Typhoons and Lagoons

Wow! An eventful National Week!

So last post I shared about the beginning of the week. After I posted I went on another trip with some different teachers. I went with my coordinator, Shelly, to her hometown. There was a group of several other teachers that went with us.

We left in the morning Thursday for a two hour drive. But the Chinese treated this drive like it was a road trip to Florida. We stopped a lot for breaks.

We just took our sweeeeet time.

Chinese people are always snacking. When they are not snacking, it must be meal time. So we would stop to eat, stretch, bathroom, etc. I wanted to explain to them that I've done almost twelve straight hours of driving before, 2 hours is nothing, but to each his own.

On the way to Shelly's, we did some sight seeing. In the group of teachers, one of them had a daughter who is in college, Angela, so I spent most of the time with her. Angela's English was pretty great. We talked about Twilight and she's super into the Vampire Diaries, which sadly I am not, but she had no problem telling me all about it.

We had a nice bonding experience with our Edward vs Jacob discussion

Here we are drinking some milk flower tea. It had petals in it!

We were farther into the country, so I got a lot of stares and more pictures taken of me. Even some of the teachers liked to sneak pictures of me. I told them they better watch it, or I am going to start charging :)

Here's an example of the type of sneaky pictures they liked to take.

Here's a failed sneaky picture. I caught them and turned my head at the last second!

We visited a village and then small island that had fun things to do like a zip line, fishing, a rope bridge, hiking, and boat rides. I wish I could tell you the name of it but I have no clue. It was famous for being a place where artists live.

I'm not kidding you, after dinner we went to the hotel, everyone went to their rooms real quick, and then we went to another restaurant. Literally 30 minutes after we had just finished eating, we were back at another place, eating and drinking again haaaaaaa.

Dinner-Round 2

The next day we went to this mountain place with step fields. I think it was called Yunhe. But I am not positive. This place was beautiful, and even had traditional musicians playing as you walked around.

This video is me creeping on a guy who was warming up to perform. He's in that dark room and I tried to nonchalantly record him. I was unsuccessful, they all knew what I was doing haaa.

Rice fields

I could listen to that music all day err day, so I figured you would enjoy it, too.


Alright so after this trip, we headed back. The next day a typhoon hit Wenzhou. It was just like an extra windy thunderstorm. It was weird to wake up and on my balcony was sand! The beach is not far, just a few miles but there are two sets of mountains in the way, so that wind was pretty strong.

The internet in the apartments is down, so I spent a lot of time with other teachers playing cards. I taught them Go Fish, and they asked me in English and I used Chinese. So it was a good time. They also taught me a game which I don't really understand. But one funny thing is that they call the hearts suit "peaches". And King, Queen, Jack, are 13, 12, 11. And Aces are called one. And twos are the highest card. Silly Chinese, I know.

Now there is no other break until New Years. YIPPEE. But this weekend is my birthday, and I am planning on getting some of my fellow teachers together and going somewhere to celebrate.

SHOUT OUT TO MY FELLOW BIRTHDAY WEEKERS: ALYSSA AND DAD!