We're coming to America!!

Follow this link!

Crank up your speakers and sing along with us :D

http://s956.photobucket.com/albums/ae49/andrealamb64/Blog%20Pictures/?action=view¤t=WereComintoAmerica.mp4

Here we come!


(I hope this works!!!)

This is happening!!!

I'm coming home!!

Today!!!

Three suitcases, a back pack, and a smile on my face..Hong Kong, Korea, LA and finally Salt Lake City. We leave Zhongshan at 8 in the morning and I will arrive in Salt Lake at 8:00 pm local time.

Literally the longest day of my life........



And just to make it a little better I'm wearing mismatched socks for my own entertainment. I have to go through customs three times, can ya blame me??

Bring on the jet lag :)

See you soon!



(Oh and watch Facebook, a surprise may be coming in Hong Kong!!)

A few last words!

As my stay in China winds to a close I just have a few finals thoughts to blog and then I’m gonna forget about my blog and enjoy my last crazy week here, m’kay? We have a final performance on Tuesday where my kids are singing to “It’s a Small World”, our kindergarten class is doing a play to the book “Panda, Panda What Do You See,” we as teachers are performing Thriller and this all goes with costumes, background music, etc., without even mentioning set decorations and teaching tomorrow. Yikes, right? So my faithful readers, it there are any of those, I will be home next Tuesday and this will probably be the last post from China.

I can’t really believe it!

(Please cross your fingers and your toes that all of those go okay, thanks :) )


Things are REALLY getting a little too Chinese here. I have this theory that the closer we get to leaving the more concentrated our Chinese experience gets. Like how an hour-long outing to a restaurant we like with a Chinese friend turned into a 4-hour deal halfway across town with weird foods, a private room, a Britney Spears dance party in a private room..it sounds like a joke right?
My waitress spilled my Coke…


The whole experience was just weird...so we smile like this..

(P.S. I’m wearing a shirt I cut up..renovating T-shirts is okay when they smell like China and you know they’ll be staying here. No problem :) )

It’s just all getting so weird.

But still fun and exciting :D

Oh and we always joke about it but seriously, here’s how I’d look with Chinese black hair..

We got our nails done one day and I had fun trying on the wigs at the salon.


What else has happened lately..oh the kung fu perfomance! It went fairly well. I need to get pictures from other people of the actual thingy but here’s a couple fun playing around pics from after ;)




Pretty fun :)

We also tried to go to the beach but it was a near-ultimate fail. But photobucket is being slow and I’m impatient so there will be no photo to support this.

Well I want to finish this and be done with blogging for the time being in China!!!! Packing, singing, dancing, goodbyes, etc…it’s all happening!

USA, here I come!!!!!!

Crazy? I was crazy once..

Here are some symptoms of living in China for 4 months…



Hugging random chicken men.



Willingly eating chicken feet.


Waiting in general does interesting things to people. For some reason waiting for buses is especially bad. We have learned to find just about anything to entertain ourselves..







Waiting rots the brain!



Using squatters, becoming acustomed to squatters, preferring squatters to western toilets, and taking pictures with squatters. Pretty much squatters make you a crazy person.



Acquiring Chinese eyes. Inevitable.



Leading songs during opening of our class has really increased my ability to yell and sing at the same time. Hopefully my vocal chords have not been damaged?



In every picture there is a moment of decision: smile or pull a face. Maybe it’s the frizzy hair or the bad skin or the bleached/stretched old clothes or the general frumpy appearance that I suffer from here but I have definitely developed a tendency to do the latter here.



China breeds random behavior. I could try to explain this picture but it probably wouldn’t do any good, it still wouldn’t make any sense to you..



I have become a photo-bomber in China. This picture was a perfectly good self-shot of Debbie at the summer palace before I invited myself in and spoiled it. Or enhanced it ;)



I get tired of doing my hair, enough so that I will let pretty much anyone do it for me.



The Chinese are concerned about saving face. We aren’t! Pretty sure we make a scene wherever we go, whether or not we mean to.


Yep we’ve completely lost it! It honestly can’t be helped though, Chinese people are inherently insane so what do you expect us to be like after 4 months with them??

There are a lot of movies and books that remind us of China in little ways but right now there’s just one phrase that stands out in my mind that pretty much sums it up. It can be found on the case of the new Alice in Wonderland movie (which I happened to really like, by the way!):

WE ARE ALL MAD HERE.


There's no denying it!

Weekend in Guangzhou

Just to warn you, there are too many pictures in this post ;)

We went to the neighboring city of Guangzhou for a little weekend trip. We’d only been there one other time catching the train to Beijing and to be quite honest it was just as crazy as smelly actually visiting it as it was passing through. All in the experience, I suppose. Guangzhou is just an interesting place. The Asian Games are being help here in a hundredish days so the city is getting ready for those but I still just thought it was weird. First of all, black people. All over. And middle-easterners. There was a point where we rode past a handful of people and none of them were Oriental, weird!! That doesn’t happen in China! Also, I’m not kidding when I say that Guangzhou smells bad. I don’t know why but it was freaking nasty. And it’s just fast-paced and the people look meaner and by the end of 2 days we were all very grateful to live in Zhongshan. It’s a good home and we have everything we need here :)

Similarly to Beijing we got to do battle with the metro to make our way between the various destinations. We’re getting pretty good with a week’s worth of practice in Beijing but it’s still just a big crazy mess of Chinese people and metro stops. We caught a rickshaw back to our hotel to save us the trouble of walking after a long day of subwaying across the city.


The little ricksha man. He had a crush on Amanda.

This is how we felt about our hotel..

Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck. I put a shirt over my pillow and slept with no covers. Our bathroom smelt like a septic tank and showering in there was one of my grossest China experiences. And I have had some GROSS experiences, trust me.

The next morning we caught the metro to another district to go to the Safari Park!!!!
It made Guangzhou totally and completely worth it :D I was so excited about everything, I felt like a little kid!







I got to feed a baby tiger!!


SO INSANELY ADORABLE!! I want one!!



I bought some food and fed the monkeys. It was fun to watch em scramble for it.


There was a series of exhibits called Tiger Hill and oh my goodness, dreams were fulfilled here. I love tigers so this was so amazing!

They had so many white tigers here! And reading the story about the couple of tigers here who have 150 family members around the globe, which make up more than half of the white tiger population in the world. Thank you, China, for taking the effort to preserve the white tiger legacy!


I decided on a favorite tiger species! The South China tiger, isn’t that appropriate?

The tiger cubs were so cute! They had so many of them!




Baby tigers! So itty bitty and they don’t even have their stripes yet!


And because one tiger wasn’t enough..


I had to hold the white one too ;)



Hey what’s my class doing at the safari park?? I ran for cover..



Then I got to feed an elephant! He was playful and it was cute.



Koalas are sleepy.


And just when I thought the day couldn’t get any better at this extraordinarily out of this world safari park …

I rode an elephant!!



Booyah!


But wait, they had pandas, too!!


This guy was my favorite!


LOOK AT HIS FACE! Isn’t he adorable?? I can totally see why the panda is so loved here, and why they made such cute cartoons.

Yes, my dreams came true. About twelve of them :)

Dear China,
I realize a lot of the things you do bother me (why do so many people throw up here? and your drivers are AWFUL) but for today I am happy you have less rules and restrictions than America when it comes to animal parks. You made me superiorly blissful :)


Then for some shopping which is always an experience.


Here we are trying on swimming suits over our clothes at an outdoor market. Lovely :)

We tried a couple more shopping places and were unsuccessful at finding what we wanted and felt as hungry, tired and irritable as if it were day 5 of Beijing. I’m starting to get burnt out on normal days so this frustrating travel experience was not exempt. One night was quite enough for me, thank you very much.

Oh Guangzhou. Thanks for the zoo but I will not miss you.

My Juggling Act

We have a precious home video of me as a 4 year-old trying to put our kittens in a doll stroller. I’d have two safely in the seat but as I turned about to get the third, one of the two in the stroller would jump out and flee for safety. I’d set the one in my hands in the stroller and bend down to scoop up the escapee, but while my back was turned another one would jump out! This happened three or four more times before I eventually just start crying out of frustration.

Who knew I’d be having a parallel experience teaching Chinese kindergartners?

You put one in line, and one runs across the room and starts kung fu-ing someone. You take one kid’s pencil and tell him to go wash his hands for snack, just to turn around and find another kid is going through all of your materials. You think you have all of the Play-doh snagged from the clutches of their little hands, only to have a kid come back a minute later and hand you a small clump. I could join the circus after juggling these kids.

To illustrate..

Goal: Try to get a cute class photo to take home to America for when I miss the little angels. Watch how this progresses..






(Notice how the kids on my lap change, they are so ADD...)

This is how it sounded: "Okay everyone come to this corner! Okay good, OH yep you can sit on one of my legs, you sit on the other. I promise there’s enough room for both of you, sheesh. Wow there's no way I can hold both of you up, let's get a chair. Alright! 1,2,3,4,5,6,7..wait, where are Jimmy and Hocking? Get off those beds and get in here! Why do I have to come out here and get you? Okay Hocking get OFF my chair. Alright everyone’s here, hurry and take it! Seriously, Jimmy? STAND UP. Look at the camera, look at Debbie!! Debbie, do something exciting so they’ll look at you. Dora, look at Debbie! SMILE!!!!! Come on, we’re happy! PETER, GET BACK here! Yeah they’re done..did you at least get ONE decent picture?"

Yep, that’s my life three hours a day, five days a week.

Barnum and Bailey, here I come!