Today was a long long tour day. We started out on a bus to the Ming tombs. When we arrived we were taken into the temple where many of the treasures were displayed a... read more

Yesterday we left Shilou City. The night before we had gone to a karaoke bar and I stayed up till about 2:30 doing my grades for the semester. I grabbed a nap and then then got up at 6 to finish. I turned in the grades at about 8:30....made the last of my Starbucks coffee, finished packing and was ready. By 9:00 We were all packed and waiting in the lobby, said goodbyes to the hotel girls and to Mr. Yin, the Education Bureau liaison, and loaded our things and ourselves into the van driven by Mr. Feng. The three Chinese volunteers went in another car to PingYao for a night there on the way back to Beijing. We drove the 5+ hours in the rain...it was miserable weather. Mr. Feng is indeed a good driver. ... read more

Tuesday, August 10, 2010 Teaching went better today than yesterday. Although we didn't have the key to my room when we arrived at the middle school and we were about 20 minutes late getting started, the class time moved at a much better pace today than yesterday. In another classroom we started off with picture descriptions..the back-to-back exercise in which one student has to explain to another student what is missing in the picture. This took about 15 minutes and was a good way to begin the class. By the end of this warm-up we had the key and were able to get back into the classroom. We then continued the powerpoint on American Holidays with a focus first on Halloween...therewas an additional powerpoint on Halloween with pictures of costumes, jack-o-lanterns and a child trick or ... read more

Shanxi - Jin is short for Shanxi province. It lies in Huabei in China. It is 150,000 square kilometers in area and with a population is 29.2 million. http://www.chinatourselect.com/Travel-China-Guide/Destination-Guide/Shanxi/Shanxi-introduction.html Shanxi Geography Shanxi located in the East of Huangtu Plateau. In Shanxi, the eastern and western parts are hilly lands. And in the middle part, there are some basins. The hilly areas, plateaus and hilly lands occupy 72 percent. And the basins occupy 28 percent. The rivers here belong to two river systems, they are the Yellow River and the Hai River. The biggest tributary of the Yellow River is Fen River. It has a semi-dry continental monsoon climate in the temperate zone. The reserves of coal and bauxite are amongst the first places in China. Shanxi abounds in iron ore, there are also copper, sulphur and ... read more

Qikou is a small town about a 6 hour bus ride from Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi Province. For more than two centuries, when transportation in the area was still undeveloped, the Yellow River constituted the main transportation route for commodities between Northwest and North China. Qikou served as a vital trading point marking the eastern terminus for river-bound freight. During the Kangxi and Qianlong reigns of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 A.D.), Qikou was the commercial center and commodity transfer harbor, where dozens, sometimes hundreds of boats, berthed every day. Cereals, oils, salt, furs, medicines and many other products came to Qikou on water routes from Northwest China, before being transported to other parts of the country by horse and camel. Meanwhile, silk, tea, cigarettes and liquor were transported from central China to the northwest (here it ... read more