Jin Hao Hotel Shijiazhuang

... with a chinese host family. I hit the jack pot. I stayed with "becky" and her parents. Her father is a meteorologist and her mother works at a bank. They showed me all over town and gave me a nice wooden good luck bracelet. (They are not normally worn by tourists and other Chinese people have found mine pretty funny when i where it out)

Becky's family was loaded. They had a large 2 story apartment, flat ...

... no I goes out the the parking lot and intercepts each driver as they go to the covenient store and the bathrooms. Two hours goes by and we had asked about 30 set of drivers with no success.

It's 10:30pm. Finally just as I am about to give up I see two guys standing close to Liu Chang. They must be truck drivers. I go up to them, offers them some cigarettes from Germany I brought with me, sweet talks them into giving us a ride. Fortuantely they are ...

... br>
*Taught them about playing card games in English- they learned
“Jack, Queen, King, Ace” they usually say”11,12,13,1.” Taught 'em different
card terminology and they learned a couple different games like BS-except I
called it “lie” and Egyptian Rat Screw. They taught me a game that’s a lot like
“P&A “or “*******.”

*Wrote short stories- students had to include 5 ...

... m either traveling or working a lot on the weekends, I usually never can but this Sunday I made a point not to schedule any lessons so could go. We took two cars out to Dragon Lake- about an hour outside the city. It was beautiful. We went on a speed boat, then went on a paddle boat, then caught some worm-fish things, had a nice picnic and relaxed by the water. It was great. Hoping to be able to go out with them again sometime before I leave. I really like both of their families.

... in Shijiazhuang. No one could have predicted that this small, unknown village would have developed rapidly into the modern capital city of Hebei Province. Lhasa China Travel Beijing China Travel China Hotels China Highlights China Tours Though it is a relatively young city, it is located ...

... board because the following week we would play a game where they would need to know the country names in English and which continent they were in. Although very few students actually did this, I was surprised by the number of them that brought geography books the next week to use during the game. The classes vs.'d each other in a Scattegories type game. I'd give them a topic such as "Countries that begin with 'C'" or ...

... up with more people at the bbq place and then went to the upstairs bar of 7 club. Sunday morning I met with Yung Yung, a lady I'm going to be tutoring once a week. She wanted to make a whole day of getting to know each other by going up to the mountains but since I knew I had a few things to do before starting another week I suggested we just go somewhere close. We walked to restaurant about 30 min from my apt (nice to see a different part of the ...

... ground. Willie plays basketball with the boys but i don't think I am really at the level of playing with the high school team...so I'll stick to volleyball. We did play soccer with a huge group of boys. I was the only girl and I felt like I was in JSA (Jacksonville Soccer Ass.) all over again. Boys are STILL ball hogs and they are afraid of playing rough with a girl. So I had to go out of my way to even get the ball. By the end people were passing to me though. It was an ...

... up to us though. we now sleep in like 5 hour increments. I think I'm forgetting a day-can't remember everything. one night we were all up really late cuz we couldnt sleep so we started drinking and played scrabble- good times. especially after a few. the next morning we explored our neighborhood- had an egg/flour type tortilla thing with carrotts, cabbage, and a bunch of spices in it for lunch- brought it to a park we found- really pretty scenery and ...

(I wrote this over a few days so the chronology may seem strange....) Rather than imagine I will have a block of time to work on this blog, I'll give some brief snapshots of life over the past week. This also serves to divert me from what I should be doing - preparing my lecture for the Hebei Medical University students and faculty this afternoon. Yesterday, I sent a panicky SOS to my brothers who are involved in medical education. Both responded ...