"Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your" face

We are in love with our new New Zealander colleagues, Glen and Christine. They are both 56 and have been married for 35 years. The moment they got here something clicked with all four of us, and we've been like a little family for about two weeks. They are almost like a perfect hybrid of both sets of our parents, but with accents. They're very funny, open-minded and youthful. Actually, Rebecca has a really hard time understanding their accents right now, because I think she is used to dealing with primarily American and Canadian teachers here at Daguanghua. When they talk and she can't quite understand, she asks me to translate their English into my English so that she can understand. We all think it's really funny.

Last night we went out to eat a hotpot dinner. So it was four of the new five teachers and Rebecca, the foreign liason. Craig, the new Australian teacher, wasn't invited. I won't go into too much detail, but there is something very creepy about homeboy. We can't quite pinpoint it, but even Rebecca brought it up, before we had a chance to say anything. "He is very strange," she said, "but I can't quite explain. He likes to boast about everything." So last night, as we were all walking to our hotpot neighborhood, I explained what "creepy" meant. So now she thinks he's creepy. We're all in agreement then.

Naturally we all want to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, but he has been here for almost a week, and the only thing he has asked any of us is "do you know what ______ is in Chinese?" The first day he came to dinner, he gave us this long-winded speech about why China rules, why he rules and why we don't know anything. When Rebecca called that night--again, before we had the chance to say anything about him--she asked us if we thought he was safe to be around children. And then, two days later, he exploded at lunch, saying "I think I'm going to go eat with the Chinese from now on. I'm like a frigging tree here, listening to you talking, rubbishing China." He apologized the next day, and though we all accepted his apology, we've been keeping our distance, too. I told him we would try to stop alienating him, so we have been making a concerted effort to include him in conversation, but I think he's already done some damage. As Christine said yesterday, "here we are in China for the first time, 56 years old, we never thought we'd be putting someone off so quickly..."

Last night, then, was a nice opportunity to get out of the school gates, to unwind and to not worry about biting around our tongues around the guy that reminded Glen and Christine of one of those "angry kids who would go shoot up a university." Rory and Glen walked ahead while Christine, Rebecca and myself lagged behind, taking pictures and chatting. I might also mention that this is the first time Rebecca has actually accompanied us to dinner or anywhere outside the school gates since the first few days we were here and had logistical things to do. I think she always feels like she will be imposing if she comes to dinner with Rory and me, but once I told her that all four of us were going, she felt more comfortable about it.

Once we got to the street where our restaurant is, Rory and I got turned around a little. We were looking at the spot where our favorite hotpot place was, but the space had been completely gutted and locked up (honestly, not totally uncommon over here). This happened with the first hotpot place we had discovered in our neighborhood--we dubbed it "Santa Claus hotpot" because of all the Christmas decorations on the window--one day it was there, and the next day it wasn't. We walked into a different restaurant that claimed to have hotpot on the menu. We changed tables three times, only to find out that they didn't actually have hotpot. So we walked outside and tried to figure out where to go. As we were deliberating, a little three-wheeled car drove by, and the driver yelled to Rebecca "Do you want to go to hotpot city?" We said no, because we already had a back-up plan, but we were certainly disappointed that our initial hotpot restaurant didn't exist anymore. They had the best peanut sauce!

Instead, we started walking to another of our favorite restaurants. Lately we have been eating bbq outside at this particular restaurant because they don't have air conditioning; they also have hotpot. As we were about to cross the street and go in, a little three-wheeled car pulled up next to us and stopped. There was a man in the passenger seat, and as I looked closer, I recognized him as the owner of the now-defunct hotpot place we had just come from. I said "Hey, that's our hotpot guy!" After a little talking in Chinese, Rebecca figured out that the three-wheel car driver--the one who had tried to get us to come to hotpot city--was the father-in-law of the man who ran our favorite hotpot place. He told Rebecca that he had good ears and could see that we wanted to eat at his son-in-law's place. We all had a good laugh about that, and when they told us that they were running a new hotpot place around the corner, we knew we had to eat there.

The owner jumped out of the car and escorted us down to his new location, and we all had a good laugh about our luck. This spot was bigger and much nicer. Good for him! He led us upstairs to a private room, and we started ordering ingredient after ingredient. Glen and Christine have had hotpot before (they call it a "steamboat"), but they'd yet to have it in China, and they also hadn't had mutton yet. Lamb is very popular in New Zealand, and they export it to China. The meal was really nice, and the owner took pictures for all of us, but it was so damn hot. There was an air conditioner in the room, but it didn't really work, and once it got dark, the owner had to unplug it so he could plug in the outside neon light.

We get the impression that Glen was builder/jack-of-all trades/manual labor sort-of-guy back in New Zealand; when the hotpot guy unplugged the a/c--just to stick the two exposed wires powering the neon light directly into the socket--Glen was shocked. It was really funny. Christine says that as he walks around China, he inspects everything, saying that "this should have been tiled this way" and "I could show someone how to rebuild this properly." Things like that. And Christine was an editor at a popular paper in New Zealand. She finished that up about three months before they came to China. They sold their house to their youngest son and headed over.

After dinner, we were all congregating outside while we decided what to do next, and I saw two of the tallest Chinese guys I have ever seen thus far. Really, shocking over here. Turns out that they play basketball for a team in Shanghai. After I took a picture with them, they asked Rebecca if I could play basketball (I had already crudely tried to explain to them that I played basketball for a long time). When she said yes, they told her that they often come to Weihai to do basketball camps at a private physical education school here in town (of course there's a private physical education school), and they asked if I would like to come be a guest at the school. Hell yeah, I would! We'll see if anything actually happens, because no one exchanged phone numbers or cards, but I would be willing to research a little bit to try to make it happen.

After that interaction, we headed back to the bbq/hotpot place that we had almost gone to earlier. We wanted to have a couple of beers before we headed back. It was just so nice to be out with the kiwis and Rebecca. She commented that Glen and Christine and Rory and I were all so easy to like, so it was no surprise that we got along so well. After that we all crammed into one cab and headed back to school. It was a nice way to spend the evening before we start summer camp tomorrow. Koreans. I hope they don't answer cell phones in class.