What's new with us

Hello everyone,

Our traveling is on hold right now because we are saving up for our February break. We get 3 weeks off and we plan to spend most of it outside of Liyang. We are hoping to definitely see Beijing and Xi'an, and then hopefully travel in the south a little bit.

Things are busy at school right now because we are testing all of our students for the end of the semester. Jen and I each have about 450 students and because we are oral English teachers we are giving all oral tests, which is taking a while to see each student individually.

Other than that things are pretty quiet. It's chilly in our apartment, usually hovering around 12 degrees. We don't normally have hot water either because we have a solar water heater. It's alright though, we spend a lot of our free time watching movies. We can buy about 10 movies for the price of one rental back home.

Our computer is acting up and not letting us transfer any pictures. So we have nothing to show right now, but just thought we'd give you all this little update.

Hope things are good with everybody back home!

Weekend in Hangzhou Part III

On our third and final day in Hangzhou we ate lunch at the most famous tradational Chinese restaurant in Hangzhou, Louwailou Restaurant. We ate their most famous dish, Beggar's Chicken, which was very tasty. If you are interested in the story behind it here is the link for the Louwailou Restaurant, http://www.louwailou.com.cn/english/chick.asp

Here is the front of the restaurant. We can tell this is a pretty ritzy place because there were many cars parked outside.

This artwork went around the entire staircase.

Here is the view from the second floor, where we ate.

Me with 1 of 3 gorgeous chandeliers in the background. Windows covered three of the four walls so the room was filled with sunlight.

Weekend in Hangzhou Part II

On our taxi ride into Hangzhou we were very surprised to see a...

Yes yes yes it is indeed a Hooters. We were never excited about Hooters in Canada but in China we were curious to see what Hooters would be like here.

I was finally able to drink a MARTINI!!! They were out of my Sour Apple Martini, but they did have Cosmopolitan. Josh was able to enjoy a Guiness, which we haven't seen much.

Here are the Hooters' girls, who were just amazing. Most of them spoke English very well and we were talking to them constantly during dinner. They even broke into dance numbers, with the cooks watching from the kitchen. We felt like we were back home in so many ways. People were getting pictures but Josh and I were the only ones that were able to get all of them to pose for a picture.

Weekend in Hangzhou Part I

Hey all,

Well we were finally able to get out of Liyang to have some fun. We went to Hangzhou, which is famous for West Lake. Even though it was cold and very little was in bloom, it was still very beautiful. There were a lot of nice spots to take pictures.

Here I am at the beginning of what ended up being an extremely long walk.

Hangzhou

We ended up spending several hours there and were able to catch a nice sunset over the mountains.

Pan Yan's New Puppy

During our short holiday, Pan Yan, who is a Chinese English teacher here brought her puppy over to our apartment. He is a beautiful Husky. I'm not sure exactly how to spell his name, but something like Bu Mi Hua, which means popcorn.

Popcorn was very friendly, but Xiao was not impressed!

Me and Popcorn.

Pan Yan and Popcorn and Jen.

New Year's Day

On New Year's day we went out of the city to a small village for a bbq with Mr. Song's family. We had a really nice time. It was so quiet and peaceful out in the countryside and we really enjoyed kicking back, eating delicious food, and of course having a few drinks.

We pulled up some carrots, which tasted very good. This picture is Jen with a Chinese English teacher, Casey, and Ian who is another foriegn teacher that works in Liyang, but not at our school.

Here we are around the bbq. Again, this is Ian, myself, Casey, and Mr. Song's cousin Yuan Yuan.

New Year's Eve

We had a very busy day on New Year's Eve. We taught classes in the morning to make up for time that the school was closed on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd. In the afternoon all of the teachers gathered in the auditorium and put on performances for each other. Jen, Destiny and I put on a short play of a day in English class and then I played guitar. The rest of the teachers sang and danced and also acted out some short skits. After all of the performances we had dinner in the school's restaurant. In the evening we invited a bunch of teachers back to our place for a New Year's Eve party.

We introduced limbo to everybody. They had never done it before and I think they really enjoyed it!

We danced in our apartment.

More limbo.

It definitely wasn't as wild and crazy as New Year's parties back home. Everybody left by 10 o'clock, but we did have a really good time with them. So here we are all alone waiting to ring in the New Year. In the background you can see the snowflakes that Jen's grade 3's made, and also some of the Christmas cards we got from our students.