Monday and Tuesday were equally full with activities, as they came to some of our classes on Monday and Tuesday. Of course the classes got changed up a little to allow time for the students to get to know them and take pictures with them and ask questions. We talked a lot about childhood and family and what those words mean and stories from America. The students really enjoyed their guest teachers and that it meant they got less homework. On Monday night, we invited many, many students to our house for a sampling of Guizhou, Chinese food made by ME. I was super excited to get a chance to cook for so many people, and to get to show Patty's parents some of the famous foods from our area. Usually I will just cook for Patty and Noah, but this time I had about 25 people. This means that I needed to make lots of different dishes. Joe and I took a walk in the countryside before supper and we got back late, so I needed to chop like a crazy man (piles of food everywhere in about 30 minutes). Then I started to cook, with lots of Chinese students also wanting to help--it was a team effort in the end, but I tried to keep the recipes mine. We ended up with 8 different dishes, including a soup. The cooking took about 2 hours and when I finished there was only 1.5 dishes left. I think that is a success then!! It was amazing to see how the students took to Joe and Sandra, as though they were their parents for the week--maybe because many of them miss their families very much and they loved to have motherly and fatherly people there who loved them. So they were celebrities with countless photo opportunities and new friends.

Tuesday brought more classes and more cooking, but this time for a much smaller group. We tried to invite students from each class to take part in different activities each day so that Joe and Sandra could get to know a large number of different students who are close to us. It was so fun to cook and to have lots of friends and family nearby. On Tuesday night, we went with a group of people from Anshun out for the famous Toasted Fish. It is an amazing eating experience!! You choose your fish out of a big tank and then they kill it and fry it over coals and heap a charcoal cooking contraption full of vegetables and lajiao (hot spicy peppers) and you eat until your heart is content. We ended up with 2 fish and in the end we finished off all of it. Sandra took a great picture of it before we chowed down. I will try to post that later. Thus Tuesday and Monday disappeared.