Nick's birthday bash!

We had a bunch of friends over to celebrate Nick's birthday last weekend. His birthday was on Wednesday and since so many people live over on the other side of Beijing it was more practical to push the celebration to Saturday. We ordered pizza and salad from one of our favorite places, Gungho Pizza, and then made some chicken wings. It was quite a feast. Of course we had too much food, but I love leftover pizza for breakfast so it worked out great. I only took 2 pictures the entire night..So here they are:

Most of the food.

Eating around the TV while watching Cops and Colbert Report.

We had fun hanging out with friends, playing games, and eating delicious food. Thanks everyone for coming over to celebrate! (and play with/wear out CoCo...he slept in so late the next morning!)

Made in China!

We are having a baby! In China! The baby is due May 29, so far I have been feeling pretty good. We go to a western hospital so its really not too different from having a baby at home (I imagine, can't say for sure as I haven't had one). I have gotten all kinds of crazy advice from my Chinese friends so far, the latest of which is that I need to eat lots of walnuts so our baby has nice hair. They even gave me a whole bag of them to bring home.

If you have never eaten duck tongue...

YOU ARE DEFINITELY NOT MISSING OUT!

This isn't my picture, but the duck tongue I had to eat today looked exactly like this only there were 

about 20 of them on the plate. BLEH!

I was tutoring (mostly playing with) the 2 year old son of a Chinese friend this morning. She wanted to take me out to lunch afterwards. She said the restaurant was close to my house and that she had been going for years. She asked me before hand if I liked fish and so I wasn't expecting anything too crazy.

Well we did have fish, but she also was super excited about the duck tongue. I had to try one of them to be polite. The flavor itself wasn't all that bad since it was so heavily spiced, but the texture was pretty awful. I had a hard time getting it down without making a face. You basically have to suck the "meat" off the cartilage in the center of the tongue. Not fun! The duck tongue hasn't been sitting too well, and all I wanted to do was come home and drink a diet coke to kill the duck tongue taste!

FINA swimming world cup @ the Watercube

Some friends called us this morning with free tickets to this event at the watercube. It's Nick's birthday, but he has been so busy at work we didn't have any plans other than going out to dinner, so we decided to go. It ended up being a really fun night out with a couple of people from our branch. 

Happy Birthday Nick!

The group of kids sitting behind us. They would go wild every time someone from China won a gold medal.

We got there right as the events were starting, but we were starving so we had dinner in this restaurant overlooking the pool. 

Our view of the pool. Not great but we could at least see the tv screens really well! (Plus we can't complain when the tickets were free)

BeiHai

On Saturday Nick and I went out to BeiHai here in Beijing with some friends from our branch. It was my first time there and I loved it. Nick remembered going there when he was in China before, but could never remember exactly what it was called or where it was so we were excited to rediscover it.

BeiHai Park is a beautiful Imperial Garden northwest of the Forbidden City. We rented a "boat" and went out for an hour on the lake to see everything. We got a few pictures, but since we went in the late afternoon the lighting wasn't great. Oh well. Just an excuse to go back during the day so I can see everything better. It was beautiful!

Nick was our driver and tour guide

You can kind of see the pretty view behind us.

We had a great time at BeiHai and finished the night at one of our favorite places for dinner. I don't think I could ever have too much Gungho Pizza!

Videos!

So part of the cool thing about living in China is people/process watching.

So i decided to record some of these things. Check it out if you'd like.

http://vimeo.com/user9003007/videos

Untitled from NickinChina on Vimeo.

Chinese Halloween

Our Halloween plans were all very last minute this year. We found out about 4 days before that a group of people in our branch at church wanted to plan a carnival for the kids, so we volunteered to help out. We didn't think about costumes though until the morning of the carnival.... We spent a frantic two hours running around Yashow market trying to get inspired. 

We ended up buying Nick some cheap glasses and popping the lenses out and breaking a branch off a tree outside to make him Harry Potter. He even let me draw a scar on him with eyebrow pencil. He claims its the first time he's ever worn makeup! I couldn't find anything I really liked for a costume so Nick came up with the idea to be a mummy. We ran to the local pharmacy and bought LOTS of gauze. I think the woman was a little confused with why we wanted so much, but it was cheap and I wanted it to look good.

Here's some pictures from our day:

Nick running our booth at the branch carnival. The dart the kids were throwing was kind of sharp and they don't have the best aim so he was a little jumpy!

Mummy and Harry Potter

My friend William. Loved his costume.