After two red-eye flights and three hours of driving, we’re here. Where is here? A bumber sticker at the local flea market says, “…the town you can’t afford to leave.” It’s 110 American degrees, which I’m sure is something obscene in Celsius. They haven’t had rain in about five weeks. But the university campus is also covered in migrating butterflies; we walked through clouds of them today.

On the way into town we stopped at Dan and Brenda’s and had a great three hours or so catching up. It’s amazing how you can just pick up conversation with some people after a while and it’s like you were never apart. Them and our conversation reminded me of how incredibly blessed we are to have all kinds of people whom we love and respect on our side. Dan and Brenda live outside of town on some land in the country, and they’ve started building an African village compound… huts and all that, complete with goats and donkeys and I think soon some ducks.

Same with Kelly and Houston (re: the conversation, not the goats and huts). Houston and I have some shared history involving goats (and huts), African village-market-quality knives, and a rather messy “cultural learning experience.” But anyway we’re staying with Kelly and Houston until Friday, when we’ll head to Dallas to see Jessica’s mom and sister before heading back to Canada on Sunday.

One whole week to enjoy lots of friends in between some meetings – sounds pretty good to me!

Camping with 23 ESL students wasn’t as hard as I imagined. We had some experienced chaperones along with us, so that helped. Most of these kids had never slept in tents before, roasted hotdogs and marshmallows, or been dragged behind a motorboat in an innertube. They liked the marshmallows, but most of them wouldn’t touch their oatmeal in the morning: it’s too gross for them, apparently. Cultus Lake is a boating lake, and the swimming where we camped was no good but we still had a blast tubing. First time I’d got to drive a motorboat.

We also took them to the Cultus Lake Waterpark, and that was fun. The park hosts mentioned that the less clothing you wear, the faster you go (it’s best not to wear t-shirts). This gave some of our boys a great advantage, since they’re quite comfortable sporting minimalist, speedo-style, friction-reducing swimwear.

They stayed awake goofing off so much the first night that by the next afternoon they were begging for naps… we didn’t let them.

Tomorrow morning we’re heading out for two nights of camping with our Korean and Taiwanese students. For most of them it’s their first time ever. They practiced putting their tents up today (it took them about 90 minutes). My class pitched the biggest fit when I told them they couldn’t take their PSP’s and iPods. And then we had a vocab lesson with confiscate and addiction.

Tonight we had dinner with a mom and her son from Qingdao. It was a really interesting evening, in part because she and her family lived through some of the major events of China’s last 40 years. It’s so interesting to hear about events I’ve seen in history videos from people who were there.

Our ESL students are trying to adjust to an all-North American diet.

In Texas, the African students would sometimes get really sick from the Texas food (they couldn’t even keep it down). But we’d visited some of their home countries and understood the drastic change in diet; their fat and oil and grease content increased about 5000% when they arrived in Texas. I thought the Koreans and Taiwanese kids wouldn’t have that big of an adjustment to make, but it’s harder for them than I would have guessed. From their journals and from conversations in class, I’ve compiled these lists.

They hate:

• raw vegetables, especially carrots – “We’re not rabbits!” One of them finally tried a carrot stick for the first time yesterday after about three weeks living with a Canadian family. She didn’t like it.
• salad (raw leaves… I guess it’s like eating plants?)
• sandwiches – “Everyday always sandweechee!” I haven’t figured this out yet, but they all hate sandwiches and seem to be appalled that their homestay parents keep putting them in their lunches. It doesn’t seem to matter much what’s between the bread.
• cold cuts, like salami. One of them was complaining that their homestay mom was feeding them raw meat. It turned out he was referring to cold cuts. I tried to explain that it wasn’t raw, but I’m not sure he was buying it.
• milk. They’ve got something against dairy products, and they aren’t liking the bowl of cereal every morning routine.
• pudding. Three of them had chocolate pudding cups in their lunches on Thursday, and after one taste they each threw them out.

They like:

• steak and potatoes. This got two thumbs up all around.
• BBQ’d hamburgers – also a big hit (after they pick all the uncooked pickles and onions and tomatoes off).
• spaghetti with tomato sauce.
• lasagna.

They also don’t understand why they have to wear seatbelts in the back seat, “even when have no police!” And one of them thought her watch was broken because it was still light outside at 9:30pm. They thought the crane flies were really giant mosquitos, and apparently aren’t used to spiders in the house. Camping (on Tuesday) will be fun!

I’ve got the older batch of Korean and Taiwanese ESL students – mostly younger teens. Many of them went to a church service for the first time yesterday. We weren’t with them, but here’s what they said…

“They gave us grape juice and said it was God’s blood? And biscuit but I didn’t know what that means. It was so crazy!”

“How do you spell ‘Jesus’?”

“They always make us stand up and sit down.”

“It looked like a school.”

I couldn’t make out everything they were trying to explain, especially since they didn’t understand what they were trying to explain. But apparently one Foursquare church was passing out packets of honey (?!) during the service… and of course the one our student got broke in his pocket and got sticky everywhere. Another one of our students started raising his hands and mimicking everyone else during the prayer/worship time. His Korean homestay partner asked what he was doing, and he said, “Trying to fit in!”

It seemed like most of them didn’t have a clue what was going on… alot of them were struggling to stay awake (and these are mostly big, P.A.O.C., professional worship band-type churches). Next Monday maybe they’ll be ready for a little Q&A session, though I’m not sure how I’ll explain the honey.

Once of the coolest things we ever did was live with a Taiwanese family for two weeks (when we were in Baton Rouge). That is such a good way to get to know people and learn. But this is not about one of the more important things we learned.

They showed us around their house when we first got there, and in the process showed us the bed in the master bedroom: plywood on cinder blocks covered with a sheet. We tried to get them to take some free mattress sets that we had access to (we were doing some hurricane relief work at the time). They were polite but seemed resistant, and we eventually gave up. I remember thinking, “Man, they must be in some tough financial times.”

But now, I don’t think it had anything to do with finances; I think they just like it that way. Why spend hundreds of dollars on mattresses when you could just cover a piece of plywood with a sheet and lay it on cinderblocks?

In Taiwan, hard is good. Hard is healthy. Spend the afternoon reading in the park… on a boulder. Better yet, take a nap on some rocks. We stayed in a furnished, temporary apartment our first two weeks here, and I thought we were sleeping on a boxspring. I was wrong – that was a mattress, and that’s how they like them. When we went to Ikea to get a bed for our apartment we tried lots of mattresses, and they were basically fabric-covered boxes. They had a few token soft ones – I guess for the wài guó rén.

It’s not like everyone sits on rocks all day. It’s just one of the little differences that pop up every once in a while – like drinking warmed water (and avoiding cold water) even on hot days or having soup with every single meal.

We had our first field trip with our new students today around Stanley Park. Twenty kids is a handful when it’s just two of us and there’s the language gap. The only negative incident was when some of our kids accidentally kicked a soccer ball into another kid’s face near Second Beach. The dented child’s family were tourists from the U.K. and the mom was pretty mad. But what can you do?

Three of students are from Taiwan (the rest are from Korea), and although we’re not supposed to play favourites, we’re extra glad they’re there. Some of the kids had their first picnic ever today. This is Jessica and “Joanne” from Taiwan.

There were three tourist-friendly raccoons that had our kids pegged from a mile away. We had to work fast to keep them from trying too get too cuddly.

You have to audition to be a busker in Vancouver.

The wheels on the bus go lound and lound…

It’s green here.

And we have slugs.

And flowers.

In case you didn’t notice, CHL is now publicly accessible. Please link and e-mail all you want.

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Tomorrow we take the kids (Koreans and Taiwanese) downtown for some sightseeing at Stanley park. Tough job…

I woke up today craving Worcestershire sauce. I drank two saucer fulls, and then soaked my bagel in it with melted cheese on top. I haven’t thought at all about Worcestershire sauce probably since before we first left for Taiwan. I don’t know if it’s because I’m subconsciously craving certain tastes that we didn’t get in Taiwan, or if I’m just a freak. Either way, it tastes good.

And this is now 21 days in a row with no coffee.