Sunday afternoon fireside

Sunday afternoon Matt and I were enjoying the Sabbath when we get a call from Matt's roommate telling him that their apartment building was on fire! He said their specific apartment had not been burned at all (it's on the bottom floor and the fire was on the top floor), but it was really smoky and the firemen had to break down the doorknob to make sure no one was inside. There was also some really gross-smelling water leaking from the ceiling into Matt's room.

So we headed over to the apartment to see what was going on and taped to the door was this big red sign that said it was unsafe to enter.

They told us that the building was unlivable so we had to pack up Matt's stuff and move him out. We just took his clothes and valuables and anything that would absorb the smoke smell and took it over to his parents' house and to Garrett's brother's house. Luckily Garrett is housesitting for his brother for a few weeks, so they can stay there for awhile.

It wasn't quite the fireside we were expecting to attend on Sunday! Now Matt just may move into our apartment a few weeks early instead of waiting til the wedding. He should be able to move in this week and he'll just stay there until we get married since his apartment is unlivable for awhile. No one was hurt though and none of their stuff was damaged, so that was good. What a crazy turn of events!

Walking and Olympians

At my work, we have these health challenges every two months. For the past two months our challenge was to walk at least 8,000 steps per day. I am proud to report that during the months of May and June I walked a total of 622,479 steps, which averages out to be a little over 10,000 steps per day. Yay for me!



Our next health challenge for the months of July and August is to win the Olympic gold medal. As of July 7, I will officially be an Olympian going for the gold! There are 6 different events--I will be in the biathlon event, which consists of running and swimming. In order to win the gold medal, I have to run a total 60 miles and swim 12,000 yards by the end of August. That averages out to be about 1500 yards of swimming and 7.5 miles of running per week. I can totally do that! Let the games begin!

It's my birthday...shout hurray!

My birthday celebration started 19 days ago on June 1 and will continue for 11 more days until June 30. Why celebrate just on your birthday when you can celebrate the whole month? Anyway, on June 1 in honor of the first day of my birthday month we had Chinese fondue in China at Greg and Rinda's house.

This is the fondue birthday cake creation that Rinda made for me. It was delicious. :) We enjoyed some Chinese fondue and I got sung to in 4 1/2 languages. Chinese, English, Spanish, Pig Latin and Double Dutch. (Caron only made it through about half of the song in Double Dutch before we started laughing too hard for her to finish, so that is why it was only 4 1/2.)

Then last Saturday, my friends and I headed up to East Canyon for a birthday campfire. It was also Ryan's birthday so we made sure to light a marshmallow on fire for him to blow out. We had birthday tin foil dinners and birthday smores. We had a lovely time. (Well, except for when Bekah's car got rear ended on the way up and we had to assess the damages and talk to the cops.)

Matt did a great job of making our tin foil dinners (they were sooo yummy!) and getting everything together for the campfire adventure. It was so much fun!

Then this morning I woke up early to go for a lovely morning run and found this fun little surprize from my cute roommate, Rachael. I especially love the music card!

Oh yeah, and my sister sent me a text at 12:01 a.m. that said, "Fried Chicken, Country Hog, It's your birthday...HOT DOG!" This is reminicent of our favorite Seattle restaurant...Jimmy Mac's. Whenever we go to Seattle we ALWAYS go there and if the waiters are singing to someone, we all (meaning all my cousins and a few aunts and uncles) stand up and clap and sing with the waiters. Even if we don't know the person whose birthday it is...it is great fun. We even went there for my cousin's wedding dinner and sang the same song. Hee hee!

When I got to work, I found this delicious piece of chocolate cake on my desk from my boss. Then one of my students came and gave me a bag of chocolate-covered cinnamon bears. Have you ever had those? They are divine. And I don't even like normal cinnamon bears, but these ones are so good. And he gave me a card that said, "It's good if you have another birthday because that means you're not dead yet." Ha ha! Another one of my students gave me some more cake. They are so cute!

My grandma, great-grandma, some aunties, and some cousins came to take me to lunch at the Brick Oven.

And cute little Lily Bug came to give me some birthday wishes.

When I came back from lunch these flowers were waiting for me in my office. Thank you Matt! I'm not sure what kind they are but mmmm....they smell good.

Then after work Matt took me on a birthday picnic and then up to Park City to ride the Alpine Slide. It was so much fun! I haven't done that in years!

I lost miserably in the race down the hill, but that was OK.

We had a great view of the sunset as we started down the mountain. Anyway, it was a great birthday and thanks to everyone who helped make it a special day. Here's to a great year of being 28!

Wedding plans update

Here's a little preview of our engagement photos! (Umm...we had like 700 taken.) We had them taken by Elisha Snow, who used to work at CK Media with me. I think they turned out great. We had so much fun just goofing around during our photo shoot.

Awww.....aren't we cute? Anyway, the wedding plans are coming along quite nicely. I've gotten my wedding dress, we have the temple and the reception center all squared away, we have ordered our flowers and cake and the bridesmaids dresses, and I have finished designing the announcements and sent them off to the printer. Last week we went to go taste cakes and it was so fun! We picked some really different, yet delicious flavors so you'll have to come to our reception to taste them.

China Wrap Up

OK, so here's the wrap-up from China. On our second to last day there, we took a 5 hour train from Beijing to Chengde, which is a town near the inner-Mongolian border. We slept most of the train ride there because we had only gotten 3 hours of sleep the night before, but I did wake up for a few minutes to see the beautiful Chinese countryside.

When we got to Chengde, we went straight to this Tibetan temple that is supposed to resemble the one in Lhasa, Tibet. It was really pretty.

I finally got brave enough to gong the gong.

And we climbed more stairs. Here is April and me in the gong tower.

The monks were wearing these cool cowboy hat looking hats. Dane told them that he was a cowboy too. And those big cylinder things are prayer wheels. You run down the line of prayer wheels and spin them in a certain direction. Interesting.

I really liked Chengde. It was smaller and prettier, and we could actually see the blue sky. What a trip of a lifetime! China had never been on the top of my list of places I wanted to see, but when the opportunity arose for us to go, I couldn't turn it down. And I'm so glad I went.

China, Part 3

The architecture in China reminded me a lot of the architecture in New Zealand. I thought that was very interesting. Just the way the beams on the roof were and the beams coming down from the roof. I loved how colorful and bright all the buildings were, and the intricate carvings and paintings were so amazing.

This was the Garden of Harmonious Interests at the Summer Palace. I really loved it. There were so many lily pads in the little lakes and ponds there. I'd never seen a real lily pad before that. The Summer Palace was HUGE! I think we walked about 15 miles that day when we walked around it. Apparently the Empress Cixi built this palace during her 50 year "behind the curtain" reign. Her son died at an early age and then her grandson really couldn't take over until he was old enough, so she had a pretty long reign.

Can you see the amount of stairs? The Summer Palace, Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, and lots of the other sites had SO MANY stairs! Buns of steel...that's all I have to say.

We took a short plane ride to Xian mostly to see the Terra Cotta Warriors. Guess who we saw on the plane? The SLC Channel 4 news anchor! Funny huh? In Xian, we also went to the Wild Goose Pagoda and this culture show. The culture show was a bit of a disappointment. The acrobat show we saw in Beijing was much cooler. Those people could seriously do amazing things...like balance on a ladder on a tightrope or juggle 9 balls while tap dancing. Coolness.

They had street vendors everywhere selling questionable things on a stick. I opted for the watermelon on a stick vs. the scorpion on a stick. At the train station they also had little old ladies who were making these crepe egg roll things on the back of their bicycles. I had to try one of course and it actually was pretty good.

The Terra Cotta Warriors in Xian were simply amazing. This emperor back in 200 B.C. spent his whole life planning his funeral. He only ruled for about 17 years and died at the age of 29, but in that time he managed to build a terra cotta replica of his entire army. He employed like 700,000 people to work on it. His tomb is apparently filled with booby traps and mercury and silver streams. Because of the mercury, it has not been excavated, but they have found records of the plans of his tomb.

The warriors were only found in the 70s when some local farmers were drilling for a well and they stumbled upon lots of pottery and artifacts. So they started excavating and found just tons of soldiers, pottery, weapons, terra cotta horses, and just a ton of stuff. Since the 70s they haven't even excavated all of it...it's a work in progress. Each warrior is a replica of an actual person. You can tell because each one has a different face. And they are all life size. It's pretty incredible. I can't imagine living your whole life planning your funeral though. Crazy.

After Xian, we flew to Shanghai. You can tell from this picture how extremely polluted the air is there. Gross! You can't even see the tops of the skyscrapers. Shanghai was very modern and European compared to the other cities we visited. Oh and they have big plans to clean up the air for the Olympics. Like shut down the factories, regulate the cars, and cloud seed to make it rain. I am interested to see how China will look on TV during the Olympics.

The coolest thing that happend in Shanghai was that we got invited to a tea ceremony by some people we met outside the museum. They have a different type of tea pot for each kind of tea and you have to smell it before you drink it. It was really cool. We had the herbal tea selection, and most of it was pretty tasty.

While in Kunshan with Caron's cousins, we got around on electric motor scooters. So fun! Here is Caron driving one of them. I did not attempt to drive one because that was right after my attack by the human leech and I was still feeling traumatized. So I was not up for a crazy driving adventure on a scooter.

Caron's cousins were awesome! They are teaching at an international school in Kunshan. We stayed in the dorms with them and went to their class. It was out of control crazy! The kids were jumping off the walls. But they were cute. They all gasped when they asked how old I was and I told them I was 27.

We also went to church in someone's house in Suzhou. That was pretty cool. There were a lot more people in church than I expected. Another interesting thing is that they have to have separate branches for the Chinese people and the foreigners. They cannot attend church together. But at least we could go to church in China! I just think that is really cool.

OK, I think I just have one more post after this one and then I will be done with the China blogging.

China, Part 2

OK, here's some more about China. This was a cool temple that we went to at Longqing Gorge just outside of Beijing. It was a pretty small temple, but it was very cool because it was up in the mountains. I really wanted to ring the gong, but that was our first day, so I didn't quite have the courage to. Don't worry, I got brave and rang one later though.

Here are April and Dane in the rowboats at Longqing Gorge.

The dumplings were really good. They were kind of like potstickers. While we were in China, our diet pretty much consisted of noodles, fried rice and dumplings. those were basically the only edible things on the menu.

I've never seen such giant incense sticks! And the huge urns they burn them in. These were pretty much at every temple we went to. And inside all the temples were giant Buddas. Of course we couldn't take pictures of them, but seriously they were huge.

These next few are from Behai and Hohai parks. I loved the parks in China. It was so much fun to people watch there. I just love that people actually go to parks to hang out and do whatever.

They had paddle boats you could take for a spin.

People were doing all sorts of fun things at the park. I loved it.

We went to a water town near Suzhou called Zhouzhaung (I think). It was really cool. The streets were canals just like in Venice and there were these cute little bridges everywhere. We had a bit of an adventure getting there. We hopped on this old, rickety bus and pointed to the name of the town and hoped we were going there. A cute little Chinese girl kind of adopted us and told us where to get off (using gestures of course). And she tried to help us figure out how to get back. We just pointed again and got on a bus and hoped for the best. And we made it safe and sound.

These water towns are like 3,000 years old. We got brave and tried some roasted pork leg for lunch at the water town. Once you cut through the huge layer of fat and actually got to the meat, it was pretty good. And we bartered for pearls and jade.

Tianemen Square. Now that was an interesting place. There were policemen everywhere. It is right across the street from the Forbidden City and in the middle of it there is this huge mausoleum for Mao (the ruler who brought communism into China). To go into the mausoleum you have to go through these security checks and you can't bring any bags or cameras or anything with you. Then you have to take off your hats/sunglasses/etc. and be really quiet. Then you go into the huge building and there is Mao preserved in a glass coffin. It was really creepy.

We also bought tons of souvenirs at the Silk Market in Beijing. It was really overwhelming to have people swarming you trying to sell you stuff, but it was kinda fun to barter with them. I even got a silk Chinese dress tailor made for me.

I've still got more to come, so stay tuned.