weekend with the family

Friday night we went to another wedding reception as a family. Two more JCI engineers getting married to each other. I guess that's what happens when you have a bunch of 25 year old co-eds working together every day. The reception was cool and the kids were a big hit (as they always are wherever they go). Kind of funny that whenever they have a ceremony, they expect the most senior people in the crowd to make toasts. In this case Wim Jacobs (my boss) was the most senior, so he got asked to step up and make a toast. A little funny to see a guy get blindsided by a toast request in front of 100 people in a foreign country where you can't speak the language. He handled it well. "Are you serious you want me to give a toast? Are you really serious?" The best was when he said they would be very happy together and then everyone laughed after the translation. The translator sitting next to us said the translator for Wim said he was encouraging them to have a baby as soon as possible. Which is what I've always suspected about using a translator in meetings. Pretty cool tradition with trying to toast each other by drinking wine with your arm wrapping around the other persons neck. Hard to describe, so just check out the video. Saturday was a trip to the soccer field down the street (2 miles). We snuck through a crack in the fence and played a little 3 on 3. We didn't want to play on a full field, so we had to drag the goal from the sideline onto the middle of the field. This was a bit heavier than we anticipated. So when we got it into place we had to flip it 90 degrees to get it right side up. When we did, Nathan held onto the cross bar and it flipped him up in the air until his head stopped his momentum by hitting the cross bar. Then came the unfortunate ending where he rotated, let go of the bar, and fell 6 feet onto his back. It was a funniest videos kind of moment except he wasn't laughing. We had a good game though and that makes all the pain go away. On Sunday, I took my bike to the grocery store. Turns out sunday is shopping day in china. Also turns out when 8 million people all go shopping at the same time, the stores get a whisker busy. Being busy, however, did not keep me from a couple of impulse buys. I came across a bag of cereal while I was buying my oatmeal. The picture on the bag looked exactly like corn flakes. I thought it was worth the risk to see what was inside that bag. The chinese have learned the power of marketing. I bought a giant bag of babyfood that actually looked like, well, baby food because it had a sweet picture on the outside. Hope springs eternal. This afternoon we went to church for the first time. We met some of the usual gang and went out for dinner afterwards. The kids didn't much care for any of the food. It might have been the bowl of blood pudding, cow stomach, and cow tendons. Not sure. There was a new guy at church. Phillipe. He's from Mexico as well. Kind of funny the number of Mexicans we're meeting in Changchun. He invited us to a "Mexican independence' party on 9/16. Not sure what a Mexican independence party looks like in China, but we're definitely going. He also said he would be willing to play soccer next week after church. Our kids will get their eyes opened seeing mexican men play soccer instead of their dad. We also got our slingbox working this weekend. Just in time to watch some quality UM football. (not so great watching MSU beat up on the broncos of WMU) Pretty amazing that we only had 5 channels when we lived on Francis. Now we have 1000 american channels now that we live in china. I'm not sure what to do with 6 ESPN's, but I'm sure I'll figure something out.