Spring Festival 2017

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I got way behind on this Blog, but I'm going to try to update it quickly. Maybe at some point I'll go back and talk about teaching at ZhouNan, but for now, I just want to post some photos from my Spring Festival trip that I went on with a few of my friends.

Really quickly, Spring Festival is also known as Chinese New Year. It's also a good time to break between the semesters, so just like American students get about a month off from school for Christmas/Holidays, the same goes for Chinese students. The length of the holiday varies from school to school, and being a foreign teacher, I got a few extra weeks off due to testing and whatnot. I've often heard that Chinese New Year is the equivalent to the Christmas/Holiday season in the USA. Families will gather together and make delicious foods and spend a lot of quality time with each other, pretty similar, right?

So during this time, I had off about a month and a half from teaching, and instead of lollygagging around in Changsha, a few friends and I decided to take a journey around China! We went to 5 major cities: Chengdu, Xi'An, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guilin. I'll make a different post for each of these so that the photos won't get all mixed up. This was definitely a highlight to my year in China, and when I get the same questions over and over again, "Why do you want to go back to China?" or "What's so great about China?" my answer never wavers: Where else, especially in the USA without a high paying job, would one get to travel around for a month and a half exploring another part of the world? Now the traveling benefit isn't the only reason that I decided to come back to China for another year, but it's definitely up there. So, without further adieu, let me end this blog post and show you what my Spring Festival looked like.

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