Here I Come.......

I will be home soon!!! Wish us luck as we take our last adventure through China, ferry across to Hong Kong, find our way to the Hong Kong airport, weight our luggage, get on a plane and travel to Taipei, switch planes and travel to Los Angeles, arrive on American soil (I LOVE THIS COUNTRY :) go through customs, get on a plane and head for Salt Lake City arriving at 7 p.m. tonight. It is going to be a long day! Love you all!!!

#1 Favorite Thing I Love about China - My Students!

My all-time favorite thing about being here in China is the the reason I came.....the kids!!! I have loved spending time with them and getting to know them. They understand us more than most Chinese people and they have taught me more than I have taught them. I truly fell in love with these kids and I will miss them so much. What a rewarding experience this has been!!!

Me and my students. Look at those adorable faces :)

Well, maybe these faces aren't so adorable!

#2 Favorite Thing I Love about China - Shopping

The shopping here is fun!!! We go shopping pretty much all the time and every time we go out someone has to buy something. The Chinese people are very talented and take a lot of pride in the things that they have made by hand. They are usually selling these items on the streets. If you walk by them without purchasing the items they holler after you yelling, "cheap, cheap." They know that American word very well :) The shopping is very cheap and just last week I got two pair of shoes for $15. I am going to miss buying things for cheap. I can definitely say that between the six of us we have helped out the Chinese economy. Pray for me that my suitcases are not overweight!

A street market where they sell their homemade items.

Street vendors selling fruit and vegetables.

Nothing stops us from shopping...not even the rain!!!

#3 Thing I Love about China - Spa Treatments

We have definitely spoiled ourselves in China. We love having pedicures and manicures and it is not expensive at all. The Asians are very good when it comes to the pampering services. More than anything I loved getting my head massaged!!! The Asians spend about 30 minutes just massaging your head, it feels so good and it makes me want to fall asleep every time. When they are done with that they straighten our hair. They don't straighten it with a straightener, just with a brush and a blow dryer. They are amazing! They can make my hair straight but it only lasts for about 10 minutes until I go out into the humid weather, then it goes back to curly. I will not miss the humidity!

Me, Mandy and Jadie getting ready for our pedicures.

Guess who's feet belong to who? Unfortunately, my feet are the swollen ones. My body does not like the hot, humid temperature.

The finished manicure.

This is the part I love and I can fall asleep every time.

Here I am with straight hair.....for about 10 minutes :)

#4 Thing I Love About China - Birthday Parties

I have also enjoyed Chinese birthdays! Our first encounter of a Chinese birthday was Ryan's birthday in February. He is one of our students and his parents wanted to celebrate in the evening at the school, of course, with the American girls. Birthdays here are full of food, friends, family and red bean angel cake. In our time in China Lindsey, me, Jadie and Mandy have had birthdays and we have celebrated each of our birthdays in a different way! Every birthday Annie brings us a cake. At first we were scared of the cakes because we thought they were going to have red beans in the middle but Annie has taken good care of us and she gets us cake with fruit in the middle.

Ryan's birthday party. We are surrounded by friends, Ryan's family, red bean angel food cake and lots of food.

#5 Favorite thing about China - The Bakery

One of my favorite things about China has been the Bakery!!! We visit the bakery every time we go to the supermarket, which is pretty much everyday. America has better sweets than China does by far. The Chinese people do not have a sweet tooth but they do know how to make some awesome bread!!!! All of the bread isn't that good, some of the breads have meat and red beans on top and in the middle. We have learned to stick with what we know is good. Here are a few of my favorites, yum yum!!!

Here is our favorite little bakery which isn't far from where we live.

The newest add to my list of favorite bakery items. It is made with egg and that is about as far as I can explain it.

This is also a favorite. It is a sweet wheat roll with seeds on top. It looks very american but I have never tasted anything like this back home.

This is my all time favorite. I cannot explain this one either but it taste like coconut. I am going to try to smuggle some home for my family, I hope they make it!

5 Days and Counting

I cannot believe that I have been in China for 5 months and it is now time to complete this adventure. These last few days will be busy ones as I have much packing to do, last minute things to do and places to visit and many goodbyes to say. It is definately a bitter sweet but I am looking forward to seeing my family at the airport on Friday, sleeping in my own bed, eating American food, going back to my job at the clinic, getting my haircut and colored and going to the doctor. Yes, I know that sounds strange but I am looking forward to going to the doctor so that I can start feeling well again. I am taking my cousin Mandys idea and going to highlight the top 5 things I have loved about China...This is hard as their are many more than 5. Enjoy and I look forward to seeing you all very soon. Much love, Raychel

A Saturday Adventure!!!

Chinese grocery store. It looks pretty American except for all the asians and the interesting fruit and vegetables.

The movie tickets are pretty American looking, except they are written in chinese :)

On Saturday all of the girls went to a hot spring but I wasn't feeling good so I stayed back with Jadie. Jadie and I didn't want to hang out in our apartment all day so we went out, we had no idea where we were going or what we were going to do. We went to the supermarket, the supermarket is HUGE!!! It has 4 floors, the first floor has lots of stores like clothes stores and bakeries, the second floor is the supermarket, the third floor is shopping and the fourth floor is shopping, a movie theater and a smoothie place. As we were wondering around we went to check out the movies, we noticed they had movies in English like Transformers 2. We got our tickets to see that and as we are sitting in a normal American-looking theater the previews for Transformers 2 comes on, we thought that was weird to play the preview for the movie we were about to watch but it is China, we didn't think much about it. Come to find out we were not at Transformers 2, we were at some other movie that was in English. We got out of there and we noticed that Transformers 2 doesn't come out until the 23, we were just a little early:) We ended up going to Night at the Museum 2 which was in English with Chinese subtitles. There were about 10 other Asians at that movie with us. They also have the traditional american movie popcorn although their portion of popcorn is not like America's portion of popcorn. Their popcorn size was very small. I like going to places in China and compare it with with America. America has better, more comfortable theater seats, better portion of popcorn and no subtitles at the bottom of the movie, this was a very fun adventure!

MANDY'S BIRTHDAY BASH

For Mandy's birthday on Saturday we went to the water park in Guangzhou, the water park is next to the Safari Zoo and the amusement park so it was a breeze to get there. It was a hot day, the weather said it was 98 degrees plus humidity, it was a good day to go and we could actually see the sun, usually the sun is covered with pollution. The kindergarten's vice principal's daughter came with us, her name is Agnus (I can never remember her name for the life of me!) she is 19, in high school and she speaks English very well. She was very quiet, she probably thought it was weird hanging out with a bunch of white crazy girls. The water park was huge, they had a little kid section, water slides (body slides and tube slides) a lazy river and other things! We were waiting in line to go on a slide and the line was taking forever! To keep ourselves entertained we played hand slap games like "Say, Say Oh Play Mate" and "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." I guess we were entertaining not only ourselves but other people as well! There were 3 Asian guys in front of us, who knew some English, and they wanted us to teach them, so we did. They were very funny to teach, they were concentrating so hard! We were at the water park all day and surprisingly no one got burnt! It was a fun birthday bash!!!

THE ADVENTURES OF YUANGSHOU

The city of Guilin

After playing in a pool of mud!!!

The rice fields - they were so amazing!

On the bamboo rafts that took us through the beautiful cliff mountains in the background.

This weekend was our last vacation! We went to Yuangshou which is a 10 hour bus ride. We took a sleeper bus there, I have decided that sleeper buses are the way to go, you go to sleep and by the time you have woken up you have reached your destination. When we got off the bus there were huge mountains around us, they weren't actually mountains, they looked more like cliffs! They were amazing! We got there Thursday morning around 6, we got to our hostel and figured out what we wanted to do for the weekend. We took a bike ride to the mud caves, we walked around in the cave, played in a pool of mud and laid in a hot spring. That night we went to a show on water, the Chinese know how to put on a good show! They had lit up the cliff mountains in the background and there was singing and dancing, it was so awesome! On Friday we took a bus to the rice fields, I thought the rice fields were going to be lame and as I was walking up a million stairs I still couldn't believe I was doing it. As we got to a resting point and we could look out over the valley and see all of the rice fields, it was incredible! I couldn't believe how much time and energy this place takes! We met a couple yesterday who were doing the same tour as us, the guy, Stepheno, is from Italy and the girl, Alex, is from Spain. They each know 4-5 different languages and they just travel around to different countries teaching languages. They were vegetarian so they invited us to a vegetarian restaurant, I was scared at first but the food was delicious! We ate bamboo (which was surprisingly good) and a lot of different veggies. We had so much fun hanging out with this couple and I couldn't believe they weren't sick of us! By the time Saturday rolled around we were all pooped! We went on a bamboo raft down Li River. It was relaxing and it was an awesome view, we were surrounded by the cliff mountains! We ate lunch at Lucy's Place, all of our friends who have gone to Yuangshou earlier have told us to go there and I'm glad we did! I ate the american style chicken strips and we all had a fried banana with ice-cream and chocolate drizzled on top! It was yummy! That night we hopped on a sleeper bus at 7:30 and got home Sunday morning at 5 a.m., that sleeper bus was hard to sleep on because I was holding on for my life, the driver was going about 100 MPH down a windy road. This trip was pretty fun, it is awesome to see the different parts of China because each place that we have visited has been very different.