The Buss Stop

Last week we were lucky enough to go spend a couple days with our friend Sherry in her hometown. It is a place called Yan’an, which is about three hours away by train. It is in the northern part of Shaanxi province, near the border of Shanxi province. In the last blog I spoke of all of the “barely made it” situations that we encountered, but this time, we didn’t barely make it. We had an 8:30 train and we left our school at 7:30, which should be plenty of time to make it to the train station and to the platform, but because this city has so many people, we got off the bus with six minutes to spare. We ran as fast as we could to the ticket booth only to realize that the ... read more

After months and months of grey skies, we woke up late feeling rather down by all the gloom. I went to the window and opened the curtains and, lo and behold, blue skies were smiling down on me! Because we were already running very late, I told Jarek, "Let's just go ride bikes around the city wall instead of going to class!" He wasn't sure if I was serious, but I was not kidding. Months and months of grey is hard so I needed to take advantage of the beautiful day! (Good thing, too, because the next day was back to grey.) Jarek agreed... I really am not a bad influence all the time, I promise! It was an absolutely perfect day to ride bikes around the wall! It was a little cool with the breeze, ... read more

Back in February, Jarek and I decided we would find a way to make it to Hong Kong for the Asia Area Women's Conference. We agreed with the owner of a music studio to trade teaching music lessons for plane tickets to Hong Kong. I am not going to go into all the details leading up to this point - it isn't a very fun story and it would take way too long - but because of cultural differences, miscommunications, and a few other reasons we made the decision to stop teaching the class. Like I said, it is a very long story so I am not going to go into that, but what I do want to talk about is what we did during our little "music" class every Saturday for the last couple months. ... read more

Ok, it's definitely my turn to pull my weight and write a blog post; Kaylee has been doing all of the heavy lifting. I know she just finished the entry about Hohhot (which was back in January/February) but I'm going to do the one about Hong Kong now because it's already been a month and we need to catch up! So, here goes: Background: Our trip to Hong Kong was only planned in January. Kaylee has told me for a while that she wanted to go but it just wasn't in our budget until our good friends the Powells told us we could stay with friends of theirs for a few days. See, March 13-15 was the Asia Area Women's conference and Jordan and Cindy Powell were going, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to ... read more

Harbin! Welcome to a city of blue skies, stackable dolls, and borsch. Oh, and a huge world made from ice and snow - we can’t forget that! Our trip to Harbin was so wonderful. It was great to get away from Xi’an for a little while and enjoy somewhat-smogless air and forks. Yay forks! It makes so much more sense to twirl the noodles with your fork rather than use the shovel-with-a-stick method, but that isn’t what I am here to talk about. I will divide our trip into locations to make it a bit easier to follow. Tigers! Our first big destination was to the famed Siberian Tiger Park! Apparently there are 1,400 tigers there, but only 400 were on display at the time… pick and choose the facts you believe. I choose to believe ... read more