Shen Nong Resort Changsha

... growing that there are a lot of uneducated people from the countryside. As for the city itself, it has a renowned education system and has amassed a lot of wealth for its size. You can tell from the government center just on the outskirts of town. The landscaping along the river is pretty detailed as well.

If Liuyang gets a little boring, there is always Changsha which is only about a 45 minute drive away.

... didn't really help! When we got to the top we saw that all the Chinese tourists were walking on the glacier! Ignoring all those warnings from geography lessons about the dangers of glaciers that were going around in my head, we joined in too being careful not to step on any suspicious looking cracks. Walking on the glacier was really good especially as there was so much snow (only the icy kind though...) although we couldn't walk up it too far as altitude sickness kept threatening ...

... understand me, but I told her I needed money, and I needed a bank and then I needed to call home so I could try to get Jenny's number. So she talked to the shop owners brother, who spoke a little English, and she told him what I needed, then she told me he was going to take me to a bank. So we started walking and after a little while we got on the back of a motorcycle to go the rest of the way. I think he was just going to put me on the motorcycle by myself, but I didn't feel ...

... this small town that I've called home for the last 11 months of my life. The phrase, "run for the border" keeps coming to mind. Zai jian, sayonara, adios, bye bye Liuyang. The ranks of WorldTeach employees are starting to thin out. Mirabai went home a few weeks ago with severe respiratory problems and Rachel and AJ are leaving in a few days. Rachel just endured an emergency appendectomy in a Chinese hospital and AJ is going back for a wedding. Almost everyone else is ...

... roaches have a mating season?). I've seen little ones running around my kitchen, so now I've taken to walking everywhere with a can of Raid in hand, as I did in the good old days of last summer. The long, cold winter seems like a distant memory. Before I left town last week, I attended Maggie's wedding. Maggie is one of the English teachers at my school, and my foreign affairs officer. The auspicious time for the ceremony was apparently at noon on a Thursday. Which ...

... has fled the area. Jinshi must have been in an uproar during the past month. Irate provincial education officials leaning on the school, communist party leaders putting pressure on the hotel, a business owner becoming a fugitive from the law... Jeff's mom came into town on the weekend of the 16th, so we rode into Changsha in style in a taxi. We briefly boarded the bus, but quickly got off, as his mom had a full fledged panic attack before it even pulled out of the parking lot. I'm ...

... is to come across as being bitter or jaded in these entries. Sometimes I feel like if I write my true thoughts, this might all too easily happen. One of my goals is to be able to leave China in July without hating China. I am just very tired at the moment. One month ago, I traveled up to a small city in northern Hunan called Jinshi to visit one of the WorldTeach volunteers. Chris lives all by himself in this city, which is roughly a 4 hour bus ride from Changsha. Fifteen of us got ...

... 3 days of feeling like death, I finally went to Dr. Qiu for medication. She brought me a gigantic bottle of cough syrup which seemed to do the trick. And the number one ingredient of this miracle cure? Snake bile. I knew something was a bit off with the flavor, but thankfully no one told me until after I had already been taking it for 2 days. Last week I taught a lesson on pen pals and countries. The students wrote letters to my mother's students in America ...

... no one spoke a word of English, and once again I was forced to say repeatedly, "Wo bu hui shuo Zhongwen, wo shi Mei guoren." I don't speak Chinese, I am an Am**ican. Ahhh...so good to be back. Who should we run into, strolling ov** the bord** just as we w**e about to pull away in a taxi, but Todd. So the three of us continued on togeth**. Five hour car ride to Nanning, then a 12 hour train ride back to ZhuZhou. Being a foreign** gen**ally sucks, but sometimes it has real ...

... I watched him simultaneously shovel noodles into his mouth and suck in and spit out what appeared to be the bones of an entire chicken onto the floor beside his bed. I was feeling a little nauseous, so I stepped out into the hallway. Just in time to watch a hunchbacked elderly woman walk by, hack something up, lean over and spit into a small container on the floor. The hallway was lined with many such containers, placed there specifically for the purpose of ...