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.

China, Part 1

These pictures are in no particular order (mostly because they all got mixed up when I downloaded them off my camera) so this account of the trip is not in chronological order or anything, but I will do my best to remember the good stories. Oh, and check out Caron's blog for her side of the story. She will probably do a better job at telling it than me.

This is the Great Wall. We went there our first day. It ended up being one of my favorite things we did there. We went to the Badaling section and got stuck in a really bad traffic jam on the way there. People were getting out of their cars and just hanging out...or smoking. Most of the men in China smoked. I don't think I ever saw a woman smoking though. We made sure to listen to that Mulan song on the way. In both English and Chinese. It was great.

Anyway, the wall was just really amazing. It went on and on for as far as the eye could see. It's just really amazing to me that they would put forth so much effort to build a huge wall around the country. And honestly it really wasn't that tall...I don't know how it was supposed to keep people out. Maybe that's what the big watch towers were for.

We discovered that the nickname for China is "The Land of a Million Stairs". OK, so maybe that is just our nickname for it, but seriously there were so many stinkin stairs. Because of all the stairs, the people need to be limber in order to get around. They had these funny exercise things in the parks and along the streets. Here are some Chinese grandmas doing their exercises.

This was one of my favorite things to see...everyone would gather in the parks in the morning to do their exercises. We saw everything from line dancing to ballroom dancing to sword practicing and jump roping to ribbon and fan dances to Tai Chi and hackey sack playing and badmitton. Just tons of stuff. And tons of people participating in the stuff. I loved it. We should go to parks more.

This is Longqing Gorge. It was beautiful. I love those steep mountains. We took a lovely boat ride and rode on this huge dragon escalator. We also rented some ancient rowboats and took those for a spin. And there was a small Buddist temple nestled in some of those mountains. And a place to bungee jump and a tightrope that people were doing tricks on bicycles up above the gorge.

Rain or shine, everyone was sure to have their umbrellas handy. They had such pretty umbrellas there. One girl we were talking to said that all the girls want to be as white as possible so they try to keep the sun out. She also said that since every family is only allowed one child and lots of people want boys, there are lots more men than women in China. This makes it hard for Chinese men to get girlfriends. And it makes it easy for the Chinese women to be very picky. Interesting.

I was telling her that in Utah it's completely the opposite. How we have so many girls, but not enough guys to go around. She said maybe I should get a Chinese boyfriend. I told her I was already taken, so then she told Caron the same thing. It was funny.

We didn't see all that many Chinese men with foreigners though. But we did see a fair amount of Chinese women with foreigners. And the Chinese men that we did see with girlfriends were completely ga-ga over their girlfriends. They probably have to be doting to keep them since the girls can be so picky.

We went to a bonsai garden in Suzhou (a town outside of Shanghai). I really loved the gardens there. They were very peaceful, which was a nice break from being swarmed by people all the time.

This is the leaning tower of China, also in Suzhou. It's really called Tiger Hill, but it really is leaning. You can totally tell in the foundation.

Our first night, April and Dane took us out to a Hot Pot restaurant. They have a big pot in the middle of the table and they cook everything right there. It was delicious. My friend April and her husband, Dane, have been living in Beijing for the past 10 months or so, so they knew exactly what we should see and do and eat while we were there. And they let us stay with them...it was so great. And Caron's cousin has been living in Kunshan (outside of Shanghai) for the past year and we stayed with them too. Thanks guys!

That does it for Part 1. Stay tuned for Part 2. (I have no idea how many parts this trip will take up.)

P.S. I just wanted to add that Blogger was blocked in China. Interesting. April said she has to go through some back way through some U.S. server to get in and view blogs. Facebook is also blocked. And so is Wikipedia sometimes when people are searching controversial stuff. I just thought that was so interesting.