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Since Chinese toilets look like this,

we sometimes need reminders on what to do when we occasionally come across a western toilet.

In a typical park in China you will find...

• more adults than children
• workout equipment instead of a playground
• Adult sized monkey bars
• At least 4 ping pong tables cemented into the pavement. 
• an occasional back massager thingy
• Over 100 people gathered around a stage doing Chinese line dances. It's a pretty normal thing here.

Results of humidity

• mold infested bathroom ceiling
• moldy scripture case
• moldy suitcase
• moldy ipod armband 
•  moldy flip flops
• bad hair day, everyday
• damp, musty smelling clothes 
• permanently wet couch
• Mold covered Mr. Mosquito (this is Kristy and I's science experiment... he has been squashed on our window for 3 months now. )
• And most recently, I found my most comfortable church shoes in the whole wide world under my bed... moldy.

CURSE YOU HUMIDITY!!!! I will never complain about Arizona dry heat again.

Some pretty cool places

Chengdu

Panda Breeding Center

World's Largest Buddha -

The Giant Buddha of Leshan

Okay, I may or may not have gotten the picture below from google images... but I didn't want to wait in a 5 hour line to get a picture from this angle! But it's SO cool!

Tibetan Street

Cool Market

Swine Flu precautions were taken at our hostel. The government ordered the hostel owner to kill his pig!

Zhu Hai

We visited Debbie and Jeanette's friend, Michael. He was pretty much awesome.

Yangshuo

Biking!

Rice paddies and village

Boat ride down the Li River 

Water Buffalo!

Mud caves and hot springs

This is my only decent picture of us in the mud because of the annoying nude man who decided to jump in all of our pictures! He's pretty covered in this one.

Sweet and Sour Sh**

Highlights of the day:

1. Helping Spring pass out flyers for his new Karate studio.

2. Having an anxiety attack while weaving through crazy Chinese traffic when taking a turn driving Spring's scooter. We barely survived. Spring's words illustrate the scene perfectly, "Aa-nee! Be careful to cars!!!" It was a pretty fun anxiety attack. 

3. When Seantay asked Spring what we were just served at dinner, he replied, "Sour and sweet sh**!" (aka sweet and sour fish... at least that's what I'm hoping!)

Hungry?

This was what we were served for lunch on Friday.

And just so you know, I ate every bite.

Plus, I enjoyed it.

Today, Kate found a rather large caterpillar in her veggies.

She calmly picked it up, threw it outside, then pounded the rest of those veggies.

She also drank/ate half a bottle of ketchup in Yangshuo.

Well, she has been deprived of it for three months. 

I think our food standards are dropping dramatically. 

Why teaching at Bond Kindergarten ROCKS:

• I get to teach the cutest kids every day!

• We have awesome Chinese teachers and friends at our school. Every Thursday night is "Chinese Night", where we have dinner and hang out with the Chinese teachers! We've had a karaoke night, a sports night, a dance party, a game night... the list goes on. We practice our Chinese, they practice their English, and we all have a blast!

• These guys are pretty cool too, I guess:

• We get Chinese lessons four times a week.
• We get cooking lessons once a week. This consists every week of chopping up some sort of veggies and meat, throwing it into a large pan, then adding soy sauce, ginger, chicken powder, and at least a gallon of oil. It's no wonder all of our food tastes the same!
• We have Kung Fu 3 times a week! Now a little bit about Kung Fu...

This is Spring, our Kung Fu instructor. He's pretty much awesome.

He wants us to be very dedicated and asked us to come to Kung Fu every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We compromised and so we go every Friday, Saturday, and Monday. And if I may say so myself, we are pretty intense... 

Spring brought his camera on Friday to take pictures of us. He was excited because after two months of class, everyone finally started getting the splits!

Well that is, everyone except me...

So every class during "splits time" when Spring yells at me in his broken English to "KEEP DOING" the splits, when he pushes my legs down farther and farther until I am crying and laughing at the same time, even though I am not down like everyone else, I just want to say to him,"Spring! Do you know how freaking AWESOME I'm doing given the flexibility genes, or lack thereof, that I have inherited?! Do you realize that my father can't even correctly kneel to pray because it hurts him so bad?! Did you know that my mother pulled a hamstring doing a little cartwheel in front of her young women during mutual?!"

But don't worry about me, I'll totally have the splits in another couple of months. And I am going to greet everyone at home with a karate chop and a jump into the splits, so WATCH OUT! I won't look like a fool for long... I know Karate!!!