This weekend was a very busy one. We finished up the volleyball tournament and we had some fellow teachers and our boss through the organization come to visit us. It was really fun to have everyone together in one place to talk and share and enjoy fellowship. The Boss is doing many great things in the area and through teaching in China. It was also fun to hear about the teachers in colleges throughout China from Beijing, Chongqing, Xining, Guiyang and Anshun. There was even a family with kids, so that brought much more life to our home. The weather was very nice this weekend, so travelling around and playing volleyball was very nice.

We played two games this weekend, the semifinal game which we won. We were playing against the host school, the No. 1 Middle School, so there were tons of kids gathered around the court chanting "Let's Go" Jia, or cheering whenever their team did well, "Hao Qiu" meaning good ball. It was a very fun match. Afterward many students came to congratulate me and even one student came to tell Patty a secret, "Your husband is a very good pai qiu (volleyball) player." For the championship game, we played against the hardest team. The games were all very close, but we ended up winning all three. It was very exciting!! Afterwards, they had a closing ceremony with awards. They made Kristine and I get the awards for the men and women's teams. We receive a large plaque, a huge bundle of flowers, and a red envelope with our winnings. We took lots of pictures, so we will be sending some out through snapfish again. If you are not getting the pictures, send us an email and we will put you on the list. I think I will miss being a part of this team. There were quite the mixture of characters: from our stern and impressive coach (also our neighbor), to Tom (our English name for him) who I often practiced with who tried so hard but everyone always told him how bad he was, to the joker on the team (#16), Chairman Ho who was always there to give a high five, and many other great personalities. They were already asking for next year--will you be here 4 years or more??

Afterwards, we spent our winnings on a huge banquet. Supposedly, we spent almost everything 2000 kuai about $300. We had tons of dishes and hot pot (it was so spicy most of the teachers could not eat it). They played cards and mah jong for a long time also. We left when they started playing drinking games, but it was a great day. It was fun to compete again!!

Today, I went to class like usual, but when I got to class there were no students there. I was very confused, but heard that this week the 06 three year students do not have classses but have to do manual labor picking up stones in front of where one of the new buildings. I decided that I would go help and it was a really fun experience. The soil is heavy clay and there were stones everywhere. They had two shovels, but did not know how to use them, and three hoe like tools with much larger blades that they mainly used to dig the stones out of the ground. We dug many large stones out of the ground and transported them to the pile. I even got a chance to try to teach them how to use a shovel (not used for farming in this area). They taught we how to use the hoe, as many of them come from farm families. We are hoping to have many of the students from this class come to our house this weekend to watch Les Miserables. It should be fun to have time to talk to them outside of class. I have been visiting with many of them as I walk the dog late at night. Their electricity is out in the dorms forcing them to study or go elsewhere from 7:30-9:00 pm. Keep them in your thoughts this week as this is a big opportunity to build friendships. Hope all of you are well and we always enjoy hearing from each and everyone of you.

It has been a wet, cloudy and rainy last week which has made it not so much fun. When it gets cloudy, it gets cold so we have turned on our heaters, but it still gets only to about 62'F. The students do not have heaters in their dorms so I do not know how they stand it. The classrooms are also a little chilly, especially since we did not bring much in the way of winter clothes. This week is the big week for our volleyball competitions--we have been practicing for a long time and now we are competing against other teachers at schools in the area. They had an official opening ceremony yesterday and today we had our first match. The school provides us with our own jerseys and really short shorts--this is not fun in the cold weather but once we start it is ok. We won our first match today and we have matches everyday through Sunday. it is really fun to finally compete with some of the same people we have been practicing with.

Today was a fun day as we have had a few students stop by who want to learn more English--they are computer science majors at the college. i also had the chance to eat in the cafeteria at the school which is quite the experience. You grab the typical metal tray and pay for some rice and they give you a huge scoop of rice and then you go to a long line of huge tubs of various dishes and choose the one you want and pay for it. The thing is all of these dishes have almost as much oil as meat and vegetables. It tasted ok and was rather inexpensive (it translated to about $1 per person, although that is more expensive than some restaurants). The students thought I was brave!! This weekend we will have some other American teachers coming to visit from our team that is also teaching in nearby Guiyang. It will be fun to see them, but it will be a busy weekend as we have the volleyball tournament also.

We are learning more and more Chinese and some of our students are writing to students in the US, so that is an exciting experience for them. We continue to miss all of you at home as it gets closer to the holidays and we hope that all of your lives are blessed immensely. Hope to hear from you soon about how things are going in your lives!!

This past week we were off for the National Day holiday, celebrating the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st of 1949. We did not truly get the week off, as we had to make up our classes for Thursday and Friday before we left, which meant Saturday and Sunday school. Those days were more laid back where we learned some American songs, played bingo, and learned some about American culture. For this break, Patty and I actually ended up going two different places. I was very excited to visit some of our friends from our first visit to the Yunnan province and Patty stayed around campus and went camping with some American and Chinese friends, but we met together for the end of the time in Kunming. Here is a short look at some of the lasting memories and things we learned from this time.

My trip to visit our friends, Faye and Roy, was a very long one. It started with a 10 hour train ride from Anshun to Kunming and ended with a 11 hour bus ride through the mountains to LuChun. I really did not know what to expect with all of the travel, but it was most interesting. Because I was travelling during the National Day holiday, I was not able to get a ticket that ensured me a seat on the train, so I got onto a packed train and ended up standing for about an hour. Fortunately, I was able to run into a student from Chengdu (Fish), who spoke English and him and I were able to find seats through the kindness of many people. The train ride was actually really fun, as there were a bunch of students all sitting together in an area with one of the train employees and we were able to talk--some knew limited English and I practiced some Chinese. It was definitely an experience though to have 5 people sitting on a seat meant for three and having people sitting almost everywhere. I was even able to meet a band touring China from France (everyone thought we must be friends because we were all foreigners). I made it safely to Kunming around 5 in the morning and spent most of the day touring around (lots of walking): I ate pizza at Pizza Hut, went shopping at the famous Bird and Flower Market, saw lots of sites, and met up with Roy's daughter and we went to Green Lake Park and experienced some of the holiday festivities. It was really something fun and relaxing and I left for my trip to the mountains.

The trip to the mountains was rather uneventful. The bus had beds instead of seats, so I was able to try to sleep some as we spiralled up and down mountains. I calculated out the average speed of the trip and we went a whopping 24 mph through washed out roads, around huge semis, and I felt fortunate to have felt ok through all of this, although I almost fell out of bed a few times. It was dark so I missed most of the sights, but I was definitely glad when the bus stopped in LuChun.

LuChun was nothing like what I expected it to be. It was a city that was relatively modern and I stayed the first day with Faye's family and their apartment was really nice. LuChun is a city of about 200,000 people living about a mile up a mountain. The area is surrounded by terraced fields and most of the people are from the Hani minority group and farmers. It was amazing to see all of the minority clothing. Faye is the first Hani English teacher, and she teaches a couple of hours away from her town, so she lives in that village for the week and spends the weekends at home. Roy teaches at the No. 2 middle school in LuChun and his wife runs a shop outside the school gate where she bakes bread rolls (Mantou) and baozi (meat filled or vegetable filled rolls) and sells other things. She works from 3am to 11:30 pm so she actually lives in the shop. How different their families are--I would struggle to only see Patty for weekends and to live in separate places.

Here are some of the highlights or things I learned from my trip.
1) As a guest, you are not allowed to do anything for yourself. I struggled with trying to explain that I wanted to help with things like carrying bags from the market or helping cook, but it took a good 2 days to get across the idea.
2) If you are not putting food into your bowl every 15 seconds they will. They kept telling me to help myself at meals (which usually consisted of 8-15 dishes that you put over rice), but then they would heap food into my bowl. It did not matter if I said I was full (Wo bao le) or I don't want it (Wo bu yao), they insisted that they knew best.
3) I was truly amazed at the terraced fields and their farming. Faye took me to her parents house and their family fields. They do everything by hand and raise all kinds of crops from corn to lettuce, soybeans, rice, etc. The amount of land was so small though--though they owned 5 fields they amounted to maybe 2 acres, but took 5 people to care for them seven days a week. I had a great respect for them and their hard work. They owned about 25 pigs between the family members, 3 cows (waterbuffalo), some chickens, and all of these live in pens in your house.
4) Never touch anything you don't know what it is. When we were walking around the Hani village, I went over to examine and check out this rock I thought was for pounding meal, so I tried to pull it out of it place, but was quickly reprimanded. To my surprise that rock was one of their dieties(gods) in a place where only men are allowed to go during their New Year's holiday.
5) We climbed a mountain that overlooked the town and that was amazing to see all of the mountains around and to look at all of the terraced fields around. it is a very beautiful area. On the way down we raced down, Faye, her son, and I and got lost but eventually ran into some people gathering things for a funeral ceremony.
6) The roads in the mountains are horrible after the rainy season. We ended up staying in town the whole time, because the roads were so awful and only a couple of the relatives had vehicles (they did not trust them enough to go too far though).
7) I also learned that American culture has travelled almost everywhere. This city high in the mountains had pretty much all of the same luxuries of America, though not everyone enjoyed them. They had fancy hotels and restaurants, electric buses, underground malls, amazing parks, and lots of American clothing and goods.
8) Frog soup actually has frogs in it. Yes, I ate frogs along with whole chickens, ducks, geese, all with their heads and feet and such on them. The food was very good though and I love trying new things. It was a great experience and it was great to be able to visit my friends after five years. I was even able to run into a few of our other teachers, but also hard because most of the people understood no English and some no Mandarin, so I could not communicate well with most people.

Patty went camping during the break with some of the American teachers in the area and a couple of the students. She said it was a great experience in working together and very different from American camping. They had super small tents, so many people squished into these tents. They brought a ton of food with them, so they ate a lot, but were not able to eat everything.

Patty and I did get together at the end of our trip though in Kunming to do some shopping and to go to the zoo. My trip back was a little harder as many of the people were on a bus for the first time and there were many people puking and it was really rough. I slept some though and Patty slept little on the train, so we met at 6 am and walked for most of the day. We enjoyed lots of sights, bought some gifts and things at the Market, ate pizza, enjoyed the zoo, and then we went to look for a place to stay the night. We found out that we had commited the cardinal sin of travelling outside the states, we did not bring our passports, so we were unable to get a hotel room and we were to leave at 8 am the next morning. We decided then to try to exchange our tickets and try to take a train home that night to Anshun. Through lots of effort, we got that to work out and we made the tiring trip home. We slept a little in the crowded and loud conditions. We sat next to an older lady who talked the whole 10 hours in a super loud voice (yes, even in her sleep she talked). We were very glad to be home and to be able to sleep on something flat. it was a great break, but now tomorrow we will be heading back to work. We are excited as the freshman will start school tomorrow, so that will be a little bit of a change.