Conference and Birthdays! Two amazing things!

So I finally finished watching conference on Friday.  I had to give a talk on my favorite conference talk yesterday.  I decided to combine two of the talks.  One was Elder Cook's talk from Saturday afternoon and the other was President Uchtdolf's talk on Sunday morning.  They were both mostly about finding peace and God's light in difficult times.  I loved them!  Of course I loved Elder Holland's talk too! All the talks were so good!

Monday was normal.  Just hanging out and teaching.  Tuesday night Sarah and I had a roommate date.  We went out to Tianyi and shopped and it was fun.  Wednesday after we taught Sarah, Sasha and I went into town and shopped some more and had dinner.  Thursday is still our long teaching day so all we did was teach and nap.  Friday we taught in the morning and while we were teaching a bunch of Chinese teachers and parents and kids from other schools came and like bombarded our classes.  They just stared and watched us teach.  It was intimidating and crazy.  We all hung out and chilled till dinner time and we went to Babelas.  Saturday was my birthday!  I got sung to several times in the morning.  We went to lunch at the Irish pub in Lai Wei Tan.  Everything in Lai Wei Tan is for foreigners.  All the restaurants and shops and spas are mostly European and owned by Europeans.  We ate burgers and fries and it was so delicious! We were eating outside in this courtyard area and another group of all guys were there too.  It turns out that they were celebrating a birthday too.  They are all on the football (soccer) team at the Nottingham college in Ningbo.  They were all from different countries.  France, England, Italy, Brazil, Guatemala, and two from Russia.  After lunch we went shopping again.  We really like shopping.  We came back home and took showers since we only have certain times when we have hot water.  On the weekends its at 7pm, which is annoying.  I got a call from one of the other foreign teachers at our school, Silvia, and she told me to come down to the PYP building for a surprise.  I went down and they had made homemade pizza and made me my own for my birthday!  It was so sweet of them.  We went to their apartments a little while later and had ice cream and strawberries.  It was a good birthday!  I can't believe how old I am! Sunday I spoke in church and after church.  Silvia (who had come to our meeting just to hear me speak.  She isn't a member) took me to where she gets her hair cut and they washed, trimmed, and styled my hair for only 10 yuan!  So amazing.  Interesting thing about China, only men do hair here.  There are only men hairstylists.  That's not true I have seen one women.  But they men here are obessed with their hair.  The women will either have it down, in a bob, or in a ponytail.  The men go crazy and worry about their hair.  It's rather funny.  That's really everything that's going on.

The church is true!  Life is great! Love you!