ice cream thingies at an outdoor eatery. This was the best part of the night. While we were there, we saw a person who we thought might have been American. Maybe he was German? He had light brown hair! We totally thought he was American or European. Well, after Jenna went up to him and said something, the non-English speaking American-looking foreigner made fun of Jenna to his Chinese friend by waving his hands crazy style. We moved on to the actual purchasing of the ice cream float. The ice cream thingy looked kind of good. I may get it next time I’m there. It had fresh fruit chunks, boba, frozen yogurt, peanut butter at the bottom, smoothie. It was pretty much any sweet, cold thing you could eat with a spoon thrown in there.

The highlight of the evening, however, came when we got a beer for Bryan while he went to go buy his bananas. Jenna had asked whether this Chinese beer could be clinked. Caroline replied “Of course you can, it’s glass.” Just as Bryan was lifting up his beer bottle to drink it, Caroline tapped the top of it with the bottom of her mug so that the bottle hit the table. Bryan had tried to drink it, not realizing how quickly the foam filled the bottle…and spilled completely out of the bottle. Beer (well, mostly foam) shot out of Bryan’s mouth and definitely sprayed Jenna’s shoulder with beer. The beer was flowing uncontrollably like a volcano and Bryan tried to contain it by covering it with his finger, which sprayed more beer out of it and onto Jenna, our table and the floor. It was full before it was clinked and after it probably held 2 or 3 sips of beer. The other tables definitely stared at us and some were like laughing their asses off. We were pretty much gone for the next 5 minutes. My stomach was hurting from laughing so much. It was great. We were still laughing and everyone around us had gotten over it and was back to their normal stoic reserve. Gotta love China.

Yesterday (Thursday)
So most of the Shijiazhuangers met a bunch of other foreigners at Mcdonald's bar and then we all went to dinner. There were about 15 of us in all. We had an amazing dinner and we met lots of people. The people we met were all teaching very young children, like ages 1-5 or 7 or 8 year olds. We have it much easier than that at the university. They also have to work on Saturdays and Sundays which is unfortunate. After wards, we all went back to Mcdonald's bar and had a few, then we went to Allan Story I think. On the way, Jake (our resident party member) and Fergol almost got into a fight on the street. I was amazed that Caroline and Jenna and Blake were able to hold Jake off of Fergol because Jake's a pretty big guy. Anyway, we all made it to Allan Story and had a good time despite the tension. It was a very late night indeed.