Well... My mom and I just got back from a traumatizing trip. We were invited to spend a "traditional Chinese New Year" with one of my mom's co-workers. Not a good thing. The main probloem was the food, as well as the physical discomfort. There was at least one dish a day that completely shocked us. On Saturday it was frog soup with whole frogs floating in it. On Sunday it was turtle soup with a whole turtle in it, and we tried really hard not to watch as one of the family members actually sucked bits off of the shell. TT__TT Waaah! Poor turtle! Then on Monday, it was a plate of whole fried sparrows. Little dead birds on a plate! Heads and all! TT___TT Sooo bad! I ate almost nothing every single day, because there was nothing I could eat... KFC actually saved my poor starving self... We managed to get in two meals at KFC, the only time I ate more than two bites of something. Thank god for KFC... Other than that, the trip was just not what we expected. We thought we were going to be watching cool and exciting cultural performances and seeing a huge ceramics market we had heard about. But no. Instead, we sat around on really hard wooden benches in a freezing cold house that barely had electricity watching the co-worker's family eat gross food, yell at each other, and play mahjong (ma jiang). Not fun. Mom even had a few suggestions for the co-worker of things we might like to do, and asked her about them. No effect. So we basically hung out with the co-worker and her family for three awful, starving, freezing, uncomfortable days. And that was our Chinese New Year. Which totally sucks because if we had been left to our own devices we could have done a ton of really fun things. Oh well... I think it's just that we're so completely different from them that they don't understand us very well. But I think it's the same the other way around too... Like if we had a Chinese person come and spend random time with our family for Thanksgiving or something like that, maybe they would have just as hard a time? I kinda don't think so though. I think that most Chinese people are just so accustomed to having to live in harsh conditions for so long that they would be able to live anywhere. So I think they would be much better off with us than we are with them in ways of food, comfort, entertainment, etc. We are very grateful to her for thinking of us, and trying to give us an interesting experience, but I think she just doesn't quite understand that we weren't exactly enjoying it. Oh well, it's over.

(Done talking about the trip.)

So that's what's been happening lately.  I was pretty much just hanging out for the first week of the holiday, and then Saturday through today (Tuesday) I was kidnapped and tortured.  Hahaha, alright, not quite, but close enough.  The rest of the holiday will probably be spent hanging around with mom, since she's off work now, and probably doing a bunch of homework...at some point...  Oh, and hopefully roller skating.  That's all for now, maybe I'll complain about the trip and/or contemplate the gigantic cultural differences between us and the Chinese.  Fun, huh? ;P