More China...

...Only this time, China came to us!  This week we hosted two young girls on exchange from Chongqing, China. Amanda is 13 and very limited in her Chinese. Jenny is 14, and did most of the speaking for the two of them, although her English is only somewhat better. What cracked me up was that Kaia and Jaelyn loved spending time with them, and would have quite the one way conversations with the girls!

When they first arrived and I showed them their rooms (now that Kellen is gone we have a spare room, and Josh's room was available due to he and Mike being at wrestling camp), they were both scared of falling out of Josh's loft bed. I told them they could share the guest room, but Jenny finally agreed to stay in Josh's room. Well it only took one day for that space to become the hangout, where I heard typical girl chatter and much giggling taking place. It might have been in a foreign language, but teenage girls are the same everywhere!  I even caught them taking photos of Josh's photo! I understood "Justin Bieber" when they were chatting while looking at his photos. Kind of glad that he was gone while they were here, or I think there would have been some mad crushes!  I took the girls to Kellen's apartment one day, and they were quite shy around him. Not the same two girls that were giggling in their room earlier.

Jaelyn, Jenny, me, Amanda, and Kaia saying goodbye.

Time went by to quickly, and they had to move on to another family since we are going camping and I have class coming up. We are hoping to be able to make the farewell party in August. Josh will be back, so I will definitely take him to meet the girls:) Since our conversations were so limited, I'm not exactly sure where they thought Mike and Josh were, so it may be a complete surprise to them to actually meet the rest of the family.

In typical Chinese fashion, the girls came laden with gifts for us. A beautiful purple fan (how did Jenny know my favorite color) and stand, a wallet made out of Chinese yuan, three music CD's, several Chinese paper cutouts, a stuffed pig for Jaelyn, and a teacup for Kaia. But my favorite gift was the new Starbucks coffee mug! How did Amanda know I have a collection of mugs from this exact same series? When she gave it to me I enthusiastically dragged her over to my cupboard to show her my other three mugs. She must've thought I was some crazy lady!