busy busy

i feel like i've been too busy to notice anything interesting to write about. or the things i'm noticing all have to do with work, which i shouldn't blog about. boo. you'll have to email and ask about those things if you want to know.

today i went to the market and as i was riding my bike, i had a fleeting thought, "oh i'm in china" as i was briefly thinking about how normal everything seemed to me. but yeah, i am still in china. but all the things that used to be weird are normal now. i have a nice new fruit lady. i miss the old market though and my fruit lady from where i lived before. she would cut up fruit for me and let me buy half of cantaloupes and things like that. this market doesn't do that, sadly. but i went back to my old fruit lady to visit her a couple weeks ago and her shop was gone, it was replaced by some mechanic shop or something like that. sad. but i got cantaloupe from another fruit lady near there who actually would cut it up for me. i love that because i can just take it home and eat it, and they are way better at cutting it up than i am. my coworkers are having a progressive dinner between 4 people's apartments this weekend and i'm making a fruit salad for that. it will have dragon fruit, cantaloupe, apples, nashi, and bananas. this will be good.

i have thought of a few things i want to cook, but it hasn't happened yet. one thing i want to do sometime soon is have a few people over for dinner and make crepes--dinner crepes with things like chicken and potatoes and cheese and vegetables and then have dessert crepes with things like nutella and bananas and peanut butter and maybe other fruits. it sounds really fun and really yummy and also like a good thing to teach girls who i want to mentor how to cook. i'm trying to figure out a good way to naturally mentor these girls, and i think it should possibly be through cooking stuff together, because at least 2 of these 3 girls never ever do anything resembling cooking at their own houses. one of them has an ayi who lives in her house and when her parents are out of the country, her ayi takes care of her, and she also has a driver who drives her to school. anyway, after going to qingdao ("where the mountains meet the sea" (like santa barbara!)) next weekend for a retreat and then to beijing for a conference for the following weekend, maybe THEN i can think about cooking something. i will have 5 days of no work after the conference, and it will be glorious. and i have no pressure to be a tourist in beijing this time, since i've done that twice now already. so the conference can be relaxing and professional developing and nothing else. yay!