Guangdian Hotel Zunyi City

... and it started us thinking.

The first year or so in China we lived in Guangdong province where the food was wonderful, the shopping extensive and the multitudinous, expensive wonders of Hong Kong only a weekend trip away. We lived large, saved absolutely no money and loved it.

But our travels around China just gave us a hunger for more. Our first long-distance trip in China, to Xi'an, made us think about following the Silk Road for a month. For two months. Finally, we ...

There's enough to see and do in China to last lifetimes of travel.

Over the years, Dan and I have done our best to see as much of the Middle Kingdom as we could in the time that we had.

Amazingly, that time in China will total three years next month. When we arrived in 2006 we intended to stay for a year or so. One year melted into another as we unfolded more and more ideas of where we could go and what we could ...

"I'm having a fun day," I thought as I watched seven normally quiet young adults struggle with brown construction paper and not enough tape.

I was turning my English class into a little science experiment. Our goal: To create a projection device so we could track the solar eclipse arcing across China without burning our retinas. Some cities north of us would experience a total eclipse, while we would see a partial one at ...

... This means that I get to really practice my Chinese. I am really improving it and I am hoping that in the two years that I will be here, I can become ALMOST fluent... (I need to do WAY more studying though! So what do I teach and how are my classes? Well I teach 13 different classes all week! I teach 9 of them on Saturdays and Sundays! I mainly teach the beginning classes, a middle school class, a high school and two reading ...

... Zunyi area, about an hour south west of where we live. The resort has a hotel and the normal bathing options: a warm swimming pool and some nice hot rock-lined soaking pools, in addition to this fish pond. I had heard of this fish therapy before. My friend Adam visited the "doctor fish" in Japan a few years ago, and I recently read an article that the first fish beauty therapy was being offered in the eastern United States. According to the internet ...

... must not have realized is that the grandson's T-shirt read "USA" in big letters. Ditto for the woman wearing a matching tracksuit outfit with "SPAIN" on her back. A week before the torch came through Zunyi the city started getting ready for it, holding a rehearsal in which traffic to the relay streets-including the street we live on and the street we work on---were closed for the better part of a day. Two days before the actual relay, crews erected iron-pipe barricades along ...

... back to China. We were right, our town wasn't harmed by the earthquake. No buildings had fallen down in small Zunyi, no schools had collapsed no villages had been at risk of flooding. But the earthquake isn't really over, even now. Literally thousands of aftershocks have rocked the already-ravaged areas in Sichuan province. Some of the following tremors are of a magnitude large enough to be earthquakes in their own right, measuring up to six on ...

... Buddha flanked by smaller icons welcomed donations. We put a few yuan in the collections box and the talkative lady, who grabbed my shoulders and laughed at one point, burned some incense for us. In the third room a collection of Arhats sculpted like giant bowling pins sat in majesty. Nathan chatted with the monk a little and learned that this temple had escaped the damages of the Cultural Revolution and that the decorations and building were at least a ...

... bought. Station halls themselves quickly filled up, so these would-be travelers had to wait outside. In Guangzhou they stopped cars from going to within several blocks of the main train station. Air travelers were also affected by the weather. While we were waiting for our flight to Guiyang we watched a group of travelers who wanted to go to Hangzhou, and who had been waiting for more than ...

... all brought into the show, jumping over bamboo sticks and dancing in a circle until the end - when they grabbed young John from our tour, and hoisted him up in the air - surprising everyone (including him). See the photo album for the video. It was lovely to be able to visit these villages in a remote part of China - to see women washing their hair and clothes in the river, young kids playing, and old men sitting around smoking.