This time I have a semi-legitimate excuse as to the gap in posts. We were busy moving about 6000 miles from the Asian continent to the North American continent. We arrived stateside a week ago. For a myriad of reasons I won’t bore anyone with, we’re back in the US temporarily. Leaving China was hard. It’s a wonderful country that we didn’t get to explore enough of. We have a laundry list of places we wanted to visit and never got to, so we fully intend on going back in the future. Our last days in China were sad and wonderful [View Full Entry]

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Hello! Sorry for the gap in posts. I have no excuse since I’m not super busy. But I’ll make one up. It’s too hot here to type or come up with cohesive thoughts of what to type. For the majority of my life I’ve been convinced I’m more of a hot-weather person and that I don’t fit in with Washington weather. Then I moved to an area of China with a sub-tropical climate. Now I fully believe I’m a cool-weather person and miss Washington temperatures dearly. It’s been over 80 degrees here since the middle of May. Now I’m sure some [View Full Entry]

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Hello! More random China-isms. Eating meat and fish in China is interesting. For starters, every piece of meat has bones in it. And in true Chinese fashion, you stick the whole piece of meat in your mouth and attractively spit out any bones. Also in China fashion, you can spit the bones anywhere on the table. It’s not like there is a designated place to spit out bones. Into a bowl, on a dish, or just right on the table; all Kosher places to spit out inedibles. Fish also has bones galore. I’m actually boycotting eating fish here from now on. [View Full Entry]

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Hello! The longer I live in China the more immune to its oddities I become; something I consider to be good and bad. It’s good in the sense that I’m getting accustomed to a new country and lifestyle, but bad in the sense that one of the main goals I have with this blog is to explain the oddities of life in China, so if one day any of you end up in China and witness something weird you can smile and say, “Oh yeah, I read about that!” So my goal is now to make more posts, but shorter posts [View Full Entry]

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Hello! Still plugging away here in China! We’ve now filmed four episodes of Just Follow Me and we’re working on posting the third online. We keep asking about the second episode but we get a Chinese answer, meaning that we get an answer but it doesn’t pertain to the question we asked. This happens numerous times every day. Yangzhou is getting a bit mundane, which is to be expected since we’re well into our third month here. But the people here never cease to amaze me, humor me and most often make me wonder when logic and intelligence went out the [View Full Entry]

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Hello! We uploaded the first episode of “Just Follow Me” so it’s streaming online. We had to seriously shrink it in size so the quality was compromised but it was one gig so we had to squish it down. I hope you enjoy it! I especially like the mushy love song in the beginning and the techno country song at the end. They have the worst taste in Western music here. [url=http://www.motionbox.com/videos/3096d6b41c1fe5c5be?affiliate_name=motionbox&guest_pass=2c90ceb30c17cce531f7d68c81780d99d5fc&iid=share&sharer_uid=0a9bdeb51918e6c387&sharing_uid=309ed9be121ce4be&sid=mbox_shareem [View Full Entry]

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Hello! Sorry this update is way overdue. Life has been busy, peppered in with some wonderful events. I'll do my best to recall the highlights. Friday was Labor Day here in China so we were given the day off. To our delight, we were able to rearrange classes and take off Wednesday, Thursday and Friday without missing any classes. We have two friends teaching in Shanghai who will be leaving this month to head back to the states and we were determined to visit them before they jet set. So here was our chance. We took a bus from Yangzhou to [View Full Entry]

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Hello! Lots more to fill everyone in on! We trekked to Shanghai on Monday to pick up our friend Luke who is spending a month here in Yangzhou to see what it’s like to live in China. The drive from Yangzhou to Shanghai takes about 3 hours, but we spent about 4 getting there in the pouring rain. We did get to take a ferry on the journey there. My first thought of a ferry in China was terror. Do they drive ferries like they drive cars? Thankfully, the answer is no. Amanda hadn’t been on a boat since she was [View Full Entry]

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Hello! I just got done showering with a pot of hot water. Why, you ask? I’ll try to explain; we have that crazy panel where we set the water temperature, which we keep set at 50 degrees Celsius, 122 Fahrenheit. But somehow it would creep up to 80 Celsius, that’s a skin-scorching temperature of 176 Fahrenheit. We certainly didn’t want it this hot but how to fix this, we didn’t know. On Sunday the panel starting saying weird things and then it went blank. Uh oh. We assumed the water had gotten too hot and the heating element was toasted. We [View Full Entry]

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Hello! Good news - we found Bob’s camera! He was sure it was gone and started wondering how to get a new one/where to buy it. I decided it was still around; we just needed to make some calls. My first thought was to a restaurant we had eaten lunch in the day before. That was the last place I remember seeing it so I figured it would be a good idea to call. But I don’t speak Chinese so I decided we should give the task to Amanda, since she’s in charge of making sure we’re alive and well. We [View Full Entry]

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