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The Buddhist Printing House was simply amazing. Of course, I forgot the camera :( The house was established in the 1800's by a man who wanted to create a place to (a) print Buddhist scripture and (b) provide learning about Buddhism. The house still does all it's printing in the traditional style: wood block carving. The craftsmen spend days carving countless Chinese characters on a wooden block. The pages are printed by another craftsmen brushing ink all over the block, placing a thin page of paper on the ink and the rubbing the back of the page with another specialized tool. The pages are then folded and bound together with string. There were huge stacks of paper everywhere. I loved it.

Also, this place has the largest collection of Buddhist scripture printing blocks in the world. We went into the library which was simply shelves upon shelves of wooden blocks. They are organized by a number written on their end in chalk. The whole room smelled of that wonderful old, scholarly smell. I loved it, too.

After the printing house, we went to Punjabi's Indian restuarant for dinner. Oh so yummy! Believe it or not, I'd never had Indian food before we moved here to China. I now love it.

I also bought a new coat yesterday. The one I brought from home was more like a windbreaker. I simply had no need for a heavy coat while living in Arizona. My new one is a green courdaroy coat lined with a fleece hoodie. You guessed it: I love it. It's a man's jacket, but I don't care. I just needed one as I was freezing my tooshie off!

Today is our church Thanksgiving celebration. I need to go to the market this morning and buy potatoes. I'm in charge of bringing mashed potatoes and a dessert. If I can find pumpkins at the market, I may attempt another pumpkin custard-pie. We shall see.

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Why is it that every few days, I want to start my lj entry with "Today was pure craziness!" I suppose this is just the facts of life that accompany living in China. I think to myself, though, it can't be this hard for everyone else who lives here, can it? Surely shopping, cooking, transportation, is not so difficult for the whole country! It must be that I just haven't figured out how to live here yet, how to live "correctly".

*sigh* Today was pure craziness.

I was asked to bring mashed potatoes and dessert to the church Thanksgiving dinner which was held today. I had to go to the market this morning to buy the potatoes and a pumpkin. I wanted to try and make another pumpkin pie to take. We left the house at 10:30 and didn't arrive back home until 2 hours later. The market is only a 10 minute drive from our home. But we have to park and walk and find the good potatoes at a decent price. Then we have to wait for the other faculty who went with us to finish their shopping. Then we have to go to the regular grocery store because Zack eats a box of cereal a day and we are totally out of kid cereal. Then we have to wait for the driver to come back and get us. Finally, we arrive back home. I have 45 minutes to cook and hand mash 25 potatoes.

Except for one small thing. Our apartment has no water. That was the last straw. I called the church ladies and said "I'm sorry, I can't bring any potatoes." Of course, they were totally understanding. Then, Chris and I decided that since we had to go into Nanjing for the dinner and then again tomorrow for church, we'd just stay in a hotel tonight. We really needed to get out of our apartment. You see, not only did we not have water, but our washing machine has also been broken for 2 days (ok, maybe I had something to do with that...) and our sink has been leaking for a week. Also, we discovered a leak in Zack's bedroom window (we've had a lot of rain over the past two days). The leak in his window has caused the paint to melt off the wall! We just had to get out of there.

Everyone's asleep now. The church dinner was fabulous and there were plenty of potatoes. We had to walk back to the hotel because it is near impossible to find a taxi on a rainy day. The kids (Zack) whined about that. But after that we just stayed in and watched tv. Chris went and got pizza. It was a fun night, very relaxing. Also, the Internet connection here is fabulous! We downloaded two free shows on iTunes, "30 Rock" and "3 lbs". They were both ok, nothing great. At home it takes about 2 days to download an episode of, for example, Lost. Painfully slow. This is much better :)