World Trade Plaza Hotel Shijiaz 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)<br><br>Becky's family was loaded. They had a large 2 story apartment, flat ...

... to work at least 20 more years to save enough money for them.<br><br>Mr. Qiao likes to hear about my travel stories. He says he dreams of going to Inner Mongolia to ride horses on the grassland and go to Xishuangbana in the tropics, but it won't happen in this life time. He's got too much obligations already. But he's not a cynic. He tells me he's driven over 10,000 km on this truck alone, I tell him that's more than 2.5 times around the world, he chuckles.

... br><br> We went to dinner and had a party for Eileen&#8217;s birthday-<br>everyone met at a restaurant downtown- Sable brought her to the restaurant and<br>we surprised her- she cried of happiness- really going to miss Eileen. Went to<br>Sable&#8217;s apt afterward, everyone caught up with one another and we played<br>drinking games. Then went to 7 club for a bit. <br><br>Some things I&#8217;ve done with my Middle School students over<br>the last few weeks ...

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 ...

... which lies to the west, provide charming natural scenery. Mt. Cangyan Scenic Area and Zhangshiyan Scenic Area also attract visitors from all over China and the world. As the economic, political, cultural and scientific center of Hebei Province, Shijiazhuang is becoming more and more ...

... problems, but not nearly as many as before. The last two weeks I've done a geography lesson. I bought a big map of the world (everything was in Chinese) and wrote several countries on the board in English and had students come up to the map and say the country name in Chinese so the class would know both. I gave out my first homework assignment- they had to finish looking up the rest of the countries I had written on ...

... I took pictures of em and attached em if you'd like to see. The tv station also sent helen the news reports from these days (when we performed and then were interviewed) but they're both of the whole event so they're too long to upload. We have a 7 day holiday coming up so we've been trying to plan a trip. We really wanted to go to Hong Kong since it's our second longest break and HK is pretty far away (22 hr train ride). But since we just found ...

... then later moved to the front, next to a stage. The food that was prepared was so good! They had rabbit head, noodles, sausage, pepper thingies with something gross, steamed rice dumplings, the best fried rice in the world, very salty noodle thingies, sesame cookies, chicken wings, pork strips and a lot of other stuff we couldn't figure out. After we stuffed ourselves the entertainment began ...

... a new one. She assured us earlier today that if anything needed to be repaired that the school would pay for because it wasnt our fault (so nice!) Well, I'm off to grab some dinner and vs. Willie and Kara in Mario Party so, until next week! Here's my address- feel free to write- I absolutely love getting mail! Alissa Trowbridge Shijiazhuang No. 42 Middle School 42 WenYuan Street, Xinhua District Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, 050061 P.R. China

... specifically and exclusively to house the U.S. Olympic team (of course the University will inherit the building after the event). Citizens are being exhorted to mind their manners - no spitting in public, courtesy toward strangers, and perhaps most importantly, no slurping! Beijing taxi drivers have received "courtesy" training as well as English lessons (one of them actually slowed down to about 50 mph as I tried to cross the road!). The Forbidden City is ...