New Tattoo

Can anyone guess what and where Ryan's new tattoo is? As you can see, we went to a high class place.

Yangshou 4

Yangshou 3

Yangshou 2

pictures from Yangshou 1

Our First Adventure in China

We had a week off of school in October so we did a little traveling. We flew west to Guilin and then bused it to Yang shou. Yang shou has these beautifully strange mountains that just jet up out of the earth. My favorite part of the trip was riding bikes through the countryside, surrounded by the mountains and rice fields. We rode to the river where we then got on a bamboo raft. It is kind of like a gondola because there is a man in the back guiding the boat down the river by pushing a long stick into the water. We went over little waterfalls and even got some peanuts from a lady selling them from her raft in the middle of the river. Then we biked to a mountain which we climbed and then biked back into town again. There is a children’s book by Jan Brett, Daisy Comes Home, which takes place on this river. The whole trip was fantastic. The food was good. Ryan even ate snails and snake. I think Ryan’s favorite part was when we went fishing. This is nothing like fishing at the cabin. We had to get back onto one of those wobbly bamboo rafts, at night, and drive up river in total darkness. Luckily this raft had a motor so we moved a little faster. We met up with another boat that had the fishing devices, BIRDS. They turned on a bright light that hung over the front shining on the water and then released the cormorant birds. They poor birds have a string around their neck and one hanging off their leg. The string on their neck keeps the fish that they swallow from going all the way down and the one on their leg is used to catch them with a pole. The birds swam under water looking for fish. When they found and ate one that the guy on the boat thought is big enough he pulled it back into the boat and squeezed the fish into a basket. I don’t know if people don’t think that is gross to eat a fish that a bird just puked up but I do. Despite how this all sounds pretty cruel to the birds, I think that boat guy loves his pets and wouldn’t really do anything to hurt them.

I am happy to say that Ryan figured out a way for us to post on the blog. However, we just read that Google might be pulling out of China, in which case I don’t think we would be able to post…again.
O.K., a little about about life in China. We are having a great time here. We are just outside of Guangzhou (city of 12 million.) It is about 2 hours from Hong Kong, in the Southeast of China. We live in a gated community. It is so safe which is a nice change of pace from Honduras. Most of the teachers live in the apartments. We live in a town house in a different part of the community because we brought our dog with us. It is funny actually. We brought a 3 lb dog and end up with 3 floors, 3 bedrooms, and 3 bathrooms. We have plenty of space if anyone wants to visit China. Our house is just across the street from a market area that has the supermarket, a wet market (vegetables and fruits, and awful looking meat), little clothes shops, the pet store/vet, a bunch of shops for cheap manicures and pedicures, and a massage place. We love how safe it is here. I can walk over to the market, day or night, by myself.
Our school is much different than our last one. We teach in the bilingual program here with means that Chinese is their priority and they only have English class for 3 periods a day. We both see two groups of kids, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
We are getting used to the lifestyle too, which might be a bad thing. We get a 2 hour lunch so we can go home to eat and take a nap. Things are pretty cheap so we get a lot of massages. I don't like the food that much yet. The grocery stores don't really carry any western food so we have had to experiment. We did find a store that has all western food (even Cheetos) but it is expensive so we only go there for special occasions. We also bought a moped… which Ryan really loves.