DC with Nikki

So a couple of weekends ago I finally made it down to DC. It is only 4 hours away from here but I had never made it. I went mainly to see Nikki Madsen, who lives there now and to attend my friends reception but ended up falling in love with that amazing, sparkling clean city.

I got there on Thursday night and Nikki proved yet again to be the most phenomenal hostess. She had an entire itinerary planned and printed for me, complete with all the information that I would need. So with Nikki's detailed plan in hand I went out to discover DC.
This is me in front of the capital building. I took the tour and was impressed, then I went to the supreme court and then on to the Library of Congress where I went on a guided tour and again developed a bit of a crush on my tour guide. I have discovered a bit of a weakness in myself for quirky tour guides. I find their knowledge of the most random things fascinating and love following them around.

I learned several things in DC.
1) With all the photographing incompetents roaming around major tourist sights, it is best to become a master of the "self-photograph" if you intend to travel solo.
2) DC is so clean and bright it reminded me of Disneyland. I kept expecting Goofy to come sauntering around the corner, broom in hand to keep the area shiny clean. There was certainly no peeing on the sides of buildings and no chicken bones on the streets. Perhaps only someone who lives in New York can appreciate the phenomenon that it is that a city the size of DC can be clean.
3) DC has a totally different feel than New York. I decided that the purposes of DC and New York are different. DC is designed to inspire awe and admiration to the visitor. It is set up to show everything that is good about being American. New York's purpose is to inspire fear and intimidation in the visitor as it attempts to dominate you financially, either through legal albeit somewhat unethical means or through the more direct way of although still somewhat unethical method of street muggings.
4)Life is cheaper, cleaner, prettier and overall easier in DC, but for some reason I belong in NYC.
Nikki met me on her lunch break and took me to the White House to take a peak. Then I went and saw the theater where Lincoln was shot and the house where he died. Then I went to the archives and saw all the stuff there including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Then I went over to the Air and Space Museum because Nikki told me I should check out the temporary American History exhibit there and look what I found....
The Nauvoo temple stone!

Saturday Nikki and I and a couple of her friends got in her car (oh what a luxury to have a car) and went up into the gorgeous hills to see the trees.
We went to these caves that were amazing and since it was their anniversary they were being lit up by candles which made them even more beautiful.
That night my roommate Cristi came and Nikki lent us her car (she is truly a saint) so that we could go to our friend's reception in Annapolis, Maryland. That town is charming and so pretty. I was in awe the whole weekend and what a beautiful life some people lead. Sunday we went to church in Nikki's huge singles ward that was full of well educated, refined, globally minded people. I was stunned. Then that night we went on a tour of the monuments. I loved them all.
This is me and my roommate Cristi on the steps of the Lincoln monument looking out over the Washington monument and the WWII monument. My favorite though, was the Korean War Monument. We saw it at night when it was dark and quiet and it is a bunch of larger than life sized statues of soldiers with all their gear on walking through the plants. This caused a much more emotional reaction in me because all I could think about were these poor guys wandering through a strange country far away from family in bad weather, at night and in reality they were just waiting for the enemy to come out and attack them. What a scary way to live, as a target. I am so grateful for the soldiers, for all the amazing leaders this country has had and for the opportunity to live in a country that, I believe, has the best interests of its citizens at heart.

I'm Still Alive

So I got back to NYC on June 16th after going to dinner and Karaoke with my friends in Beijing. At Karaoke I sang the New York song that says "I want to wake up in the city that doesn't sleep" and I actually got on a plane and woke up in NYC. It was cool.

I went back to my ward and it felt like coming home. Many of my friends were still here and it has been a lot of fun to see them all again. I went immediately back to my temple shift, Saturday mornings at 5:00 am and I was called as the Spanish trainer for the session. Within the first two weeks at church I was asked to come up and give an impromptu testimony, asked to speak and given a calling as Relief Society Teacher. Looks like I didn't miss a beat.

I started training on June 18 to be an ESL teacher. The schedule was grueling. I taught middle school ESL for 4 hours in the morning every day, then went to school for a four hour class for my Masters degree, then I went to a special training program. The summer school that I taught at offered me a job for the fall so I will be teaching Beginning level ESL students at MS 326 starting Sept. 3rd. It has been fascinating and I will definitely tell you more about what it is like to teach students who have such limited life experience in NYC's inner-city public schools.

So now for some pictures....

My friend Seth asked my friend Amy to make this shirt for him to surprise me. It was hilarious!

I went with a group of friends up to Niagara Falls again.


This time we went to the base of the falls and danced under the spray. We got soaked but it was AWESOME!!!

We went to palmyra and saw the temple and the Sacred Grove. I love those places.

Then we say the Hill Cumorah Pageant. This pageant is really rather amazing. Nothing like the Manti temple pageant. This one is a BIG deal and very well done. Check out the sets and how huge the cast is.


My training ended and in August all I had to do was find a new apartment. I scoured the city and saw some of the most frightening excuses for an apartment that I have ever seen being rented for thousands of dollars a month. Luckily we found this one just one block down on our same street. It is a NYC historic landmark called Astor Row and it is the only place in NYC with a porch and front and back gardens. We move in August 18th.

I am heading to DC to visit Nikki Madsen tomorrow and then I will be goint to girls camp with the stake next week.

Wrap-up

So I have been avoiding posting because I didn't have any time to write, but then I realized that in the Allred Blogging world everyone is more interested in the pictures than anything else anyways.
So here is my recent life in pictures...

About a month ago I went on a field trip to the zoo with all 250 of my students. I stood in front of each animal and said its name and asked questions like, "What color is it? How many legs does it have? What is it doing? etc. " Apparently it was a rare event to have a foreign teacher at the zoo because we got quite the following. People would just follow me around and repeat my English. This is me and some of them in front of the panda.



The last weekend in May, five girls from the branch and I got on a train and headed to Xi'an to see the Terra Cotta Warriors. The train ride was like a slumber party and after some clever flirting with the cook we were invited to the dining car for free soup for breakfast.


The Terra Cotta Warriors were discovered by a Chinese peasant in the early 1970's while he was digging a well. An emporer in ancient China had them made to protect his tomb. It was like China's answer to the pyramids and quite impressive. They are still unearthing them. They have barely scratched the surface and the sight has been called the 8th wonder of the world.


At 4:30am (sunrise) they raise the Chinese flag over Tiananmen Square. It is a very significant experience for a Chinese person to attend. So I, in an effort to be Chinese, left my house at 3:30 in a taxi to have the experience. It was the quintessential Chinese moment, complete with crowds, bad smells, spitting and unexplanable patriotism. Other than that, the flag raising was pretty normal and uneventful but I do feel in some way, so much more Chinese.

That night 44 LDS Young Single Adults from around China climbed in a bunch of mini vans and headed for the Great Wall. We hiked for about an hour to the wall and up to one of the guard towers where we built a fire and had roast duck and chicken and spent the night. It was awesome!! Although there were parts of the wall that were so steep they made you want to die a little bit.

Me on the wall on the way back home. It was very misty and gave the wall a mysterious feeling but ruined the photo opps.





After getting back from the great wall a couple of friends and I went to Wanfujing (like Bejing's Time Square) for a culinary adventure...Chinese Style. This is me with a giant scorpion in my mouth. It was fried and not all that bad, not nearly as bad as the grasshopper, which I also ate but worse than the seahorse.
Last weekend I went to see the Forbidden City since I had not been there yet and it was cool but a lot of it was covered for reconstruction. I also got to go see the spot where China was dedicated for the preaching of the gospel.


That night I met up with some friends and went to a famous teahouse We are all Mormon so we had hot water instead of tea. I have actually become a big fan of a nice cup of hot water. This teahouse had all of the traditional Chinese entertainment including Chinese Opera, singing, a kung fu demonstration, shadow puppets, Chinese acrobats, and presentation of Bian Lian or Changing Faces. A man (pictured below) is a kind of magician and changes masks very fast without using his hands. I can't figure out how and he even let me look at his cape and hat.


I am wrapping up the last week of school and am spending all of my free time rehearsing for the big English Show on June 14th. It is my worst nightmare come true. It includes me on a stage in front of 1,000 people, dressed up like Fraeulein Maria singing Do Re Mi accapella solo and dancing around the stage with 15 little Chinese girls. It is what nightmares are made of.


I leave for the states on Saturday June 16th and I will miss China so much!! I love it here and could live here forever if I ever had the chance.

Great Mongolian Romance 2007

On our way home from our afternoon horseback ride, our guides wanted to stop off at the base of turtle rock and play some pool. There are a few pool tables set up and it is apparently their only form of entertainment. So we stopped and I met a Mongolian cowboy named Suuk Bot. He spoke no English but we had a lovely little chat, aided by Burma, who also served as our translator. We went back to our Ger and hung out at the billiards table in our little Ger town and a little later Suuk Bot showed up and wanted to hang out. It was a very funny conversation that we had through Burma, our translator. He asked me how old I was and not long after that he suggested that we get married. I thought maybe that was a little fast for me to jump into an engagement so I decided to point out some potential difficulties we might have as a couple, he gave some rather compelling arguments. I asked him how we were supposed to communicate if we couldn’t speak the same language. He told me that he would teach me Mongolian and that we really wouldn’t need to talk much. I can vouch for the fact that he really was a man of very few words, unfortunately I am most definitely NOT a woman of few words. I asked if he had ever been to the US or would want to live there he said we could go on our honeymoon there but then we would live in Mongolia. He told me he was the best looking Mongolian around and he was very rich and would be a very good husband. He invited my friends and I to his ger (which he shares with his parents) for breakfast the next morning. He said he would come over to our Ger on his horse to take us back. The next morning he knocked on our ger door and then led us over to his Ger past his herd of horses. His mother made us fried empanadas for breakfast and we hung out in their Ger. Suuk bot showed me all of their baby cows and after breakfast this dad took us to show us where they get their drinking water. They attach a plastic bottle to a tap in a tree and take the water from the tree. We had it for breakfast. It was cool and really good. Suuk Bot invited me to stay there at his Ger with him while the rest of my friends headed back to reality. I considered my options carefully, and while I do want to learn new languages and live abroad for the rest of my life, and as cool as it would sound to say I lived in a Ger with my Mongolian cowboy and drank water from a tree…I hate the cold, and Mongolia gets cold. So I said farewell to my Mongolian boyfriend and I am very happy that we ended things amicably.



We went back to Ulaanbaatar and went to a real Mongolian dance club. The live band was from the Philippines and all of their songs were in English. We had a great time dancing and then went home and crashed. The next day we bought some souvenirs and visited the square. Odd, fun fact: Most large cities in the world have a main square and it is typically my favorite place to visit. Then we got on the train to head back. The ride was much less crowded and therefore, much more pleasant…at first. I tried to sleep but the windows are not sealed very well so half of the Gobi desert flew into the train car and I inhaled it. My face and mouth were coated in a layer of dust and I couldn’t breathe so I sat up with my covered by my shirt all night.

We found a dirty little minivan with only one backseat to take us across the border. Unfortunately the border was closed so we ended up waiting for 8 hours for it to open. There were two alleged causes for the closure. One, we were told that the border couldn’t find the stamps for the passports and the second report said there was no electricity. We finally got through, and got on our bus back to Beijing. We slept on the bus and arrived in Beijing at 5 am. I went home, showered and then headed up to church. It was a fabulous trip. I got everything out of it that I wanted and would do it again all the same in a heartbeat.

Ah the Mongolian Country Life

We were greeted in Ulaanbaatar by our three friends; Eric, Devon and Mike and Burma, a girl from Mongolia who served her mission with Eric in Oklahoma. We went back to the hotel, took a much needed shower, went to the store to buy snacks and a much needed pair of sunglasses to shield my eyes from the intense desert sun and the crazy sand wind. There was not much of selection so I ended up getting some hideous things with an atrocious gold design on the side. and then jumped in cars that Burma had arranged for us and headed about forty minutes outside of the city to a place called turtle rock to experience the TRUE Mongolian lifestyle.

On the way to our campsite we saw a couple of Mongolian men with a HUGE eagle stopped the side of the road. We stopped to look at the eagle and he let us pet it and let whoever wanted to hold it, put on this big glove and hold him. The eagles feathers were so thick and hard that it almost felt like a reptile. A little further along the road we saw aOn the way to our campsite we saw a couple of Mongolian men with a HUGE eagle stopped on man with camels. We stopped and he let us ride them for 1,000 tigirig (about a dollar) a piece. It is a fairly bumpy ride but it was fun.















At turtle rock there were lots of camps full of Gers. A ger is the Mongolian version of a tee pee. It is wider and shorter and made of lambskins and everyone in Mongolia used to live in them and LOTS of people still do. Right in the middle of the city there are a bunch of little neighborhoods that are divided up by fences just like a normal neighborhood but instead of a little house in the middle of each, there is a ger. Inside the Ger there is a stove that is right in the middle with a pipe through the middle of the roof. The beds are placed along the outside walls. The front door is really short and it is pretty warm inside. Especially when someone keeps the stove going all night. We had stew for dinner and then went wandering around in the hills.




You will notice huge fake dinosaurs in front of these Gers. Come to find out, Mongolia is somewhat of a dinosaur graveyard. They dig up all sorts of bones in the deserts.


We woke up the next day and had arranged for a lamb to be slaughtered. We watched and I was expecting to be horrified but it was so quick and clean. Nothing like what I expected. The Mongolian guides made a small incision in the lamb’s chest and then he stuck his arm in all the way and snapped the lamb’s spinal chord. The lamb didn’t even move. There was no blood during the whole slaughter because they kept all the organs in the lambs natural membrane. They put the pieces of meat into a large milk can with rocks that had been heating up in the fire and then put the can on the stove in the middle of their ger.













We left on a horseback ride with our two Mongolian guides. Mongolian horses are much smaller than what you are used to in America but ther are really strong and strong willed I might add. Mine had a real attitude problem so I cussed at it in Mongolian and hit it with the reins…she didn’t care.









We visited a Buddhist temple that was up on a hill and then went riding around all over the place before coming back to a delicious Lamb lunch in our ger.














Many of you unadventurous travelers have said my vacation didn’t sound all that great. It was in fact AMAZING!! How many of you have pet an eagle, ridden a camel, eaten fresh lamb or learned how to curse at a horse in Mongolian?

Stay tuned for part three, entitled, my Great Mongolian Romance 2007....

Great Mongolian Adventure 2007 Part 1

On Sunday after church I rushed home and threw a few items of warm clothing in a backpack and headed to a bus station about 15 minutes from my apartment to start my Great Mongolian Adventure 2007. To commemorate the one-week May holiday 4 friends and I decided to brave the deserts of Outer Mongolia. I met up with my friend Faye and we climbed onto a tall red bus. Inside there were three rows of bunk beds that stretched from the front of the bus to the end. The bus started heading north out of Beijing at 5 pm and we rode, talked and slept in our bunk beds until 5 am when we reached the border town between Inner Mongolia (part of China) and Outer Mongolia (not part of China). We took our time getting off the bus (it was 5 am and cold) so by the time we got out we were the only bus passengers who hadn’t been swooped away by the over eager cab drivers. The 20 cab drivers who were left without passengers attacked and were trying to physically drag us into their cars using rather unconvincing coaxing in a mixture of Chinese, Mongolian and English. According to Faye one guy even grabbed her bum! Since when will that convince a girl to get in your car? There was one HUGE Mongolian man with long dirty hair and wild eyes. He looked to me like what I imagine Ghenghis Khan looked like. We decided that the Genghis look alike was a good omen for our trek into Mongolia so we jumped in his car and he took us to a little hotel where we could nap until the border opened at 9. We slept and then after haggling for a price for the ride that would take us through the border we got in a dirty old van and the driver drove us around town for three hours looking for more passengers.
We left China and got Mongolian stamps in our passports and were dropped off at the train station in Outer Mongolia. On the wall at the entrance someone had spray painted in English “Death is comino” we assumed they meant Death is coming but were undeterred. We got to the train station at 1 pm only to find that all the train tickets had been sold out for the day. Our friends were waiting for us in UlaanBataar and that 17-hour train ride was the only way to get there. We tried everything to get on that train. Even all the scalper’s tickets were sold out. We had asked and begged everyone but were finding no solutions.
This is the lovely border town that we almost got stuck in.

Then Baikel found us (she is the one in gray). She spoke some English and is the kindest warmest person I think I have ever met. She made us her project for the day and dragged us around town trying to use every connection she could find to get us on that train. Finally she hooked us up with a train smuggler who spoke no English, we paid the woman 20,000 Togrot (about 20 dollars). At 4:30 as all the ticketed passengers were charging the guards at the doors to the train cars our smuggler took me and yelled at the guards to lay off as she pushed me on board. Baikel yelled, “you will have to find Faye in one of the other cars when the train starts moving!” Once on board I was alone in a crowded sweaty train car with lots of boxes and tons of people who spoke no English and looked at me as though I were definitely lost. I sat down near a family and prayed that Faye had made it on board, I had no way of knowing since our phones didn’t work and I couldn’t go looking for her until the train started moving…when it would be to late to do anything about it if she hadn’t.

The train started moving and after about twenty minutes I started to walk through the crowded cars looking for Faye. I found her 6 cars up sitting in a sweaty heap with a large group of Mongolians.
This begins the portion of the trip that we loving call Tangled and Sweaty Mongolian Adventure 2007. We were so excited that we both made it. I joined the sweaty heap and we made a bunch of friends although nobody spoke any English. Fortunately, through my experience living alone in a country where I can’t communicate and teaching children who don’t understand me, I have become quite proficient at communicating without words and well, Faye is a phenomenal artist. Her drawing of a toilet wowed them all. Mongolian culture is unlike any other I have seen. Everything is communal and everyone is family right from the start. There are no formalities, (well other than if you step on someone’s foot you have to shake their hand). I figure this culture must come from the fact that Mongolians are traditionally people who live a very hard nomadic desert life in tents. They MUST help each other to survive so their charity is not so much a gift like it is with Latin Americans as much as it is a way of life. It seemed to me that the way they look at life is, if you are in their presence you are family. No questions asked, you are treated like family and they expect to be treated like your family. They get close very fast and they don’t expect gratitude for the kind things they do for you, they do them because that is who they are, not because they are looking for a reaction from you. We hung out all night until our smuggler, who found us later and brought us back to her car, and her people got off. Then we slept until about 9:30 am when we pulled into Ulaanbaatar after a 17 hour train ride across the Gobi Desert.

Here is a picture of a traditionally dressed Mongolian man who cuddled with our sweaty heap for a few hours.

My wordiness should come as no surprise to anyone reading this, but if you would like the condensed version for the next few days of the trek, let me know.

My Chinese Easter Part One

For those of you who were frequent visitors to my blog you might have noticed a prolonged absence. My excuse: I live in China and Blogspot was and still is blocked, don’t ask questions. Here is a long one to make up for it….

My Easter celebration began during my Wednesday night adult English class while I was trying to explain Easter without talking about Christ, virtually impossible. Then my students asked me why we use eggs and why we color them. The research I have done on the subject since then has been rather inconclusive. It is just a bunch of guesses. So I decided against the Easter egg tradition in exchange for something a little more Chinese and therefore a little more exciting.

On Friday night another teacher at my school named Belinda asked if I wanted to come over to her house for dinner with her mother and father and grandmother. We made Easter Jaozi. For those of you who read my Chinese New Year blog, Jaozi are very traditional Chinese dumplings. They are like potstickers, they are made with really thin dough and a variety of meat and vegetable fillings like beef and green pepper or chicken and carrot and then steamed. Belinda’s parents are a bunch of geniuses and used carrot juice, purple cabbage juice and some little green herb (not marijuana) juice to dye the dough orange, purple and green. So we folded the jaozi and they looked like Easter Chinese style. It was far less messy than all of the egg dying I remember and SO tasty. A fabulous Chinese treat. I did NOT however hide the jaozi about the house as I was a guest in the home and could not really imagine making her 96-year-old grandmother scamper around the apartment looking for them.














Saturday morning I went to watch conference at the church. There were about 50 people there despite the fact that it was a rerun. I enjoyed it so much. That evening I tried to go for my yearly Easter mass at the Catholic church here but it was so crowded I couldn’t even get in. I stayed and listened to the priest sing the Mass in Chinese for a while but then I had to go to meet Aunt Ada.














Ada (Grandma Allred’s sister) and Dex (her son, Dad’s cousin) were staying at a very nice hotel right in the middle of Beijing so I went and had dinner with them. They had been to see Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City and had gone pearl shopping at the pearl market. It was so fun to see family all the way here in China and on Easter no less.

That night we went out bowling and I broke one hundred. I know that claim is rather pathetic to most of you bowlers but…I bowled a 43 a couple of weeks ago. My secret, I just let the ball do the work.

I spent the night at my friend Faye’s house and was able to get to church in 15 MINUTES instead of the standard 2 hour commute to church that I have grown to love and hate. That was my first Easter miracle, then I got two bags of Easter chocolately goodness from a couple of the amazing members of the branch here. Side note: If a person gains nothing else from living abroad other than the chance to see how wards were, in my opinion, meant to function like a close knit loving family then it is all worth it. I have been blown away by how amazing the members of the church are here and how kind and loving they are toward me. So, bags of chocolatey goodness was Easter miracle #2. Conference, as always, was amazing but I was really sad to see Sister Parkin be released. I am sure the next General RSP will be wonderful, but for some reason I really loved Sister Parkin. She just seemed so humble and real to me, like someone whom you could just sit down with at her kitchen table and talk about life and she would be wonderful and understanding and loving and down to earth. More on that later. After church a family from the ward invited the YSA over to Easter Dinner; Easter miracle #3. There was hanging out and general Easter appropriate merriment to be had all day. All in all it was a fabulous Easter weekend and what with three miracles, someone should be sainted.