Broetje

Sorry I’ve been MIA for the past a couple of weeks, however this past weekend we got to travel to Western Sichuan and visited and stayed at a Ganbu Tibetan Fortress. However before we went to the Fortress, we all went to the Maoxian orphanage school (Jet Li founded and donated a lot of money this orphanage) they were around 90 Tibetan Orphans who were affected by the massive earthquake in 2008. We all pooled in our money to buy each child some winter gloves and hats. The kids were really excited to hang out us. We taught them some English songs and words like “Lizard” and “Monkey” then we played duck duck goose with them. We played with them for about 2-3 hours until we piled back into the bus and went to the Ganbu ... read more

Sorry I have been missing in Action for the about the past week and a half. This past week was China’s national holiday so we didn’t have school for about a week. (Think of America’s version of Spring Break except there is about 1.2 billion people on vacation) Several of us had been looking at different places that we all wanted to go to. Since there so many of us we all broke into our own groups. A large portion of the group went to Xi’an and a couple went to Li river (not sure if I spelled it right) and few of us and I went to Hi Lou Gou to climb at Hailuogou Glacier Park. To get there we piled into a bus which took us about 8 hours to get there however the ... read more

So this week leading up to my birthday was pretty uneventful; first a few of decided to go to Hainan Island for our week long holiday in October so we bought our train tickets for that. (Hainan Island is China’s version of Hawaii) I also did get my first Chinese experience here (They have different pricings from 20 Yuan to 60 Yuan based on the experience however one of our volunteers talked one guy who charges 40 down to 20 Yuan.. so I got a haircut for $3.20) which was pretty amazing, he did a good job. Tuesday was pretty uneventful but did get a good workout in. Since Wednesday was my birthday I felt that I should have gotten my my non-intensive Chinese homework done since was pretty tough since we haven’t really gone over ... read more

Today was our long day of classes which began with Non-Intensive Chinese followed by three hours of International Trade and one hour of Taiji and one hour of Kung Fu (which I highly enjoyed and it is taught by the same instructor). Our Non-Intensive Class is always interesting since we have E-Books and couldn’t find any handbooks so we ended up taking pictures of the assigned pages with my IPhone and made PDF’s with them (Our generation and our gadgets). After having our professor teach us how to say in Chinese “What is your nationality” and other conversation starters we went to lunch. After lunch we went to our International Trade Class in which our professor gave us a “Bacon-Flavored” moon cake. It was kind of spicy but definitely did not taste like bacon. It was ... read more

So Monday was the Mid-Autumn Festival where they pass out moon cakes to one another. (I explained what moon cakes were in my last blog) So Monday was a laid back day since most of the places were closed due to the holiday. However a few of us found a ma and pa restaurant for dumplings. (They were literally hand making them behind us as we ordered and our motto is “The more sketchy the restaurant, the better the food). We found out that they were 4 Yuan for 9 dumplings… So we ordered about 6 trays… (We spent six US dollars for 54 dumplings). After we were filled with dumplings, we ended up going back to the university to relax a little. I ended up taking a small power nap before my roommate and a ... read more

Sorry I’ve been MIA for the past a couple of days however I’ve been nursing a strained eye so I decided to give my eyes a break from my contacts and my laptop.(No I wasn’t detained) On Friday, we had no classes, so after working out, some of us decided to play basketball with some of the locals. First we just started playing a game of H-O-R-S-E. Yet we kept getting some locals who would try to shoot with us unaware that we were playing a game. After a while we played 2 on 2 until some more locals decided to join us where we ended up playing 4 on 4. (I held my own against the Chinese) I’ve noticed that the Chinese don’t really like to play physical when it comes to basketball however we ... read more