I meant to continue this blog..shortly after the Kunming/Dali entry....but I think I put it off because there were so many pictures to upload. Between the 5 of us, we probably took over 500 pictures! So bear with me, we were there at the beginning of October, I will try and remember all of the happenings. After Brad and Angelina dropped us off at the entrance of the Old City of Lijiang, we walked around trying to find our hotel. We were situated right in the centre of the ancient city. It reminded me of what I pictured of China before [View Full Entry]

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Last week we thought it would be a nice gesture to invite our Chinese co-teachers over for dinner. We cooked something simple, butter chicken, which turned out nice, and they brought a Christmas cake for dessert. Everything went well, although we had to quickly wash the dinner dishes before we could serve dessert (not enough plates/forkes etc). I'm sure they could understand that we don't have the best kitchen selection. Rebecca's co-teacher (Ivy) brought her son, who just started at our school. He is really smart and very cute! She said he enjoyed our cooking. [View Full Entry]

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Some random photos and videos from when I first got here.......mostly in August and September. [View Full Entry]

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I don know where the time has gone, but December has crept up on me. It doesn feel like a regular December...1) because of the damp cold 2) because until you go into the stores/malls it doesn feel like Christmas. On the weekend I went to Tai kang Lu (a shopping area in Shanghai) that is many old streets filled with shops and restaurants. Myself and some girlfriends walked around the shops before grabbing a slice of fantastic pizza for only 15rmb!!! What a deal! ($2.00). Afterwards we visited an art gallery which was showcasing a Chinese photographers recent work. I [View Full Entry]

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There have been a few things that have happened/ places I have been to that deserve a photo and explanation. We have a saying around here that goes a little something like this: TIC.........This is China. This is said a lot. Just a side note for the fireworks video- fireworks happen ALL the time and ANY time here. The week day morning, afternoon, weekend morning, afternoon, evening....you name it. I couldn't understand why they would set them off in the daylight, but apparently when someone has moved or has gotten married they set off fireworks. I think they like to let [View Full Entry]

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A couple weekends ago the girls decided we would ditch "the guys" and have a Girl's Night! Best idea----why did we not think of this earlier. Seriously???? We went to Barbarossa for dinner......a Mediterraean restaurant (equivalent to the Keg at home) but the atmosphere was really nice. Food and drinks were both great, especially the Happy Hour until 8pm......I may have had more than one drink lined up in front of me! After dinner we went to a Jazz bar called Cotton Club. It was a small bar, with many foreigners, mostly middle aged. After Cotton Club, we went to a [View Full Entry]

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On Sunday I was invited to a Barbie Birthday Party, at the Shanghai Barbie store. The birthday started at 9:30am and went until 2:30pm. The day consisted of a fashion show, eating in the Barbie Cafe and creating our own Barbies. The children also got to make some of their own creations, like their names made out of fruit. It was pretty incredible. I think everyone involved had a good time. [View Full Entry]

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This blog entry is LONG overdue...but better late than never. For the October Holiday I travelled to Yunnan province in the South West of China. The first stop was Kunming. The flight took about 3 hours, and when we flew over the city it looked very different than Shanghai. Still a big city, but instead of 18 million people, it has a population closer to that in Toronto. There were fewer tall buildings and more space. When we landed, we hired a man to drive us to our hotel (which was all booked ahead of time) thanks to Jess, who is [View Full Entry]

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This year for Halloween I dressed up as Hello Kitty (she's a Japanese cartoon cat) for those of you who don't know.....if you google her, you will see! My roomate was Hello Kitty as well and we created our costumes ourselves with our own clothes, some face makeup and a headband with cat ears and a bow. Since Halloween is a traditionally Western holiday the english teachers are in charge of decorating and organizing the events at the school. The day of Halloween we had games set up in all of our rooms for the kids to play and candy to [View Full Entry]

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Since last week we experienced a couple days of pretty sudden cold weather (going from temperatures of 25 degress to 9 in one day) we decided to get a head start and buy some space heaters from Carrefour. My roomate and I found two heaters made by Midea (a reliable brand around town) for only 300 RMB- $60. We asked the people at Carrefour to lend us a hand by delivering our heaters (since they were way to heavy for us to carry). They informed us that it would be no problem to deliver the heaters to our house- free of [View Full Entry]

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