Playing Charades

Have you ever played the game charades? It really is an interesting game - sometimes. If you're not familiar with the game, it's where you have one person act out a scene, action, or object and his or her team has to guess what they are depicting by their actions only...not a word said. Well, let me just say one thing: Charades as a game can be fun, but when your life and well-being depends on your ability to communicate via the "game" of charades, it somehow loses its luster! Just today we tried to explain to our landlady that we would like to get our laptop connected to the internet in the apartment because the computer they gave us is much slower (as we expected). You should have seen the two of us using different hand motions to signify a laptop computer, internet, the verb connect, you name it. She, obviously not understanding, began to play her own game of charades along with her broken English (although better than our Chinese!). As you well know that also failed so we just smiled, said goodbye, and left for school neither of us having understood anything. I called an English-speaking Chinese person who could help us, but that incident was just a funny reminder to us vital communication is to human life. Next time you play charades, if ever, just imagine for a second that you were trying to communicate an entire sentence to a group who could not speak a word of English - it's quite humbling.

Well, here's the latest update on our situation - we are finally moved into our apartment!! The president of the school took me (Josh) out of class to move all of our stuff immediately out of the hotel so the school didn't have to pay for another night. I felt like a cool elementary school kid who gets to skip class with a note from his mom or something! They fixed everything (for the most part), and cleaned as much as they could, I guess, but we have a lot of work ahead of us. Last night we spent our time cleaning the bathroom, doing a load of laundry (hurray!), sweeping, organizing, etc. Things are still a mess, but hey, we're home. This week we have a list of all the things we need to buy to make our home complete. The only thing that might stop us is a bit of rainy weather, but something tells me Tiff won't let that stop her (which means I can't be a sissy and want to stay home). Oh yea, I almost forgot...our bathroom looks great, especially after we cleaned it! We have a new sink, shower head, toilet, and tile to cover all the exposed piping and heater unit. We even have a nice mirror that is my height (a miracle by China's standards) and cabinets to store all our extra toiletries. We wanted to wait to take pictures when we got our new shower curtain and the floor completely cleaned, then we will post some before and after pictures.

That's all from the other side of the world for today. We wish the best to all the ladies in Dallas who will be living it large at the Marriott this weekend, especially those who will be teaching. Thankfully, we will be enjoying our weekend cleaning and making the apartment home. Nothing makes you appreciate humble yet cozy accommodations like spending 4 weeks in a hotel waiting for the chance to live there!