Thursday Day 29 "Parent Teacher Night"

Today was pretty much a blur. We were exhausted and didn't really have our lesson plans ready. Luckily it went okay for the most part. The kids really are getting better at their English.

We had cooking class and had some delicious broccoli and pork. Michael is seriously the best cook. Our food here is way better than the food at Kaiyin, and he likes to make food that we actually enjoy. I love cooking in woks too, not that I have actually done it, we just watch Michael do it, but I want to learn and try it, because it is way better than a regular frying pan. Maybe I will buy one here..

It was Sarinas birthday tonight so we went to Gina's pizza to celebrate. We got a Hawaiian pizza that was really good.

Parent Teacher Night: the biggest joke since we have been here. I said 5 words the entire night. We had to take a bus to our school at 6:30 and then sat in our supply room for an hour and a half until it was time to go "meet" the parents. Then I walked in said "Hello, my name is Melissa" and I walked out, and the school gave us a taxi ride home. When they told us that they didn't want us to talk to much they were being serious.

The rest of our day consisted of doing our mountains of laundry, which is kind of impossible be cause our washer is tiny and slightly broken as it is, and there are 4 other girls who need to use the washer too. We finished packing for our Beijing trip, which was pretty much just not un-packing the same stuff from Yangshuo from yesterday. We are leaving directly after school, so we have to be all ready to go in the morning.

The broccoli and pork we made in cooking class today :-) 

in the taxi we got to take back from parent night. You don't see these signs very often here.

I have the cutest kids ever :-) 

These are the PE teachers who come every Friday. The kids adore them. (and so do the Chinese teachers ;)

Judy is one of my favorites..although there are many ;)

All the kids are so helpful and set up lunch every day.

Wednesday Day 28 Catch Up

Finally made it back from Yangshuo. I didn't really sleep at all on the bus, and I don't really know why. I slept about 2 hours out of the 12, so I've been exhausted lately.
We ate some disgusting food at the school for dinner and then went to Kaiyin to do some Kung-Fu. I am getting much better than I was before, and my splits are way better, hopefully I will be able to get flat by the end of this trip. We went back and made Oreo balls with Trent, Zach and Brooke. They were great. 

Here are some highlights of our trip that weren't mentioned, but were pretty great (or sad). 

The best purchase here hands down were my pants. They are silky and stretchy and awesome. And they were only 20 yuan which is about $3.50 :)

It was extremely slippery and wet because it was raining all day, but I didn't want to get my tennis shoes nasty and wet, and flip-flops are just way easier and better, unfortunately that was a bad decision. I slipped at least 100 times on the stupid cobblestones, and I had to hold onto Brooke's arm wherever we walked. Right before we got to our bus I fell right on my butt, in my new pants too :(  Luckily there was only a small audience of people I knew, beside the obvious hundreds of Chinese who already stare at me.

Allison got whacked in the head with a banana..literally whacked hard by some little Chinese fruit lady. We tried to buy some bananas from her, but she gave us one with the skin peeling off, so I tried to explain to her that we didn't want it, but she just made an angry face and put it in the bag. Allison took it back out and the lady snatched it from her and hit her in the head really hard. Unfortunately she was an elderly lady so we couldn't really do anything back to her. She was very cranky >:(

If I haven't mentioned it already, McDonalds has this spicy cheese sauce that is super delicious. We ate it with everything, fries, chicken sandwhich, and even our little fry bread things we got from the street vendors. I was thinking about bringing some home until this little incident happened. I had gotten some for my fry bread earlier, and forgotten that I put one in my bag. It was a disgusting smell to say the least, but at least I had emptied most of my things out of there so nothing was really ruined. 

Days 26 & 27 More Yangshuo Time :-)

We went to A little village tuesday by the river and found this really cool cave. We jumped off a cliff into the water and it was freezing cold! Especially inside the cave. Hayden had his headlight luckily so we could see, and it was kinda creepy. We could see tons of bats hanging on the ceiling. 

Apparently you're not supposed to go in there because boats go through and we could get ran over, but we didn't understand what they were saying and we could see the boats anyway. We made it through the other side and got out when we saw some park rangers following us in their motor boat. They weren't very happy with us, and kept telling us "very dangerous" but we didn't get in trouble, and in the end they were smiling and waving goodbye, so it was okay :)

The best part was that it was free, Free adventures are the best :-) 

After our cave experience :)

Goodbye Yangshuo! :(

Jenga nights on the rooftop 

"Muslim" Noodle place we stopped at. There is just Muslim people working there. We don't know the real name.

We stayed up laughing for hours :) 

Typhoon!! Day 25: Sunday

Well it looks like we are unfortunately going to have to stay here on our vacation longer...darn :/ Just kidding, I'm soo excited! We get to have two extra days of vacation. Our four day vacation has now turned into six and counting. The only sucky thing is that I'm spending more money than I wanted to. We have to rent the hostel for extra days, and keep cancelling our bus reservations, and buy all our food. It is a bit expensive here..
Typhoon Usagi is coming to southern China, which is where our apartments are at, in Zhongshan. It is supposed to hit pretty hard, and all of the transportation in and out of the city is shut down right now. It should be okay on Tuesday though.
Today was pretty relaxing. We had some oatmeal and bananas, and banana bread for breakfast, and then we walked around the city for a while.
Were trying to get cheap food to eat, so we hit up the street vendors most of the time, some of them are actually pretty good, and some of them are not good at all. We get these little scone things filled with pork that are only 5 yuan and they are delicious. They also fill them with cinnamon and sugar too and they are heavenly. I think that is what my meals are going to consist of for the next few days. That and some McDonalds ice cream cones :P

The beautiful sunset I got to see this morning :) 

The view from our rooftop.

The girl who works at the hostel saw Allisons hair and wanted us to french braid her hair too. She is super cute :)

Typical Chinese man 

James, Hayden, and Noah being themselves.

Trent fell asleep, which figures because he was watching Wall-E..

We played in a puzzle store for about an hour trying to solve all of the chinese puzzles. We ended up buying a Jenga game to play too. It has different things to do every time you pull out a block, and its super fun. We went down to the river again and just floated around and skipped rocks. It was a pretty relaxing day :)

Day 23! Mud Caves!

Today was so much fun! We rented some bikes again and rode up to the mud caves. It is so pretty to ride our bikes around, everything is gorgeous.

Brittany hit a rock or something and flew over her bike and got some gnarly bruises, but she caught it all on her go-pro, while saying "i love china!", which was hilarious (and shes fine too).

The caves were huge and really cool, although some of the rock formations were a little exaggerated. You really had to dig down in your imagination to understand some of them. 

The mud was the best part. You couldn't even sink if you wanted to. It just made you float right back up to the top. It also didn't exactly smell good, but it was still awesome. I did get mud in my ears though, which is probably going to never come out.    
The next part of the caves had a hot spring which was relaxing and nice. We sat in there for a while and then moved down to some cooler water for a little bit because we were burnin up. The lights kept turning off while we were sitting in there, which was a little freaky, because it is insanely dark. Luckily they turned back on when we were leaving so we could see where we were going. It was definitely the best money I've spent so far. 
Sorry I have no pics of it :( We did buy one from them, but we didnt have cameras with us in the caves.

We went swimming down at the secret "beach" which wasn't really a beach. It is just the river with some rocks on the edge, but it was still fun. We just floated and played around until some Chinese lady came and told us we were on private property. Crazy people :P

We went with the group and ate at Kelly's which has some pretty good American/ Chinese food. We had already eaten earlier, so I just ordered a milkshake and went to grab something else with Brooke and Kyle. Unfortunately it took us about 10 seconds too long, and the vultures drank almost the whole thing. Luckily Hayden is nice person and bought me another one. 

Brooke licking the last of the chocolate from the doughnut wrapper ;P It was delicious.

Hayden

Kellys! This place has pretty dang good food :)

James being a...vampire?
Sweet Dreams! 

Yangshuo Vacation!!! Day 22: Bridge Jumping

Today was awesome! We rode bikes to a bridge and did some bridge jumping which was super fun. The bridge was about 35 feet and a little bit scary at first :P The Chinese loved it :P They were all cheering and taking pictures of us the whole time. They are hilarious.

Bike riding to the river. We were so sweaty! :/

The Foosball table at our hostel. The guy on the right is the person who runs the place. He is really nice and Loves to play with us. He is pretty dang good.

Books and Postcards

Our room.

This is James. And his fancy glasses he bought today.

Just sitting in our hostel.

Allison and her snail

The snails our hostel owner brought out for us. They had a really good seasoning on them, but I didn't really care for them. Not my favorite :/

On the roof of our hostel. (Kyle, Allison, Hayden, Noah, Brooke, Trent)

Doughnuts. Pretty much the greatest thing I have had here, and I dont even like doughnuts that much. It was soooo delicious. We decided we are going back tomorrow for another one.

Ice Cream Cones! We have been eating waay too much ice cream here :P

Kissing Fish!! They tickled so bad!

Best China Friends!

Pond hopping

Wednesday Day 21: Sleeper Bus Fun

We made it through school today! Our vacation to yangshuo is what motivated us :P We got tons of moon cakes for the mid Autumn festival... they are pretty nasty :( 

Carmen eating her "delicious" moon cake 

We got all packed and went to the bus stop with everyone. We all crammed on the first bus, but got split up when we took our connecting bus to our sleeper bus. Luckily the group I was with knew the way so we made it there, but Allison and about 4 other people got lost, and barely made it there. They got off on the wrong spot and luckily a man spoke enough English to tell them which bus number to take. They got there barely 5 minutes before we were supposed to leave, so they were really lucky.

Sleeper bus! The beds are so small!

The little rest stop we got off at, and most of our group, along with some girls from another school. The toilets there were DISGUSTING! It was a trench along the ground with a ton of Asian women squatting next to each other. No privacy, but then again China doesn't have much of that.

The actual bus ride seemed very long. It was around 12 hours total, and I was awake for about 11 of them. The beginning was fun, we played some catchphrase and charades in the back and ate some peanut butter sandwiches, but after that it was not so fun. My bed was in front surrounded by Chinese people smoking in my face, so I moved to the back to try and sleep. We had 6 people in a space made for 3, so we were crammed tight to say the least. It was pretty uncomfortable and me and Brooke were just laying awake shifting around every few minutes or whispering to see if the other had fallen asleep yet. I watched some of X-men with Hayden, and listened to a little bit of Anastasia, which held me over for a few hours. Otherwise we just snacked on chips, crackers, and cookies and tried not to drink any water so we wouldn't have to pee again. We finally made it at 5 am and walked to our hostel. Everyone looked pretty scary, but at least the scenery was beautiful :-P