THANKSGIVING!!!!

Last week was Thanksgiving and there was so much to be thankful for!

Everyday, the Korean girls and Japanese girls cook five star meals in our dinky dorm kitchen. The American kids are really good at cooking instant noodles.
But we knew it was Thanksgiving and so we rallied together, invited all the other foreign students to the V.I.P. room and cooked up a thoroughly impressive Thanksgiving dinner. We felt like real grown-ups!

The day before Thanksgiving, I skyped my grandmother to ask her advice about the meal. I told her we didn't have an oven. We only had a hot plate and a microwave and did she have any helpful pointers on how to throw it all together. She furrowed her brow, thought it over for a second and screamed"It's Impossible!"



This is a tradition I took from my cousin Nora. Every year, we make paper chains and write what we're thankful for on them. Then, later in the evening, someone reads them aloud and we all guess who wrote it. This year, it was a little trickier though. With paper chains in Chinese, English, Korean, Japanese, Swedish, and Russian, we had to switch up the readers and add a few translators in the mix.

We did it!!!

And then at about 11 pm someone said, "Hey. Don't we have a Chinese test tomorrow?" There was a brief period of panic followed by the level headed and genius decision to pile up a plate of turkey and take it to our favorite Chinese teacher. We batted our eyelashes like champs and informed her about the sacred, precious American holiday of Thanksgiving and how special and mandatory it was as an American to eat massive amounts of turkey, drink massive amounts of Nouveau Beaujolais and stay far, far away from Chinese textbooks.

The test was postponed until Monday.

Beijing

So last week we went to Beijing! We'd been warned again and again how disappointing and unbeautiful and industrial it was but I am happy to report the exact opposite. It had all the charm of a sweet, Midwestern city. Tons of families, very clean, fairly quiet for a city, and the bluest skies. Apparently, Beijing is still working hard to keep the skies clear since the Olympics and it shows.

The Great Wall! It's certainly one of the greatest walls I've seen, as far as walls go. The plaque in the middle of the road was put there by Mao Ze Dong and it says whoever climbs the great wall is a hero. So, not to brag or anything but...

We chilled with this guy for a bit although, I think we had a little more fun than he did.

Clout the knockers!

That is the Temple of Heaven. It is awe-inspiring and gargantuan and intricately painted and totally gorgeous. Really breathtaking.

However, there is a limit on the amount of pagodas a person can see and thoroughly appreciate. The limit is a million. And we exceeded it a month ago. Rachel and I agreed that at the beginning of the trip we were totes pagotes but by the time we got to Beijing, we were notes pagotes. So, we went out and had a beer.

At this place. Which was sweet! The dance floor was bouncy moonwalk material and there was a guy who was inexplicably dressed as a pirate! We were all a little sad to leave.

Guilin!

A few weeks ago, we went to Guilin in the south of China and I never really said anything about it. Here are some pictures.

So, we got off the airplane and headed to the hotel where we were greeted by this:

Disinfected, eh? Now...it never would have even occurred to me that this toilet had been infected if not for the pageant-style sash it was sporting. And what, one might ask, had the toilet been infected with? We had so many questions.

Below is a picture of my friend Sarah holding some monkeys in kind of adorable, if not Peta-approved, outfits. Some guy handed them to her really quickly so she couldn't disagree. And as I'm sure you know, it's not so easy to escape when you have two outfitted monkeys crawling all over you.

We learned in no time that this was a scam. We learned this because apparently you must pay to take photographs of people with these monkeys and apparently this photograph that you are looking at right now cost 10 yuan I didn't pay. When we managed to wiggle out of this situation and get a little further down the street, the monkey man ran after us screaming all sorts of obscenities and possibly even threatening bodily harm. Although, it's hard to say. My Chinese isn't that good yet.

This is a stalactite.

These are some of the many mountains we saw on our trip. Lovely scenery. And Dylan, if you're reading this, it made me think of you a lot. All over the place were mountains and fresh air and crunchy hippie dreadlock dudes. It made me think that Guilin must be the closest thing China has to Boulder.

And before we left, we even made a few new friends. Like this kid.

My Parents are Very Famous in Hong Kong

My Rents came to Shanghai this weekend! That's us at a tea shop.

That's us at the M50 Art Galleries.

For our Chinese Culture class this week, we took an excursion to a nearby dance studio. This is a photograph of a rehearsal put on by the very first privately owned dance company in China- which is to say, the very first dance company not controlled and supported by the Communist Party. The company was created by a very famous male to female transsexual contemporary dancer named Jing Xing. I wish I could explain what this afternoon was like in great detail but there's no way I could possibly do it justice.

This guy cleaned out his chamber pot in the street.

And this lady was in a Chinese Opera performance we saw. When we saw her backstage she was kind of a diva but our little battle axe Chinese Opera teacher insisted she was "very famous in Hong Kong". Our teacher then proceeded to describe every subsequent person as being "very famous in Hong Kong.

For who?

Last week I saw a Chinese guy in a Fubu t-shirt. I'm still wrestling with the cultural significance of this event.