Days 6 and 7

Day Six went by fairly uneventfully.  I ventured to bus with the boys by myself (no small endeavor when it involves crossing eight lane crazy highways with two jumpy boys) so that we could go to church. It was certainly nice to see other humans again!

Day Seven dawned with the return of the renovating crew who burst onto the day with such zeal (8:00am) that we were deafened by their feverish pitch of air guns, cement drilling machines, saws, wrecking balls and the infamous "flatulence machine" (I might have added wrecking balls).  We were calmly eating breakfast when right underneath the table the most ear splitting machine possible sent the boys into a fray of screams, and me jumping to the roof.  I am not kidding when I say that these are the kinds of construction noises that a requires North American construction companies to provide their workers with protective ear equipment.  At my parent's suggestion (who got to hear the whole thing on skype), we stuffed our ears with the cotton from the boys' vitamin bottle.  

It really was sad.  The boys had started the morning so happy, but when the noises started Jude in particular spent the morning shaking like a leaf and clinging to me.  When we moved to a new part of the house it followed us.  Normally I would have taken them outside, but I had to study for my exam this afternoon.  Eventually I just put on Robin Hood for the boys and sat closely huddled with them so that they finally relaxed (Jude even slept for half an hour through the fray, as long as he was curled up on top of my chest with my arms wrapped tightly around him). 

 Yes I did manage to study!  I had my exam, and managed to score a 96%!  This launched me into the next textbook, having finished the first.  My teacher also told me that my pronuciation has really been improving.  Hurray!  

When learning new vocabulary after the exam, one of the new vocabulary was the word for "body" or "health" - shenti.  My teacher asked me to make a sentence with this word.  So I said  "Zai Jianada wo xue shenti" meaning "In Canada I studied health".  From the way that she almost spit out her water laughing, I'm sure my sentence came out sounding extremely crass and vulgar.  Later in the lesson, I had my turn to keep my laughter in.  My teacher was trying to describe just how fat her husband is.  She spread her arms wide and said over and over again "He's so fat!  He eats huge mounds of noodles in under three minutes!  He is fat!"  I couldn't tell if this was a bad thing or a good thing, but whatever it was, she seemed to be extremely energetic about it.  

5 more sleeps!