A little lost... a little found

China pt. 2

mmanddb — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 09:44:00 GMT

It is our 5th day back in Wuhan. We have settled in quite easily, with only slight jet lag. It was very nice to come back to the apartment and already have everything we needed (except food) but what was not so nice was the amount of dust and mould found around it. So we spent the first few days cleaning, grocery shopping and waiting for Danny’s luggage. Yes, that’s right, we were left staring at the carousel in disbelief once again. Our luck was slightly better this round in that we received two of our three bags, unfortunately the one we lost contained Danny’s clothes, food and a helmet. We know the bag was in China because we saw it in Beijing, but after that it could be anywhere. Danny is getting tired of rotating through the two pairs of underwear he had here but he has mostly gotten over the loss of the salmon that has surely gone bad by now. The helmet was going to be used for our new/terrifying scooter!

Danny decided we needed to buy a scooter after he was ripped off by one of the black cab drivers last year. Black cabs are essentially men who wait with their personal vehicles outside the school to take teachers places for about double the price of regular cabs. They can do this because the school is not in an area where it is easy to flag down a cab. He says he now feels a new sense of freedom, because he does not rely on them to go places. I have to admit the scooter is pretty cool however driving it anywhere but around the school is quite frightening.

Over the next week we are attending Pro-D work shops, getting to know the 20ish new teachers and planning for school to start next Monday.

Fun Facts about our SE Asia Trip (Part 1)

mmanddb — Fri, 8 Feb 2013 13:22:00 GMT

Travel Info:

1. Countries Visited (So far): Thailand (11 days), Malaysia (6 days), Singapore (1 day), Indonesia (5 days)

2. Cities/Islands Visited: Bangkok (1 day), Koh Tao (4 days), Koh Phangnan (4 days), Kuala Lumpur (1 day), Kuching (Borneo) (4 days), Singapore (1 day), Kuta (Bali) (2 days), Ubud (Bali) (3 days)....where to next?? no idea!

3.Transportation: 4 buses, 2 night trains, 4 flights, 3 ferries, 5 tuk tuks, 10+ taxis

4. Most useful items brought: Smartphone/toilet paper

Interesting Moments:

1. Cutest moment: Baby monkeys in Ubud (Bali)

2. Luckiest moment: Seeing the largest (and smelliest flower) in the world. It is from the Genus Rafflesia and is parasitic to only one species of jungle vine. It actually smells exactly like rotten meat (strongest on the second day of blooming, even though some locals believe that the stench increases with time) and can grow to over one meter in diameter. It blooms for one week every 2 1/2 years. It is pollinated by beetles and carion flies (attracted to odour). Pollination is extremely rare. It requires that a male and female plant grow in close proximity to each other and that a fly or beetle visits the male flower and then the female flower. The flower has been extensively studied and very little is known about its biology.

3. Most fascinating moment: Learning about head-hunters in Borneo and getting to use a blow pipe that was well over 300 years old and took over a year to make.

4. Michele's most memorable moment: Watching a rare variety of sea turtle forage on coral underwater (on Koh Tao, Thailand).

5. Danny's most memorable moment: Waterfall fall massage without getting inappropriately touched by a man. (near Kuching, Borneo).

6. Danny's most memorable meal: Barricuda at Mantra Bar, near Legian, Bali.

7. Danny's least memorable meal: Tuna on Koh Tao (Thailand)

8. Michele's most memorable meal: I don't know...some sort of salad or tofu.

9. Michele's dumbest moment: Leaving her phone at a restaurant.

11. Danny's dumbest moment: Forgetting his bag was in the x-ray machine and leaving security...had fun getting it back!!!

11. Danny's dumbest moment #2: Booking our first train for the wrong day (worked out pretty well though!!)

12. Michele's most terrifying moment: Danny informing Michele rather nonchalantly that there might be a leech on her ankle...and there was!! Michele literally jumped out of her socks...well she had to take her sock off to get the leech off and she was hopping around on one foot...hilarious!

12. Danny's most terrifying moment: Hearing the bamboo rustle behind him and thinking it was a deadly Orangutan, pushing Michele out of the way and running as fast as he could to our machete-wielding bush guide (those Orangutans can really mess you up man).

13. Most expensive city (by far): Singapore

14. Most bang for your buck (so far): Ubud (Bali)...also the best food!

15. Most depressing moment: Watching a 12-year old get beaten by his father at an internet cafe in Surathani.

16. Most confushing moment: Walking-in on Michele and about half dozen other people watching our friend pee in his pants (on purpose...I later found out)...at the full moon party.

17. Best party: Jungle Party! Michele got her shirt taken off by two of our friends in the same night! (This could also be classified as Michele's most confusing moment).

18. Most expensive accommodations: $30 (night train to Chumpon)

19. Least expensive accommodations: $3.50 (our first night in Bangkok...what a winner that was!)

Pictures to Follow!!!

Christmas in Hong Kong!

mmanddb — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 01:21:00 GMT

OK so finally have something exciting to write about. So the last few weeks of school have been dragging on. We had a long stretch working a few saturdays BUT we made it! Now we feel like we are on the down hill. We had four days off for Christmas, three days off this weekend for new years, then the week after is finals (so no teaching YAY!). After that there is one week of our new classes, then we’re off to sand and sun in Thailand for our winter holiday!!!

For our four days off we headed down south to Hong Kong! We took the bullet train after work on friday to Gaungzhou. The train traveled between 285 and 307 km/h!! We went the entire 1000km or so distance in just 4 hours! We didn’t do much in Guangzhou, we basically just had dinner and slept in the creepiest/dirtiest place I think I have ever slept. Danny mentioned it felt more like camping than a hostel. In the morning we had all you can eat TEPPANYAKI. Read more about it here ---> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teppanyaki. It is probably the best meal you will ever have in your life and is worth the 1000+ flight to asia. Basically a guy cooks amazing food right in front of you. When we could eat no more, we hobbled to a different train station (one of the considerably slower trains) and got into Hong Kong around 6.

That night we were ecstatic to find that the convenience store across the street from our hostel had not only beer but hard alcohol, doritoes, a deli, organic soups, juice, chocolate milk and CHEESE! Yes, real cheese, and all kinds of cheese exactly like we can find at home. All of this was quite exciting as the nearest cheese is a 45 minute cab ride from our home in Wuhan, and its not that great. It’s really amazing how accustomed we are to the food we eat, and how much of a difference it can make. I mean just imagine if all you could eat everyday was Chinese food, greasy, not sure if thats meat or vegetable Chinese food. It’s awesome and exciting at first, but after a while and more than a few pounds (cough danny) you need something different. So all in all I enjoyed the variety of food and restaurants available. I even found an organic bakery and a health food store!

Unfortunately, Danny could not enjoy the food as much as I did, because he ended up getting the stomach flu the next day. We were headed out to explore Hong Kong in the day light because we had just gone out the night before and hadn’t seen much. Right before we get on the Metro he grabs my arm and tells me he doesn’t feel well and is going back to the hostel. I thought he was just a hang over, and he told us he would meet up with us later. Long story short, he spent the day (Sunday) violently ill, going from the bath room to the bed, and I had no idea until I got home around 8pm. Danny did not start to feel better until the next morning, but he still did not end up leaving the hostel room until we had to go home on Tuesday.

Our Christmas was spent getting home in a cab, then on a train, then a metro, which took us to the plane to Wuhan. We really missed being with everyone, but it was not that bad, just a long travel day.

All in all we didn’t get to as much as we wanted but I loved Hong Kong and would like to go back. The one flaw we found with the city, and this might just be my experience was that people were generally not very friendly. I had a couple of neat cab drivers who gave us advice and we chatted with but everyone else was cold or unhelpful. Hopefully others have had different experiences.

Our next adventure is Shanghai this weekend! Will write back with more news then.

Ps. It is a pain to add pictures to this site, so I’m sorry I will try and add some but it is a very time consuming process. If you can go on facebook or know someone who can show you facebook, there will be more pictures there.

fireworks

mmanddb — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 01:19:00 GMT

Did I mention there are fireworks here all the time? Its sounds much more awesome than it actually is. Can be quite frightening when they wake you up in the middle of the night, and they’re about as annoying in the middle of the day when your trying to teach. Apparently, (this is what I’ve been told) they are to ward off or scare away evil spirits when constructing buildings. They set them off when they are breaking ground and anytime a major project is completed. As you’ve probably gathered, there is a lot of construction happening around us. It seems like things are changing here at an alarming rate. From what I’ve heard from other teachers, the city is much different now then even a few years ago. Its quite impressive to see how many buildings have gone up even since we have been here.

Vaca! Guilin and Yangshuo

mmanddb — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 16:11:00 GMT

(writen oct 13th, sorry took so long to post!)

Alrighty, so we just finished our first week back after our vacation, thought it would be great and we would be full of energy again but that was not the case. Our vacation was not exactly relaxing, but we did have a lot of fun. So we left almost right after school ended on Friday and drove the hour to get to the airport. It was only an hour and fifteen minute flight to Guilin. We were with a group of nine other maple leaf teachers traveling together. We had a great group, it was one of the main reasons we had so much fun.

Guilin was great, it is nestled in between all these neat mountains. The city is much cleaner that Wuhan and the air is much nicer. On the first day we went on a tour to this town with terraced rice fields. It was really neat, we climbed all the way to the top, amazing views. The little village was really cool as well. Danny drank snake wine (cobras in a bottle of 60% alcohol)

On the way to the rice fields we stopped and bought a chicken. Yes, a live chicken and yes it was Danny’s idea and no I did not endorse buying the chicken. So for 100 yuan we bought some lady’s chicken which she told us was not diseased but we could buy one of those if we wanted. Somehow he ended up with the name Rufio and he pooped all over the guys van we were in and then he spent a couple hours in a box until we got home that night. We were faced with the dilemma of what to do with Rufio so Danny and our friend Adam ended up taking him to a nearby restaurant and for 35 yuan they had a delicious chicken dinner, head, feet and gizzard included.

The next day we made our journey to Yangshuo. Yangshuo is a smaller town down the Li river from Guilin. Its even nicer than Guilin and has lots of shopping and touristy things to do. To get there we got on this tour bus which took us on a romantic river cruise, which was very cool, the scenery was amazing. After we went to the place were they do the cormorant fishing, where the cormorants are trained to catch the fish and bring it back. Its quite sad actually because they only do it now for the tourists really it is a dying profession I guess. Danny really enjoyed the birds though. After we watched him fish we went to see a water buffalo and a few people payed to sit on top of him. Danny was pretty pumped to be a guy on a buffalo, he was looking forward to it all day.

In the same little village there is a bridge that is known for tourists jumping off of it, so of course most of the guys (minus Danny) wanted to jump off of it. My friend Steph and I were standing there watching them jump and we looked at each other and decided to do it. We just couldn’t leave with the guys having such a great story and we knew if we did it, it would be pretty cool. I was absolutely terrified, but it was awesome. The river was super refreshing.

That evening we made it to Yangshuo which was packed with tourists! It was really difficult for us to get anywhere the entire time we were there because of how many people were there. The town itself is quite small, you could potentially walk around the whole thing, but there were so many people because of the national holiday. Our hostel was amazing, right in the middle of town near the shopping and the food and we had to go down this skinny alleyway to get there. The place had a rooftop bar, with free pool, and we spent a lot of time up there. It was great because we met a bunch of other travelers including two guys from Vancouver who are teaching in Shanghai. We will most likely try to visit them in a few weeks.

Our time in Yangshuo was spent mostly relaxing, drinking and shopping. We attempted one major touristy excursion on scooters. It didn’t go so well at first. Our friends Tommy and Steph were on the scooter behind Danny and I and we hear this awful sound and turn around and all we see is Steph standing on the sidewalk and the scooter on top of Tommy. There were also three tour buses stopped, staring and taking pictures of them. It was scary at the time, but its pretty funny now because 1. Steph jumped off as it was going down then stood there and watched in shock as Tommy fell and then got himself up and 2. that they were still within sight of the scooter rental place. Oh ya and while we were waiting for Tommy to get fixed up an old chinese man ran into Danny’s parked scooter and knocked it over. We all just turned and looked at him. He came to say sorry I think but he just kind of laughed and said thank you in Chinese and then left, we were all very confused. Now, its just a great story we laugh about.

We finally did make it to where we were going. It was this mud cave, that was all lit up and at the end of it there is a mud pit you can get in. The mud is like swimming in pudding! You can’t sink, you just float around and get really dirty haha. There are also hot springs in the cave. It was a fun day, with the exception of the intense traffic to get there and Tommy getting hurt.

Well this blog entry is long enough I think, hopefully I’ll write again soon with what we have been up to since then!

One day weekend, shopping and vaca

mmanddb — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 18:51:00 GMT

WOAH I’m getting worse at this blogging thing. Sorry everyone! Thanks to those still checking. So we are still alive and starting to live life again! Both of us have colds now though :( but a little more free time, yay!

So updates updates... Hmm, well we have been doing pretty much the same, we survived our one-day weekend, it really sucked to work Saturday. Did not stop us from going out and having a good time Saturday night though. There were a few birthdays to be celebrated so we went to this dance club in Hankou, which is one of the three city’s that merged to become Wuhan. It is across the river and 45 minutes away and the taxi was 71yuan!!! It shocks you at first and then you remember that is only around 11 dollars. Even though we live here we still sort of feel like tourists and don’t care what people think of us. This means we all usually end up dancing and/or singing and getting lots of locals up and having a good time where ever we go. Everyone stares at us anyway, so why not have a good time right?

School is going well, although we now have clubs and tutorials and other things after school so the day gets a bit longer. We are also both going to mandarin classes on Wednesday. One of the Chinese teachers is teaching a bunch of us. I really like the language and I think I have the tones down, its just hard to remember when to use which one. The hardest part are the letters that sound so similar and then there is j, which is a sound we don’t have in English. Anyway we can see how the taxi’s never know what we are saying when we give them the places we need to go. I have a new respect for Chinese people who come to Canada not knowing any English. The people here must think we sound so ridiculous.

Went on an adventure right after writing the last blog to east lake to this botanical garden. It is not the season for the garden but we rode on this sketchy chairlift and got a cool view of the city over the lake. It was pretty smoggy though so not the greatest view. We went because there was this awesome slide you could ride down through the gardens but when we got to the top it was closed, but no one understood us when we tried to ask if it would open again. They just kept pointing us toward the slide, it was quite annoying. So we eventually just took the chairlift down. We were disappointed about the slide so we decided to eat at this floating restaurant that had hundreds of koi fish (see pictures).

After, Danny and I went tot the mall to try to find me some shoes. This was quite the task. Whenever I am shopping I feel like a giant. Only a few shoes even come in my size (woman’s 8) and I’m usually the biggest size of clothing, an xl or xxl. When I walk into stores I can just see the girls working there looking at me thinking, ‘Is she kidding?’ Haha you have to just laugh, it’s China. We did end up finding shoes at this department store that sold American brands, but they were still the biggest size.

We are both very excited because today we finally booked tickets for our week off! (We leave in 7 days!!!!!) We are going to Guilin, which is a paradise (we hear). It’s on the 20 yuan note so it must be pretty cool. We are traveling with 7 other people, so should be a great trip, it’s a good group. Everyone wants to have a good time and a few adventures, which I’m sure Danny can get us (hopefully not too scary though).

Our crazy first week

mmanddb — Sat, 8 Sep 2012 13:31:00 GMT

So wow. Sorry for the lack of blog the last week and a bit, we have kind of been dead to the world because school has taken up all our time. It has been crazy with multiple freak outs, more illness and extremely long to do lists. Very glad it is Saturday, and we survived. So we are at the school from 7am to 5pm at least, but there were a couple days we were there until 9pm, and if we do go home we are working at home until we go to bed, usually. They tell us in a month things will get better and settle down, which I think only applies to the stress. Pretty sure we will be working at least 10 hours a day 6 days most weeks. Good news is, the kids are pretty great. Even the ones you think are a bit annoying or disrespectful are nothing compared to what there is to deal with in Canada. They are all very externally motivated, because their parents are paying for them to go there so they can get into university abroad. The only ‘trouble‘ kids we get are the ones who are there only because their parents want them to and they could really care less about school.They all have quite a bit of money even by Canadian standards. As much as we have to work, I do feel bad for the kids because they are at the school from 7am until 9pm, have to take classes in English, which most of them just barely know enough to get by and then they have Chinese school mixed in there as well. Basically, the biggest behavioral issue is kids falling asleep in class, and I don’t blame them, most of them are very tired.

The kids Michele teaches vary immensely in ability to understand and speak English. They are all the ones who did not make it into full BC grade 10. It is kind of funny because you give them simple directions like ‘get up and move to the back of the class’ and maybe one kid kind of gets up but second guesses himself because no one else is. Then they all turn and start chatting furiously in Mandarin to find out if their friends understand, instead of watching me. This can get frustrating. So teaching involves a lot of visuals and body movements. Haha I guess that makes the class interesting sometimes, but you have to account for the extra time it takes to get everyone to do anything, including ‘take out a piece of paper’.

Danny’s classes are pretty good...the physics and math classes are challenging because the kids are incredible at math and can do most calculations (even algebra) in their heads. Danny does not have any behaviour issues so the classes are really great. Danny’s plan is to incorporate some fun English activities into every class so that the kids can pick up some skills where they need them the most. Anyone remember Heads up, seven up???!

There is an interesting dynamic between the Chinese teachers and the Canadian teachers. It is really unfortunate because as the school grows bigger they become more divided. The Chinese staff have their own offices and if they share with Canadians (like in Michele’s office) they speak mandarin all the time. Which is to be expected but it makes creating relationships slightly more difficult. One guy on the administration has noticed and is trying to make it better. I think it is important especially since the Chinese teachers get payed maybe a sixth of the Canadian ones.

Ok enough about school! Most of the people we work with are really great. There is a big group of us all around the same age and because we work so much we all also like to relax on the weekend. Which means there is usually a party every Friday, which leads to going out to a club or bar. It’s great to be able to get away from the bubble of school and just hang out. Beer and alcohol in general are much cheaper here. It depends but usually like 2-3 dollars a beer in a club. Also, there is no tipping here. People get offended when you offer, especially taxi drivers. I read somewhere that it implies they do not get payed enough for their job. Understandable, so I try not to feel strange not tipping.

OH also that thing about the kids just going to the bathroom on the street.... entirely true. You do not sit down, put anything down and for the love of god do not eat anything off the ground outside. You only need to see if happen once and you never forget.

Food, traffic, school

mmanddb — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 13:36:00 GMT

My phone was a worthy investment to bring along, even if it wasn’t working. The dictionary app I downloaded has become very useful in communicating. So through using that and a lot of gestures (that you hope are not offending anyone) we can communicate well enough to get around. Went out for dinner today to this western place called Helen’s Cafe. They play ninety’s music and the food almost tastes like home... Almost. Haha did not think we would want western food so fast, but the stuff on campus isn’t the greatest cafeteria food and there is not much selection since the students are not here yet. It’s noodles with a choice of mystery sauces or what appears to be stir fry with mystery meat (mostly we assume it’s pork). I think we will be cooking at home a lot once we can get back to a grocery store. Oh ya, on the way back we show the taxi driver the address and he starts driving and then at a stop light he ever so slyly takes out a map. I say HEY and he starts laughing, this guy was hilarious, he kept just rambling on, and I had no idea what he was saying. I think he thought I knew some mandarin because I knew the street name we had to go to, but I don’t know how to say ‘I don’t understand you’ haha. He was pretty awesome though, and we got home on a fairly direct route.

I described the traffic before so you can kind of imagine what it is like crossing the road. Kind of like frogger, go ahead, stop, go ahead, stop, and whatever you do don’t run. Apparently it freaks drivers out and they don’t know what to do. So you end up standing in the middle of the road a lot. We tend to wait for locals and follow them.

We are super busy, it seems like there is a never ending list of work to do, what with planning, and shopping and people are always doing things after school. We finally have our teaching assignments and tomorrow we should have our classrooms and I really hope we have our class lists as school starts on Monday!

So busy!

mmanddb — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:55:00 GMT

Yesterday was a long day!!!! Full of more and more waiting, almost as tiring as the flight, uhg. We had to go get our residency permits, and with the thirty of us it took a while. A lot of people did not have their medical forms filled out correctly so they had to redo tests right there, which meant we had to wait. After we went back to the mall we were at yesterday because everyone has to have cell phones, it again was a long process and we had to wait and wait. And I was still not able to get a working phone. Then we went to the bank to open bank accounts and they stuck us all at one window so that took hours as well. Not so fun, but we did get stuck in a crazy storm! It was raining sooo hard and lots of lightning, we had to run across the road and got soaked.

Also, we have decided that Danny is not adjusting well to china lol. He is constantly sick in someway or another, complains about the heat on a regular basis and is still falling asleep at 7 and getting up at 3 or 4 am. Today was our first day of pro-d. Nothing too exciting, thats our schedule for the rest of the week. We did get our desks though! Pretty exciting, starting to feel like professionals haha.

Hopefully we will take more pictures, we seem to be forgetting to do that a lot, hence the lack of good ones on here.

Find of the day: $1 wasabi calamari

Photos: Wuhan

mmanddb — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 22:29:00 GMT

Photo's of our adventures in Wuhan

A productive day

mmanddb — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 22:46:00 GMT

It is our first day off and there is sooo much to do! We went to this enormous mall which makes cross iron mills look very tiny, for some groceries and shopping. Then we went and got massages from this hotel near by, which were awesome and only cost 11 dollars for an hour long body massage. I thought it was pretty painful but Danny was lovin it. When we got back from there we went on a mission to track down our luggage, after asking four different people and talking to a secretary (who was not working today) we found out everything was at the front gate! It arrived sometime today, what a gong show. So we got this rickety, totally rusted cart and had to wheel our luggage from the gate to our apartments going past all these parents watching their kids do military training. Moving off campus is looking more and more appealing. So happy to be able to change our clothes though!!!!

We are having to learn mandarin fairly quickly, no one speaks enough English off campus to be able to get by. The driving is crazy, exactly what you would think. The bigger the vehicle the more right of way, you can do any maneuver you want (including but not limited to driving on the wrong side of the road) as long as you honk to let other people know you’re there, crosswalks are for decoration and lights are suggestions.

We now kind of have internet in the apartment. It works on and off and the VPN we use to get on facebook and other blocked sites slows it down quite a bit, but yay!!

Now we have to get back to cleaning our apartment bc it was not cleaned by the previous occupants before they left! Gross! :p

Ps. Pictures tomorrow, hopefully

Waiting, waiting, waiting....

mmanddb — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

It is 5:30 am in the morning August 25th here and both of us are up eating rice and eggs for breaky, so the jet lag is not bad at all. The last few days have been fairly hectic, but we have been having a great time and had great people to travel with. From van airport to the school took 26 hours. Our first flight was delayed by four hours so we waited around the airport before the 12 hour flight to Guangzhou. We were following the sun, which was neat because for us it didn’t set until around 3 am. The flight was long but we both slept, Danny finished his entire book, The Golden Spruce...he said it was one of the best books he’s read in a long time and highly recommends it. I felt bad for the couple next to us, they had flown from Ontario and were continuing on to Australia. :l

Anyway, when we got to the airport it was panic because instead of the 4 hour layover we had an hour and a bit to exchange our tickets, get out bags, go through customs, recheck our bags and do the thirty minute walk to our gate. It all went very smoothly though. Our second flight ended up being delayed a bit and we took off around 1045(745am pst).

We get to Wuhan a few hours later and are waiting for our luggage, and we wait and wait and everyone leaves and no luggage, by this time we are so exhausted neither of us really cares as much as we probably should have. The next few minutes were spent trying to hand gesture with the baggage woman what our stuff looked like and getting her to let us leave so we could find the people picking us up, so they don’t leave without us. Finally, she left with us and we found the principal and he got his secretary who is Chinese to figure things out. Our bags got sent to Shanghai and they would be here tomorrow. We got to the school at 230 am. (now you can figure out if I counted correctly how long the trip was haha)

It seems like most things in our apartment look really nice at first glance, but has some cracks and flaws if you look closer. It’s two bedrooms, one bathroom. It’s major downfalls are that we are on the first floor and we face the school. We will probably stay but we hear the off campus apartments are really nice with a great neighborhood.

The school is huge! There are three schools, the international school (where we are teaching) is the biggest. It is essentially a boarding school so there are student dorms, which are on the other side of the cafeteria building and the teaching building (thank goodness).

Yesterday was our first true experience of China, and it was awesome. We went shopping for cleaning supplies and basic necessities for our apartments at Walmart, and before you think, “What? They are in China, why would they take you to Walmart?” trust me, it is not like Walmart in Canada. They have some of the same stuff, but the majority is not. We spent two hours shopping and spent 300 dollars three shopping carts full of everything we need in our house for the year plus groceries. It was kind of crazy with all thirty of us Canadians running around the place.

After, the school took us out for dim sum. It was very fatty (even the vegetables, which is what we tried mostly to eat), very good and some was quite spicy. After supper, we headed straight for our boxspring of a mattress..jaja.

Oh ya and still no luggage, hopefully today. Everyone cross your fingers! Thank god some very awesome people got us some very nice gifts to open on the plane ;)

There was also a praying mantis with its head chopped off outside our apartment and Michele squished a giant centipede with her foot! Last night we went over to a teachers house and he had all the new teachers over and many of the old staff as well. Danny accidentally drank too much but ended up having a really good time. He drank some really strong Chinese liquor called Bai Jo. It smells good but is the worst tasting alcohol he has ever had. We made lots of new friends including an elderly asian man dancing by himself at the dance club we went to later that night. Danny tried to get convinced to go to a different club down the street that was run by these sketchy african guys...that didn’t end up happening even though they offered to give us free drinks. Danny tried to “dance the liquor off” and ended up eating street noodles with quail eggs. We are trying hard to eat as little meat as possible but it is challenging given that pork is basically a seasoning here. We are not really vegetarians anymore :(

Feel free to post questions/comments or email either of us!

We're moving to China

mmanddb — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 13:15:00 GMT

Hey everyone!

Lots of people have asked us to keep them in the loop, so we have started a blog for anyone who wants to check out where we are and what we are up to. I will try to write and add pictures semi-regularily and for sure after anything of interest happens. 12 days until we land in Wuhan! lots to do......