Thursday, December 26, 2013

12/8/13: Howl's Moving Castle

Morning broke and most of my symptoms of sickness were gone, besides a queasy stomach but that didn’t slow me down too much. For the first time in a while I didn’t use an alarm to wake up, so I got up about 9:40 to find Katie cleaning up already, ready for the day. I got fixed up a tiny bit- just pulled on a skirt- and soon Abby and Greg were over.

Usually we do church at their place and that’s the only place we can do the sacrament seeing as that’s the designated place and all, but their internet wasn’t working so we chose to have it at our place so we could listen in on church.

They came over and we got to enjoy church. Abby pulled out the stockings she had gotten all of us, and we pulled out our needles and thread and started sewing in our names! Katie went ahead with crazy ghetto, I went fancy, and Abby finally began and went for casual. We never saw what Greg’s looked like, but we do know Abby ended up finishing it for him. This helped us keep our hands busy and cheerful to enjoy church. And shortly after church ended, Abby and Greg were out the door.

I wasn’t feeling well enough still to head out for lunch, but we were soon bored so we pulled out The Last Holiady with Queen Latifah, so we enjoyed that for a while. After that was finished, we still had about an hour, although we slowly began getting ready for our evening at Linda’s house. We were just finishing up getting ready when we got a text from Sandy, Linda’s mom, asking where we were.

They said four o’clock. We still had time! I have no idea what her clock said…

Anyways, we were soon hopping out the door and headed to the corner by our place to meet her. She was looking cute as ever! We joined her up the street near our place to head to her super nice house. It had an American feel, even, filled with nice things you’d probably find in Kohl’s or something.

We took off our shoes and found more of my kids from Grade 3 here for the party. Dan and Barbie were there, goofing around with Linda. And a few minutes later, Jerry showed up with his parents, too! Full house, all good! Of course the kids immediately ran off and us adults sat around the TV for a while until the kids came out and invited us to play Chinese monopoly with them. So we did that on the floor by the TV for about two hours.

The game was much like the American one… except it was super confusing because it was all in Chinese. And the kids enjoy a bit of cheating. Except they eventually got bored with all of it- seriously the game takes forever- so we decided to take a rest for a while, until dinner was ready.

Lovely food on the table! More parents came over as well to enjoy the meal with us. There was some fish we were able to avoid. We also managed to avoid all the alcohol, thank goodness. There was some weird diseased looking beans I tried eating a lot of to show that I do eat food, along with some almost spicy tofu. The corn dish turned out pretty good, with tomatoes and stuff in them. Then there were seasoned bits of potato, those were tasty as well… sticky ‘yellow’ rice was pretty decent, too. The men were drinking red wine and they offered it to us but like I said, we refused several times and ended up having juice instead. Dinner was pretty interesting overall!

Speaking of- we had rose tea while in the living room, which is awesome. Basically water with rock sugar melting into the bottom because its warm, with rose buds on top! Hard not to get them in your mouth, but otherwise pretty darn pleasant! And very lovely to look at!

Soon we were finished with dinner, and we went up to where the kids ran off upstairs. We got to hear Linda play the piano, and she’s pretty good! Then Katie played a memorized piece which the adults enjoyed- the adults wanted me to do the same but since I never memorized any pieces and I haven’t played in about ten years I had to refuse. Katie taught Linda ‘Heart and Soul’ which I always thought was Chopsticks, but hey you learn new things everyday… that was cute, though!

We watched the kids play around in her nice bedroom for a while, and then got a bit nosy with their family pictures so Sandy showed us all of these really nice picture books and holy cow some of them were pretty darn fancy, seriously, and Sandy looked like such a model- so not fair!

Eventually we went back down to the living room to drink some more rose tea, talk a little, and try to find a show or movie to watch. However the programs weren’t really behaving so well and then we saw it was after 8 and Lucy said we should probably get going [it’s so awkward trying to decide if we should just say we should leave or see if they wanted to do anything else for the night, I don’t know], so we finally all headed outside.

Katie and I walked since it was such a short distance- seriously, just a ways back down the street! And one of the other guys lived nearby so he walked with us. Except he didn’t speak any English so that stroll turned out pretty awkward pretty fast. Finally we reached the bottom and parted ways, and Katie and I headed inside.


Turns out we were out of water which really sucked because it turns out my cough was working its way back down my throat, and it really helps to brush our teeth with water, too... Anyways, we finished the night with Howl’s Moving Castle, and finally went to bed.

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