Vacation!

Turns out time flies by FAST! And, I can't seem to keep up with blogging, or really much of anything lately. But, I'm going to try and be better.

So, last week was vacation!! Because of the Qingming festival, all the students got a few days off, and because Kelly (our Chinese coordinator) is awesome, all the ILP teachers got about ten days off of teaching this month! So, April 1-10 a bunch of us traveled to a city called Guilin! It was AMAZING!! Obviously, though, ten days is quite the vacation, and I just won't be able to tell you all about it in one post. Once again, I'll revert to pictures and just give you a couple fun highlights. Pictures I will have to post separately as individual posts due to my current blogger proxy not being the best and my e-mail not cooperating.

So, Weihai (where I'm at) is northern China, Guilin is southern China. Which means the train ride was pretty long, but actually way fun! We also didn't spend all our time in Guilin, but visited quite a few outlying cities as well. At any rate, we went there and back mostly via sleeper trains! Sleeper trains are open and just full of bunk beds and small little tables with chairs that usually don't fit the entire rear end of a normal-ish sized person. Anyway, so, the funnest thing about the sleeper trains is that everyone is so friendly. Because there's really not very much room to sit down and everything's pretty open, the people with the bottom bunk just let anyone and everyone join them sitting and that way everyone just gets to know each other. Or, well, I imagine we would if we could speak the language! But, even with the language barrier everyone was friendly. Usually someone on the train who spoke some English would hear that Americans were there and would rush over to be the translator for us. 

Another thing about the trip that I loved was the people we went with! We went with an actual tour agency type thing, which means there were a quite a few other people in our tour group. The fun thing is that all the other people were old and retired Chinese couples who spoke little to no English. They took care of us though and even invited us to come and visit them. I have one of the couple's phone number written down so one of these days we can take a weekend trip up to their house and they can feed us and show us around a little. The picture of myself and my friend Camille and a Chinese couple out on the boat in Guilin is the same couple who gave me their number. That old man was my FAVORITE! He was always so excited for everything, it was so fun to watch. Oh man, I hope I get to visit them! That guy also went on all the hikes and down the bajillion stairs down a mountain with us… only, he did it without panting as much as us! 

And yes, that's right, I went down a mountain via staircases. The Chinese are obsessed with stairs. Anyway, I'll have you know I didn't fall completely on my face once the whole way down! It actually wasn't too bad I guess—it took us about an hour and a half to walk down all the stairs, and I held on to my friend Tessa's arm the whole way down so we could both keep our balance and go down faster (no rails for most of the way, just stairs). We were in the front of the small group who decided to take the stairs almost the whole way! Yep, I know, and I didn't even sprain my ankle! Although, one of Kelly's nicknames for me is now chopstick legs because either they're skinny, or they don't bend very well going down stairs. I'm guessing at both of the above.

Most of the things we saw were super pretty parks and mountain-ish stuff and a few caves. It was all so beautiful!! And, the best part is, it wasn't insanely cold!! Colder than I was hoping, BUT, Weihai has gotten super warm while we've been away so that makes up for it completely! Just keep your fingers crossed that the weather will stay this way and won't turn back to cold for another week or two before summer hits. Looks like I'll finally have to start shaving my legs  more often which means I'll probably need to buy men's shaving cream when my current small supply of girl's shaving cream runs out. So far I haven't found and shaving supplies meant for women. Too much info for a blog? Maybe, but oh well--it's all about embracing the body here in China! No shame, my friends, no shame!! ;)

So, those are just a couple of my favorite parts about the trip—cool FYI is that we went and visited the mountains where Avatar was filmed (no signs of blue people or the tree of life or whatever). We also went to some cool hot springs. I also went clubbing for the first time! If you can call it that… no drinking for me (surprise, surprise!), but plenty of busting my mad dance skills. We also went to a southern China culture show type thing that looked like something from the early eighties. But, of course, that's China for you.

And now it's back to my regular teaching life in China. Best part is "regular" and "China" and "my" were all in the same sentence :)