Travel and Last few weeks:

I just wanted to finish up the review of these last few weeks before we set off for our month journey around china and southeast asia. Sorry the last blog was so long, but just think of it as the last few months all put into one. While you wait for the travel blog you can read all of this last one. We will be traveling from January 26-February 26. So we will have a month of blogging to do when we get home Here are the destinations

Beijing ( Forbidden City, Great Wall, Summer Palace, Tianamen Square)

Xian ( terracotta warriors, Hot springs)

Tibet ( lhasa, yamdrsko lake, all monasteries, Mount Everest BaseCamp

Cambodia ( Dirt bike tour through country stopping in temples and historic sites for sight seeing)

Hopefully we will make it to all these places. Travel planning has been difficult because in China you don’t plan anything until last minute. So as a foreigner it’s very frustrating. We will see where we end up. I know you will be awaiting the next blog.

Now for the last few weeks update

First I want to introduce you to my new girl posse. I now have a set of twins and several of their friends that like to find me after school and take me around town. If I step outside the school gate these girls find me and run to me ending in a huge embrace. Then they all take a piece of my arm, like a mother and her ducklings and we walk down the street until their street comes where we part ways by blowing kisses. Its really cute, these girls know only a lick of English , but they just enjoy being seen with me, kinda like little groupies. First I thought it was interesting to see twins in china, but we actually have two sets in our small town that we’ve seen. Both girls. It always brightens my day especially since these girls English names are lily and lulu. Don’t mix them up or you’ll get a mad little girl saying no I’m lily she’s lulu. In a tough voice.

We also recently had the senior 3 teachers over for dinner. Joe taught them to play craps. We used a huge piece of paper and drew the board and then used monopoly money, probably the most ghetto craps game ever, but I never saw these guys more excited. They were screaming and hollering when the dice was being rolled just like Vegas!

KTV: we felt really bad about the students that didn’t make it into being the host for the performance so we took the top 15 kids from the competition to the local Karaoke joint. Just to let you know karaoke is the biggest thing since sliced bread and let me tell you Chinese people can sing!! All of them. Maybe it’s a stereotype I’m starting but no really these people can sing!! The students spent three hours in this rented room. You can rent it by the hour or by the package. They spent there Sunday Afternoon (there only free time all week) belting the latest Chinese pop tunes and even played some English ones for Joe and I . We sang some britney spears but really did awful in the end I started to feel sorry for these kids for having to listen to us. We also got a cake and really just enjoyed letting the kids break out of their school shells.

Zhang Guing:

Recently we visited the 500 year old village in our province. It’s called Zhong Guing and it is said that all the Zhang’s from the whole world were started in this small town. It’s very interesting because this town is completely intact. Nothing has changed and the whole town is made up of buildings that all share a common roof. Almost like the skyways in Minneapolis, you never have to go outside. They even have parts of the city where there are small holes in the roof for collecting rainwater. The scary thing is as you walk around this place people still live here. We walked right into someone’s house accidentally like 5 times. Because everything is really shared commonly. They had a shrine to the ancestor Zhang his tomb there as well. The also had old rice tools there that you could try out and play with. There was even an old irrigation system they used kinda like peddling a bike. ( pictures are on the picture site) We even found the place where all the virgins in the town were kept until their marriage. They were made to do embroidery all day long. Interesting life. We also hiked into the mountains and decided that this was defiantly a trip worth taking again. I think we will come back and hike and maybe even bring a Chinese student so that they can translate some of the many things for us.

The Fish!!! If you’ve looked on the picture website you’ve probably already been sick, if not, I’ll warn you right now the pictures are not for viewing before or after eating. We were given 140lbs of fish from our school just last week! If you remember we were given a whole pig last fall. This gift is for the spring festival and every teacher in our school got 70 lbs of fish. Since there’s two of us they gave us 140!! Great! What are we supposed to do with our weight in fish? Especially right before our vacation?? Well the first 70lbs we gave away to our friend Leo. He’s a man that works for a construction company and part of the government. We met him a while ago and he likes to take us out for tea a lot so we thought this would be a good way to repay all his kindness. He was so happy! He’s actually smoking his along with some bacon, he promised us smoked bacon in return!! Sounds like a good deal to me.

After that what do we do with the other 70 lbs?? Well we decided to do what we do with all our Chinese problems…. Go ask The barber. This man really must think we are nut job kids that don’t know how to do anything. We are always asking him for help, but we love him so much he’s practically part of our family. We even let him do his laundry at our house now because the water is so cold that he was washing all his towels by hand. You should have seen his hands. So we told him to do it in our machine. He was so grateful. But really we love this man, he comes up look at us with our bag of fish( I must tell you that he has also gotten his own fish and has spent the day gutting and cutting and de scaling so he’s already too tired from kneeling outside), but he comes and helps us anyways. He tells us (in charade language) that it’s too dark outside so we must do it inside. He takes the bags of fish to my bathroom!! Yep that’s what I said bathroom! He shows us how to cut them, de scale them (which as you can see from the pictures he just threw the down the toilet.) and what parts to keep. We ended up keeping the head ( I guess we can make a soup) the intestines and maybe the heart I’m not sure. We had to clean the intestines out with our thumbnails however. I never knew fish intestines were so long. What kind of dish you make I have no idea. We then placed the fish into a huge tub and salted them, let them sit in this.. Open, trust me it smelled awful, for 3 days. Then we hung them out in the sun for three days, one day we missed because we went into town, trust me did we get a talking to from the barber!! . Dried fish, mmmm anybody know any good recipes?? I guess this fish will stay for a long time and actually it makes a lot of sense I mean people don’t have freezers here, and during spring festival everyone’s family comes to visit so you must have a lot of food ready.

Snow Day

It actually snowed in our town this past week. For only one day flakes came down and then melted right away. To our students though it was like candy. All the students ran around throwing snowballs and even hiding them in the classroom. On our way from our apartment to our classrooms was a battlefield. You had to cover your head with a book because foreign teachers were automatic targets. I finally got smart and brought some of my own snowballs. I even found a kid with a huge one and I just used it to go from my classrooms to my office. I would hold it out and all the kids would put down there balls. Its only cause my snowball was as big as their heads!! The student that made the enormous ball took it and carved a heart into it and gave it to me at the end of the day. I now have it in my freezer. I also had a boy that continued to put ice down girls and boys backs during my class. Finally I told him to come here and I searched him, I checked all his pockets for snow, but there was none, then a student near him said in a whisper.. Teacher Emily, and pointed to where the kid had thrown it on the ground. So I scooped it up before the student noticed and hid it. He couldn’t figure out where it went and as he bent down to search for it, I put it down his shirt!!! The whole class roared and cheered. How was I supposed to teach that day with the students acting all snow crazy anyway? We had more of a fun day then anything else.