I'm leaving, on a jet plane

wait ... on an overnight train I mean.

Tonight we are leaving for Beijing. This is a 6-day vacation and I am so excited! I'm going to stand on the Great Wall of China ... what are you doing this weekend?

Mom's takin' us to the ...

That's right! The Zoo! Today we spent about 3 hours at the local zoo, which turns out to be only a 10 minute bus ride from the school. It was a pretty big zoo. The most impressive thing to me was how close you could get to the animals; sometimes it was a little scary!!

Dance, Dance!

For the past few weeks we have been having dance practice with a 6th grader named Candy. She taught us a sweet dance that she made up and on Saturday we performed it for the English program at the school. If you want to watch the dance click Chelsea's blog link on my blogroll. It was really fun and we had crazy/hilarious costumes. Shiny white geenie pants? Sign me up.



Me and Chelsea, me and Meghan, and me and my roomie Joelle.

Someone's in the Kitchen

The other day I went behind the scenes and ventured into the kitchen at the school.

The have big pots a-brewing with food for plenty of kids and teachers.

Here are some of the lady cooks rolling dumplings for us! A few seconds before our cook "Mr. Lee" tried to "kidnap" the girl on the right using saran wrap. So funny.

Here is a favorite cook affectionately known as Happy Man or Happy Cook. He always smiles!! They are some pretty friendly people. (notice the huge bowls of noodles)

Chelsea made a cake to use in one of her lessons. They have a cool oven back there!

Chinese Dance Club

Last weekend we all went to a dance club in Hefei. Some of the girls had been there a few times before, but this was the first time I had gone. When we got there no one was on the dance floor ... so we Americans decided to make fools out of ourselves and dance in front of everybody. So what if we look like fools? No one can even tell us that we do. AND it was really fun. We acted like goofballs and danced for about an hour. At 10 the people crowded the floor and we were smashed between sweaty Chinese people bouncing up and down.

The smoke was a little overwhelming, but overall it was a fabulous night of dancing and laughing and enjoying ch-ch-ch-CHINA!

PS I have to give picture credit to the fabulous Chelsea Davis :)

Campus

The weather has been looking up recently so I took the opportunity to roam around campus and take some pictures of my home, in good light.

This is the "flat" where we foreign teachers live. My room is the second window to the left of the entrance gate. The gate is manned by some really happy guards who always smile and wave as we cheerfully say "ni hao!" whenever we walk in and out ... hopefully they smile because they like us, and not because they are amused by our poor Chinese!

This is the view of the entrance gate and our flat (to the left) from across the track. If you continue to the left there is a swimming pool (which has yet to be filled, and on the right are some teacher offices. The building on the far right is the auditorium where our kids watch movies every Saturday night, and apparently have dance practice. Sometimes they let us foreign teachers use the auditorium to watch movies!!

There are plenty of these inspirational signs around campus. The front side is in Chinese and the back side is in English. I've read a few of them, and only sometimes laugh at the pictures who have had their eyes gorged out by the less appreciative students.


The building in the background is one of the high school buildings. I've only been in it once (while we were playing night games around campus) but I have run past it too many times to count. The track and I are becoming well acquainted, partly because there is nothing else to do and partly because Annie and I have plans to run a relay this summer!

Xi'an etc

Last weekend we went on our 3rd vacation. 8 of us decided to go to Xi'an and the surrounding cities. It was a great trip; the weather was perfect, the hostels were nice, and the sites were pretty cool.

The city of LUOYANG is about 9 hours by train from Hefei. We took an overnight and Chelsea and I got top bunk sleepers. Best decision ever. Sleepers are a great way to travel. At the train station we got 2 cabs that ended up driving us in a circle and then ripping us off. Stupid. After a long nap we took the city bus to our first site: the LONGMEN CAVES. A bunch of Buddhas carved into rocks. Actually, according to my amazing China Insight Guide "there are over 1,300 grottoes, 700 niches, containing 40 pagodas, 2,780 inscriptions and more than 100,000 statues and images". They all date back to the 5th - 7th centuries. Cool beans.

The SHAOLIN temple was our next stop. We took a bus tour that left from our hostel. We thought it would be a good deal to do this, but we once again got ripped off and taken to a few uninteresting buildings/fields (with gross bathrooms) before we actually made it to the temple. Despite my resentment towards the tour guide I actually enjoyed Shaolin. We saw a short show given by some of the Kung Fu students. Then we acted like Kung Fu-ers posing and climbing on some poles. We looked ridiculous but enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. We walked to the pagoda forest and as we were walking back to the bus we were passed by swarms of students dressed in red and marching. "yi, er, san, si!"

After our trip to Shaolin we went to catch a train to Xi'an. It was an hour late and we didn't end up in Xi'an until 5 am. After that uncomfortable ride all we wanted to do was sleep, but when we arrived at the hostel we found out that they had given our rooms away. We were displaced about the hostel. Chelsea, Danielle, and I ended up in a honeymoon suite for about 2 hours before they woke us up and put us in our real room. After that little kerfuffle, we slept. And slept.

XI'AN is a neat city. The cab drivers are nicer than in Louyang and there are a lot of trees. However, there is an uncomfortable amount of white people and the air is thickly polluted. I took a deep breath at the train station and it was not pleasant. We spent one day in Xi'an trinket shopping, wandering the Muslim quarter, eating funny food, and exploring the popular sites (without paying any entrance fees of course). It was nice to take a break and wander around without any time constraints. Most of the girls bought gifts gallore! I had a fun time haggling but still have a hard time spending my precious yuan. Oooh well.

Our last site was the TERRACOTTA WARRIORS! We took the city bus about an hour to the warriors. AND I became Danielle for a while when I used her student ID to get the discount. Thanks Danielle! We saw all of the pits of warriors and looked around the museums. It was a nice place. The warriors though were a little underwhelming. I guess I had heard so much about them, how they were so incredible, that I was expecting a little more than 3 pits of carved statues. Don't get me wrong, still cool.

We took another overnight back to Hefei on which I slept a solid 8 hours. I keep thinking about how I must have been trained on my 13 hour car trips to Alberta every summer, and now I can sleep wherever. We arrived at the Hefei train station and once again it was raining, just like every other time we've arrived home.

So, a successful trip I'd say. I'm already looking forward to our next vacation in two weeks! Beijing here we come.

TEACHER!!!

me: Hi! How are you?
student: Teacher this! [pointing to any object I'm carrying ... lets pretend a sticker]
me: oh what is that?
student: Teacher yellow!
me: oh hey! it IS yellow! Good job!
student: Teacher I wanna!
me: you wanna????
student: yes
me: what do you want?
student: uuuuhh ... teacher I wanna
me: do you want it?
student: yes
me: sigh, okay here
student: hahaha [runs away]