Ncpc Building 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 ...

... he looks much older than me he's only 31. I ask him how much he makes for each 1,200 km trip, he says about 500 yuan. He says he can make the trip 20 times a month. He's got two sons, a wife, a nephew, both of his parents to support. Where he comes from he has to save money for his sons' wedding and the construction of their new home when they get married. It cost 60,000 yuan to find a wife and 100,000 to 150,000 to build a new house. He admits he'll ...

... needed- Jack translated everything of course.
These guys could DRINK! By noon they had finished off 10 bottles of
baijiu. They kept insisting that I drink with them but since I had to teach in
the afternoon, I got away with only having to do a few- thank god, I hate
baijiu.

Some of you know about Mickey- used to work for him downtown
on a regular basis. His company went bankrupt and he said he needed more time
to pay me. Although ...

Peanut Butter and Jelly Day :) *We decided to bring a little taste of the West to our Middle School by making over a thousand peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and distributing them during the students lunch time. It was crazy! We had Willie and our friend John controlling the crowd and Kara and I handed out sandwiches. It was a lot of fun until we got in trouble by the school because theres a rule against it.. even though we told them all about what we were going to do.. ehh ...

Guilin China Travel China Attractions Yangshuo China Travel Located in the vicinity of the North China Plain, Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province, neighbors Beijing and Tianjin in the north, Bohai Sea in the east, and lies against the continuous Taihang Mountain in the west. Covering ...

... 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 ...

... telling you? ha. If they want something done, they expect you to do it that very second. This would make you think they are very organized and punctual themselves which is not the case at all- i've come to realize chinese people are always late! I'm gonna get to bed since I have to be up in 5 hours. News of our first Beijing trip will be here in one week! Hope all is well with everyone. Love the emails updates on whats going on with you so keep em coming :)

... reached the top of the mountain to be awarded for our effort with a magnificent temple! This temple was so grand on the inside- I wanted to take picts so you could see the statues and gods that were represented but it was considered disrespectful to do so, so you'll just have to image it! The gods were in gold and some were as big as a elephant. They were depicted to show how they could crush you ...

... pretty park where i somehow started singing into a microphone with these chinese hippies. we also met this man who we tried teaching the soulja boy dance to- apparently he liked our entertainment cuz he followed us for a while- we didnt mind thought cuz there were a bunch of us and he kept opening our beer bottles with his teeth! after a while we went to 7 club and danced the night away. Met more foreigners- people visiting our english ...

... us to the Prince Gong Palace Gardens - a palace inhabited by the chief counselors to several emperors of the Qing dynasty (the last dynasty). Located in the middle of an urban area, the grounds (maybe a couple fo square kilometers were incredibly peaceful, despite the crush of tourists - Chinese as well as foreign. I was struck here as elsewhere by the huge chasm between the lives lived by the elite and that of ordinary people, a chasm paralleled in Europe at the ...