Gao kao, wedding photos and more!

Well this past week was the college entrance exam for the students all over China. Its serious buisness here and our school was a host site for all the neighboring schools to come to. Joe and I went for a walk and were greeted by hundreds of buses all coming to our school even stopping at the near by hotel just packed with kids.This test is so important that many students will send other kids to take the test for them, or somehow cheat on the test. Thats why all over our school there were police and officials over seeing everything. This test is the only thing that gets you into college here. You work for senior 1 and 2 and then your last high school year senior 3 is a complete review of the last two years. Then the last semester of senior 3 you just take practice tests after practice test. Many students drop out because of the pressure and some even commit suicide. What happens when your parents , grandparents and all your other family members are counting on you to succeed? All these family members put there money together just to send you to school? With the one child policy the pressure is even worse for that one boy or girl that will be the future to the families well fair. There are some students that come from rich families and they say that there not nervous about the test at all because there Dad will just buy them a place in a university. Ahhh it makes me sick.
We had a friend Billy who taking the test, I never saw a boy more stressed out them him. He is the one that was able to travel to America and go to an american high school. Now he is finally taking the gao kao. After the test he ran over to our house and was just so excited he couldnt even speak. When Joe and I went to the grocery store the roads in front of our school had been closed, to save the students from the noise of the cars and big trucks. WHen we went to the back gate to leave right after the test was over there were thousands of parents waiting. We asked the guard if we could squeeze threw but there literally was no where to go. So we waited. The guard then opened the huge gate and in rushed all these parents!! It was just like at the train station well the chinese train station, when you rush to get on your car. It was crazy!!!! So for our school the Gao Kao was a success, even though they had to send most of the other boarding students home, and feed and put up barriers for all the out of town students to come and take the test. Next week we are holding the Jun Kao which is the high school entrance exam, we shall see how that goes.

Well Joe and I took wedding photos yesturday. Its really popular to have these huge wedding photos above your coach and bed and basically in every room of your house here in China. You go to these studios, which happen to be on every corner of every street ( big buisness) and you wear the gowns and change into many outfits for these photo. They have really funny poses like one where you both look into the sky or the man appears to be sniffing the girl. Really hilarious. In these books there are also funny english sentences about love, but they never make any sense, the english is always really bad. We will load some of the photos when we get them next week. You will die, the outfits are hilarious, the lady put fake eyelashes and fake hair on my head, I got to also wear a fushia dress. Joe all I can say looked like a figure skater all afternoon the Yueyang girls and I called him Brian Boitano. You will just die!