Personally, I love house visits. They are usually a lot of fun and it is so neat to be able to see the homes of my students and to be able to play with them there. As a note, not all of the parents know English... in fact only a few sets of parents know any English at all.. Thankfully, we always bring at least one of our AWESOME coordinators with us to translate for us. I love these visits because usually the kids are super excited to show their parents how much English they have learned. The parents love us and love taking pictures of us with their kids. Not to mention, one of the great things about house visits is FREE FOOD! Sometimes we just get an apple or two and other times we are fed a giant buffet of food.
Here are the a few pictures and a brief description of the house visits/parties/field trips that I went on this semester. :)
November 6th, 2013
Lucia:
Lucia is a super sweet but pretty shy girl. Her mom was really nice and was really invested and interested in what Lucia had learned thus far. For the visit with Lucia and her parents, we went to this AWESOME restaurant around the corner from the school. At first I was a little worried because it was a seafood restaurant and I don't like seafood, but they had a really good variety of chicken (with its head), goose, pork, steak, beef and some super delicious dessert! There was soooo much food and it was a lot of fun eating out at this restaurant because they had the cool spiny thing in the middle of the table for you to put the food on so everyone can share.. and then you spin it until the food want is in front of you! I had a good time playing with that and laughing the night away with Autumn.
Jim:
After we left Lucia's family, we headed over to Jim's. HIS HOUSE IF HUGEEEEE!!! Seriously, it was super nice and his parents are for sure RICH RICH RICH $$$$$. Jim has a baby brother who is about 9 months-a year old named Will. He is such a cute little guy. He looks just like Jim but smaller with fatter cheeks. Jim's family kept feeding us fruit but I was so stuffed from Lucia's visit that I thought I was going to dieeee from eating so much.
Jessie:
After we left Jim's, we headed over to Jessie's House. She lived around the corner in a small apartment. Her apartment was still pretty nice though. Jessie was such a fun ball of energy. She is also so so so smart and really knows English. We didn't even have to prompt her and she knew "I threw the ball". Amazing right?! I think it helps that her mom knew a good amount of English and had different "English" things around the house. Jessie has the cutest giggle and is so loud and fun. As we were leaving her apartment building we could hear her yelling "BYEEEE TEACHA!!!"-- She was on like the 15th floor of the apartments, it was really cute and so funny. :)
November 14th, 2013
Older Class Visit #1: Jessica's House
Kids that were there: Jessica, Oscar, Gordon, James Bond, Lilly, Riley, Nina and Lesley
This House visit was crazy, but awesome. We ate soooooo much food (I told ya house visits were amazing because of all the free food ;)). They even had some pizza hut, along with some delicious dumplings, rice, fruit and cookies. This house visit was great because I really got to bond with some of the kids. Gordon, Oscar, Riley and James Bond were all sitting on my lap/right next me, watching Riley play angry birds on my phone. After a little while, Jessica brought out a ton of balloons and so obviously, we blew them up and attempted to make balloon animals. Shelbie was really good at it, but I
Later on in the night, Nina's dads was SOOOOOOOO drunk, it was really funny but also really uncomfortable. He kept sputtering at us in Chinese and then saying "happy, happy, happy" and grabbing our hands and even kissing them at one point and wanting pictures with us. Straight up he was kinda a drunk tool. I felt bad for Nina because she is such sweetie. Even though that awkwardness happened, the night was still very enjoyable.
November 16th, 2013
One Saturday Morning, we woke up at the crack of dawn and met up with the younger class to be bused to Guifeng Mountain for a field trip. On the way there, I sat next to Autumn. Spencer came and sat on my lap and was talking to us. He kept asking us the rules and saying "Rule Number 10... there is no rule number 10." It was so cute. It was also darling because on the way back from the Mountain he sat on my lap for part of the ride and kept saying the rules in random order but he would quickly count "1-2-3-4-5-6 Rule number 6" and then "1-2-3-4 Rule number 4" and so on and so forth. He's so cute. :) 
When we got to the Mountain we all hiked up some monster stairs for probably 40-45 minutes.. that wasn't fun... then we took at tram/train type thing for probably another 10 minutes. We then walked and enjoyed the fresh air and beautiful mountain scenery. Finally about 20 minutes later we arrived at an open field. We had a fun picnic with the kids and their families. I felt nice and full and that's always a nice feeling. :) After eating, the kids went to go play around in the field while some of the other teachers and I passed out into a nice food coma. After waking up a little bit later, I enjoyed watching the kids fly kites and hula hoop. At one point, Carmen (one of the Chinese teachers) kicked a giant beach ball and it smacked into Joshua. He fell down and sits back up and exclaims "Whoa!" It was hilarious!! That kid is such a goober. :) Later we joined in on some relay races. Shelbie and I were on a team and totally beasted it. We played a game where one person has to jump from hula hoop to hula hoop, but you only have one hula hoop.. so she would jump and I would move it. It was a lot of fun. :)
On the way home, Carmen sat next to me on the bus. It was super sad because she typed up a message to me on her phone in the translator and it said "I don't want you to leave". :'( I love all the Chinese friends that I have met here and I know that it is going to be super hard to leave.
November 27th, 2013
Nicole:
Nicole is a super sweet, and super cute girl... but she is also superrrrr quiet. So it was a little awkward when her family asked her to speak some English and didn't speak... haha.. Thankfully they were understanding and know how shy she can be. Nicole's family lives in a nice apartment and both of her parents are super nice as well. Nicole's Mom speaks English pretty well but her Dad doesn't know any English. They had this cute but scary cat that Carmen had fun attempting to pet. It was a pretty funny sight because Carmen would build up the courage to pet it but then last second would get scared. After scarfing down some fruit, we said goodbye and heading to Jacky's house.
Jacky:
Jacky's house was a blast!! I love that kid so much. He was so freaking adorable handing out drinks and food. His Dad and him were playing checkers and I wanted to play so I played against Jacky... He won.. that's right... I lost in Checkers to a 5 year old. For the record, he is Chinese... :/ It was still a super hilarious time.
November 27th, 2013
Older Kids BBQ at Kaycee's:
Kids that were there: Kaycee, Oscar, Aubrie, Cavan, Mia, Sammy, and Tony
At one point, well actually at many points, the Dads wanted to drink with me. They offered Beer, then whiskey, and when I kept rejecting the alcohol, they settled with giving me some type of Chinese tea. We had a few chugging contests... the tea was gross but the Dad's were loving that I was hanging out with them. haha it was an interesting experience.
So apparently Kaycee's Dad works in making fashion underwear. I saw all the kiddos playing in a back room so i walked back there and died laughing. They were playing in a room full of men briefs. Some were really crazy with snake skins and cheetah prints, even some with pink and yellow flowers. I took a few pictures of them so people would believe me when I told them the story and as I was taking pictures, Kaycee took some and put them in better lighting and held them up for me as I took some more pictures.
Man, that was a funny and unexpected surprise of a house party.
December 4th, 2013
Joshua:
We went to eat at a restaurant with Joshua and his parents. He is such an energetic little karate kid. Seriously, all during dinner he was hopping around the room doing karate moves. It was so cute and funny. :) Joshua's mom was hilarious. When I first met her she kept shaking my hand really fast at everything I would say and she kept saying how nice it was to meet me and how beautiful I am. That was flattering. Dinner had some good food. I ate a mini lobster/jumbo shrimp/maybe it was a crawdad. I also ATE A PIGEON... it was kinda weird tasting but now I can check that off my "random animals that eaten" list.
Calum:
Calum is such a sweet, sweet kid. I played cars with him and raced the cars and had a good ole time. :) His family gave us lots and lots of cherries and grapes which tasted amazing. :)
December 5th, 2013
Older kid party #3:
We went to a fancy hotel restaurant right next to the RT Mart around the corner from the school. Almost all the kids from the older class were there so it was insane. We got our own huge room that had 3 massive table in it. The food was really good and there was a lot of it. Nothing too epic or funny happened, it was just an over all enjoyable night, with a lot of good food.
December 11th, 2013
Cindy:
Cindy's house was nice and had a beautiful and big garden with a little fish pond. I accidentally fed the fish (which were pretty big for such a small pond) a little too much and Carmen goes "oh no!" but then Cindy's dad threw the whole cup of food into the water, so it wasn't that big of a deal after all. :) We enjoyed eating some KFC and PIZZA HUT! Yummy!! I also tried some amazing passion fruit punch. and then got to eat some actual passion fruit. That was a first! haha
Spencer:
After Cindy's we went over to Spencer's House. No lie, I was a little disappointed because I thought that Spencer would run and jump on me and hug me like he does every morning at the school but he didn't.. and he was distracted by the TV almost the whole time we were over there. We still gotta have a few cute moments though. I teared up a little when I told his parents about how great he is doing and how much I love him. I also got to "read" him a bedtime story. It ended up being 5 little monkeys swinging from the tree, which is one of the songs that we taught the kids, so I basically just ended up singing the song with him. I love that kid so much.
December 13th, 2013
Older Class #4: Brinlie and Dori's house.
(All of the Older Kids were there)
Brinlie and Dori are twins, but not identical and they have a MASSIVE HOUSE. It was HUGE and ALL MARBLE. We ate A TON of meat and had a lot of fun hanging out with the kids. One really funny thing that happened was while we were eating, I was at the table with Oscars mom and a few other Moms and they were asking us if we had boyfriends. I told them, "My boyfriends name is Oscar, Oscar is my boyfriend". Man, Oscars mom thought that was hilarious and we all got a good laugh out of that! Another funny thing happened later in the evening. We had all wandered inside and Autumn and I were sitting on the couch. Autumn, who's birthday was that day, knocked out on the couch and took a nice nap. The kids thought it was soooo funny that she was sleeping so they covered her with stickers. Moral of the story, don't fall asleep when there are kids running wild with stickers.
