A Very Important Thumbs Up

Hospitality is a word that often gets thrown about lightly and for many different purposes. This weekend, we discovered hospitality in a way unlike anything we had known before.

Background: This past weekend was a BIG one in the small country of China, for every year, around this time in January, the Chinese celebrate Spring Festival aka Chinese New Year(the traditional Lunar Calendar is a bit slow, haha). This is a time when over 300 million Chinese travel home to be with family and celebrate a great past year, and, hopefully, a fabulous upcoming year. Entire cities are closed, fireworks reminding you of D-Day are set off, but above all, you are together as a family.

Our Story: For the past couple of weeks, we have had a student, Lisa, living with us in our main apartment, with the girls. In return for our hospitality, she invited us to experience some of her own hospitality. Before we knew it, Margaret, Judit, Chad, and I were hours away from our city and in a small farming village surrounded on all sides by mountains; Spring Festival was a day away, and we were about to meet the parents...

Our Story (Part Deux): What followed was three days of meeting family, extended relatives, and friends and classmates. Each time we went to another house to visit, we were greeted with smiles and more peanuts, oranges, and sunflower seeds than you could shake a stick at (I honestly thought about trying). Constantly asking if we needed any more of anything, our hosts made sure each and every one of our needs were met. One of Lisa's uncles pretty much forced me to wear his coat to go outside and use the bathroom, even after I assured him I was quite warm and didn't need it (for some reason they didn't understand English so well out there...huh). We were never allowed to help with dishes, though I was able to in a sneaky way :), and helping cook was right out!...so instead we asked it we could "learn" how to make Jiaozi (dumplings), again we had to be very clever. Haha that turned out to be a fun time, from being ashamed of our one dumpling that took us 2 minutes to make, to taking 15 seconds and even getting the thumbs up from Grandma(coolest old Chinese lady ever)! I made sure to have Lisa tell her grandmother that I thought I made better dumplings than her...Grandma got a good laugh out of that. A lot of nothing happened there, but at the same time a lot of something happened. There are many stories from this weekend, so feel free to ask one of us some time :)

The Road Goes Ever On and On: This weekend we learned that hospitality is not just opening up your home for someone, it's giving of yourself, all you have, even the coat off your back, to someone you've never met, who doesn't even speak the same language, and expecting nothing in return other than for them to except everything you give them. That was an amazing lesson learned.