I will lift up my eyes to the mountains; From where shall my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth. He will not allow your foot to slip; He who keeps you will not slumber.
Psalm 121:1-3

Just seemed like nothing else was adequate to begin this post. Look at those mountains! The views from where we live never cease to amaze us. Albert took these first two pictures on a relatively clear day from the top floor of one of the classroom buildings here on campus. The second shot shows the buildings in the "downtown" area of our city.

Every week or so Albert comes home from class with a box (or a bubble envelope containing a DVD of a Carolina football game!) from the campus post office! It's CARE PACKAGE DAY!!!!!! Do you see the smiles on those little white American faces?!? Thanks, precious friends, for showering us with such thoughtful pieces of home since we've been here. Studying our Chinese homework is never so bad when we have beef jerky, Jello pudding, Ritz crackers, peanut butter and other yummy American treats, not to mention the wonderful notes of love and encouragement sent from all the folks we miss so much! To say we appreciate you is a big understatement!

We're managing to make our newly renovated apartment into a home, slowly but surely. Here's a shot of the corner of the big rug we bought the other day for our den (this now covers the incredibly hard concrete tiles!). Look, y'all! It's an oriental rug! Are you shocked?
OK - We just thought this next picture was hilarious. It was taken during the renovation from you know where. Albert was trying to take a picture of Kendall doing something but Whitney decided to jump up in front of the camera just when the shutter was pressed. We now call this the picture of Kendall holding up a giant Whitney head. You see what I mean now, don't you?!?!? Take a moment to laugh out loud. You know you want to, and it will make you feel better.

This foam (being cut by a meat cleaver in this photo) is why we don't wake up with a stiff back every morning. We didn't fully realize until we arrived here that the term "mattress" means something different to everyone. Over here it means "piece of wood with fabric stapled on top." After a few weeks of not really wanting to get in the bed at night, we knew enough Chinese to go out and plead with these ladies to cut some pieces of foam to fit our beds. What an incredible difference this stuff has made in getting a good night's sleep. We still miss our beds at home, but we love our foam mattress pads!

What Kendall is consuming in the next photo is a freak of nature that we thought you'd be interested in. It is a "double banana." We didn't even know that there was such a thing - the conjoined twins of the banana world.

These last three photos are just various pictures of the surroundings in our city that we thought you'd like to see. The lady selling vegetables is a common sight for when we are out doing errands. These ladies have incredibly strong shoulders. You will see them carrying very large amounts of different kinds of produce all over town in these bamboo containers . We can buy a big bag of apples or mandarin oranges for less than 75 US cents. The last picture is the outside of our apartment building. Notice all the bricks and concrete that are outside waiting to be installed in our kitchen (pre-renovation)! They are sitting under our small bathroom window and the larger window is the kitchen. Y'all come see all this in person now, ya' hear?!?! We'll look forward to updating you more next week -

I thought I might better go ahead and answer the burning question that many of you have asked (and most of you have undoubtedly thought but not asked)- Where did you use the bathroom and clean yourselves while your bathroom was torn apart?
Some of you suggested that we go to a hotel, others that we should visit the neighbors. Both of those are much more civilized options than what we were forced to end up with. So that your questions can be put to rest, I give you the picture you see here - This is, unfortunately, what our toilet and shower looked like for that week we'd like to forget. Actually, the kids enjoyed using the trash can so much that the other night we had one on the new western toilet and two sitting on trash cans at the same time! We're glad Johnson's and Pampers actually make Chinese wipes that smell fresh and clean :)
People get ready, because when we get home we're liable to enter 'Survivor' and WIN THE MILLION!!!!!
So, in closing, don't think about this picture too long, but now at least you have the answer to the question of the century -

Just wanted to show you a few funny (only now, not then) pictures of how disorganized this place was during the month of our renovation. Most of you know how I respond to living amidst chaos! Needless to say, it was not a pretty sight. Notice in the photos how the refrigerator is in the den, all the furniture is covered in blankets, and, if you look closely enough, you can see our new bathtub on its side in the kitchen.

And this is Kendall saying goodbye for good to the stinky squatty potty and the nasty blue tube that drained from under the bathroom sink. None of us cried to see our dear squatty friend go, and, actually, we still have it, as the workers ignored Albert's plaintive plea and against all of our better judgment installed the Western toilet on top of the squatty. We can't seem to get away from it no matter how hard we try.

RENOVATION SUCCESS!!!!!

We are happy to report that the renovation is now history! What a crazy, long month it was, but we are now glad it is over and our apartment is outfitted to hold all six of us for a few years. Above are two "before" pictures of our kitchen. Then we have Skillet (and Mrs. Skillet) working on our counters and our cabinet man (he unfortunately never got a nickname - Sorry!) working on the final touches to the kitchen cabinets. He came to work injured and was in pain while he worked, so Albert tried to help him as much as he could while he was here. I unfortunately didn't snap a picture of any of our workers spitting on the kitchen floor. Sorry about that, but I felt like you could use your imagination on that one. It's not something I want preserved in a photo for the future. I don't ever want to see (or step in) a hocker on my kitchen floor again for as long as I live. Some things that happen over here, I promise, I will never understand! I suppose there are some things you have to see (and hear) to believe :)

Who needs a ladder when you have a chair with a plastic stool on top of it? We were amazed at how these guys worked and worked, with not many of the "conveniences" of home that we are used to. OSHA would have a field day over here. Albert said we live in "a tort waiting to happen". We're just happy no one was electrocuted that we know of while installing our new light switches and overhead lights.

And (drum roll, please) the NEW KITCHEN!!!!! Can you smell the spaghetti? Can you hear the southern food in the frying pan? Is your mouth beginning to water just looking at the photo? Come see us and I'll cook you something real American - We can fit you at our kitchen table now!

As we went through our month with no kitchen, we had to decide what to eat 3 times a day that did not involve any cooking on our part. This became a more difficult task as more time went by. Albert, as most of you know, is quite the adventurous type, but I would rather know I'm going to enjoy what I'm eating as opposed to taking too much of a chance. One day Albert happened to be the one who was out in town around lunch time and he decided to get us some rice. He saw the lady at our favorite fried rice place cooking something that smelled so good, with bits of marinated meat in it. He said, in broken Chinese, that he wanted to get two of those. He brought it home and said "We're trying something new today! It smells delicious!" We were all excited. Surely he knew what he had ordered and he was right - It would be wonderful. I opened the first package to divide the rice among us, and I saw something sticking out of the rice. That's not a toenail, I said to myself. They don't put toenails in rice. So I pulled a little more, and I was right. It wasn't a toenail. It was instead an entire chicken foot, and it had lots of toenails where the first one came from. As I dug a little deeper I found all kinds of interesting treasures - internal organs, bones and various appendages. Who knows what they really call it, but we've now termed this lovely dish "chicken foot fried rice", and we have vowed to never get it again. That was one of those days that our stomachs growled for a good portion of the day. I'm not sure how we'll not end up ordering it again, since Albert's not sure how he did it in the first place, but we'll try to figure it out.


OK, back to the pictures. At one point, Kendall decided the renovations were taking entirely too long and that she needed to take matters into her own hands (just kidding, but she did enjoy pretending to break the counter apart!).

What a happy day it was when Skillet got the toilet upright and in the bathroom instead of on the kitchen floor! It was quite frustrating for that week of no running water or working toilet to actually own a toilet, but to look at it, unusable, sitting in the middle of the kitchen. It is unfortunately now sunken into our bathroom floor instead of bolted to the top of the tile, so we feel as if we are in the children's Sunday School department every time we use the bathroom, but, like Albert has said many times, it's a lot higher off the ground than the toilet we used to have!

Mrs. Wok made our shower curtain, and it took quite a long time to actually get here and be attached to our ceiling. While we didn't have it yet and REALLY wanted to take the first shower we'd had in a month, the workers assured us that it would be OK to go ahead and take a shower anyway - We simply needed to make sure that the water fell on the bathroom floor and not in the bathtub. I'll leave you with that comment to ponder. If you figure it out, please let me know because we still are confused. But we are clean and are eating normally again! Praise the Lord for the end of the longest month in the history of Allen-kind!

Here is our able Chinese "contractor", so to speak. He has become quite a friend of Albert's, as they have traveled many miles in his itty bitty pick up truck trying to pick out and purchase needed items for our renovation. Since our Chinese language skills need much improvement, and we can't pronounce our new friend's name, we call him "Mr. Wok," or sometimes just "Wok" for short.

Since Albert had already named Mr. Wok, we had to find an appropriate name for our kind helper who has worked harder than anyone we have ever seen. Here he is in what used to be our bathroom. This was during our week of no toilet and no running water. What a fun time that was. In keeping with our kitchen container theme, he is affectionately known in our house as "Skillet". Skillet would show up at 7:30 in the morning and work for 11 hours with only a 30 minute break for lunch, and always with a smile on his face.

OK, I know what you're thinking - What is Kendall doing in that bomb shelter? Well, those, friends, are the beginnings of our kitchen cabinets. Why use wood when you can use bricks and concrete slabs? Yes, things are quite different on the other side of the planet. We've joked that they were just building us a brick oven to cook pizza, but unfortunately that dream didn't materialize. The kitchen is finished, except for window shades, but the bathroom is still a major work in progress. We can't wait to show you pictures of the finished product. In fact, we can't wait to see the finished product ourselves! Hopefully we will have those photos for you soon -

FIRST BIRTHDAY IN CHINA!!!

The season of birthdays has begun in the Allen house! Today was Kendall's 9th birthday, but she likes to say that she is now 10 in China. When you are born here, you are 1, so she gets credit for an extra year now. That makes her feel much older and wiser apparently. Today is Mid-Autumn Festival here, too, so folks are giving each other gifts of moon cakes and other fun things (we also received some roasted chestnuts - yum!) and tonight we have heard lots of firecrackers. This morning we went to our favorite bakery and watched them create this amazing cake for less than 4 U.S. dollars. It was very yummy - It had (notice I said HAD) a nice orange filling layer between two layers of yellow cake. We shared it with our friend Lily, a student here at the college, and two volunteer teachers from England, Adam and Tilly. Notice the pretty Barbie that Kendall received as a gift from Mom and Dad. She has red hair and hazel eyes just like Kendall does.

We were able to travel out of town for a few days during National Holiday Week here and go to the big city on the train. This is why you haven't heard from us in almost two weeks! While we were there, we ate at McDonald's, saw some folks we know, and bought some western goodies for the kitchen - including some peanut butter! We had a lot of fun relaxing and getting away from the never-ending renovation.

Speaking of that renovation, it keeps going and going like the Energizer bunny. I'm not sure if it will ever come to an end. Above you will see a sneak peak of what's been going on around here for almost a month now. We're weary of the changes going so slowly, but hopefully things will be worth the wait. We'll keep you posted, of course!