May flowers

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It's been an exciting month so far. The first weekend in May was the Chinese Labor Day so we had an extra two days off which was much needed. Our company took us on a trip to two cities. The first city was where the movie crouching tiger hidden dragon was filmed. I never saw the movie, but it was filmed in a famous bamboo forest. Actually it's the largest bamboo forest in the world, and it had over 500 million (I think that's correct) trees. Our trip was very chinese style. Which means we saw as much as we could in as little time as possible, and we were forced to stay in our large group and move quickly. I thought it was good because it was so hot, and bamboo isn't that interesting. Once you've seen one, you've seen them all. We went to three different places to see bamboo and ate a bamboo meal. We stayed the night in a small town surrounding the forest. Needless to say we were probably the first foreigners ever in this town and they made sure we knew we weren't welcome. After this town we visited Hangzhou (population 5 million) which Alex and I had already visited with his Mom. We went to a tea field and tried the most expensive tea in the world. At cost, the price is $1,000 for 2.2 pounds. Our company gave each of us a small tin for a souviner. It was so relaxing to walk through rolling hills of tea. Once we got into the city of Hangzhou it started to rain, so our company gave us some money and we were on our own for dinner. Many people complained about the trip. Mostly because the bus drivers took us on all the backroads to the cities. We would be told we'd be somewhere in an hour, and it'd turn into four hours. We'd see signs that would say Hangzhou - 50 KM and we would do our math. That's about 31 miles. We couldn't figure out why it would take hours and hours to get there. We later found out that the drivers took us all around because he didn't want to pay the toll fare. Overall we had a good time on the trip. It was fun to hang out with other teachers and get out of the Shanghai smog.

Last weekend Alex and I had open class which means that our students parents come to class and write comments about how they think it went. I'm glad that's over. We worked weeks and weeks preparing for it. Sunday night we went to a party at a coworker's apartment. He has two roomates that are business men here from California and France. It was fun to meet other foreigners. We talked for a while with a man from Germany and I thought it was interesting to find out what other foreigners do in Shanghai that aren't teachers.

We only have 6 weeks left, and we're counting the days! The weather is miserable, and I'm afraid it's only going to get worse. It's in the 90's, and the humidity is horrible. We've been places that are humid, but it's so much worse here with all of the pollution and garbage everwhere. It's almost like we can't breath. It doesn't cool down at all in the early mornings or at night eaither. Last night we woke up around 3am drenched in sweat, and didn't even have the sheet on us. We immediately went into our living room and turned on the A/C. We were way too hot to touch, so I slept on the floor, and Alex slept on our twin bed/couch. I think after we tutor tonight we're going to move our bigger bed into the living room so we can be close to the A/C. We sold our electric bicycles to a chinese guy off of craigslist. It was quite the ordeal with the language barrier. Although he spoke English well, we had to have our neighbor talk to him so he knew where we lived. He got a good deal on them, and we were glad we were able to get some money back from using them all year. We bought folding electric bikes, and Alex took one apart yesterday. They break down small, and we'll have to find large bags that they can fit into. We don't want to use them and get China on them, so I'm walking to school the next few weeks, and Alex is going to take the Metro.

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