New Friends

In mid October, as I was sitting in the cafeteria with Mark, I noticed some new Western faces. And I watched them for a little while (like a creeper) to see if they were just visiting or if they’d be staying around longer.  I thought to myself- this lady doesn’t know it yet, but she’s going to be my friend. But I figured I should give them time to get at least a little settled before I forced friendship on them.

As I was picking up packages a few days later, they stopped me!  We struck up a conversation about getting packages weird life in china stuff and thus a friendship was born. Coral and James have joined the growing Western presence here on Campus.  They are a lovely couple from Scotland and have been brainwashed into thinking we’re not that bad to hang out with.

So we thought we’d start them off right and we took them to Hotpot! So we took the bus so they could get used to that. And of course, Alex made friends with everyone.

And, like he always does when given a camera, Alex took dozens of pictures of random things along the way.

 

When we got to the mall, we walk around for a bit, showed them the important things, made them play some arcade games with Alex. And then it was time for Hotpot! This time Mark had figured some things out from our last adventures and ordering what we wanted went much smoother.

We got the usuals, beef, tofu, potatoes, lotus, noodles, corn and mushrooms. And we had such a good time introducing Coral and James to hotpot and getting to know them more in the process. It was nice to be the person with the experience for a change, instead of always feeling  two steps behind.

Alex was done earlier than the rest of us (as usual) and got very bored waiting for us to finish, so he started taking pictures.  Someday I will look back on this and say that this was the beginning of his amazing career as a photographer… or not.

Before dinner, or maybe after (I really can’t remember) we took them to a toy store to show them what I consider to be my greatest find in China yet.  There is a Lego factory here in Haining and as a result there are lots of off brand legos. There are some (Enlightenment is one of them) that are absolutely legos;  same bags, instructions, pieces, quality, everything is spot on.  That being said, some of the sets of enlightenment legos are different than any we’ve seen in the States. You can get Space Wars (Star Wars), and Future Knights (Nexo Knights) and Super Ninja (Ninjago) but you can get completely different sets that as far as I know are only available here in China.

One of these sets is the one that Alex has started collecting. He has a newfound fascination with WWII and the Chinese legos have a WWII collection. He picked a tank and a plane (shown in a previous post) and an anti-aircraft gun thing that I had to learn the name of.  I tried to convince him to get the lego set below… but he wasn’t having it.

I have since tried to buy only lego Hitler, but he’s only available in this set.  I don’t know why exactly I think this is so funny, but I really do.

 

After that we took them down to the supermarket in the basement of the mall. It is a little overwhelming at the best of times, but it was particularly busy that Saturday night.  They were good sports though, even though they had to watch me pick out kitchen ware for our next big adventure… TACO NIGHT!