Visit to a Tea Plantation

The interesting thing about Chinese tea, is that all the different kinds of tea come from the same crop. The difference between green tea, red tea, oolong, etc. is when they pick it and whether it is fermented or not. So interesting!
They poor high because this allows oxidation...... and it's really cool looking! The Chinese make a beautiful art and ceremony over making, pouring and drinking tea.
One of the Chinese sayings is to "cha" or to tea. When they drink they imagine the tea searching for impurities in the body and allow it to flush the system.
The girls and I will often comment that we are "cha-ing"!


This bowl is incredibly hot to dry the tea leaves. And they do it bare handed!
Rolling the moisture out of the leaves.


Edward! Such a cutie.
Caro, who Savana has become very close to.
Beautiful

On My Way to Work

The stinky canal. Yes, they see me coming.
One of the many businesses along the route.
My Monday night class. They are a lively group! Look what they do to my hair! Well, they and the mosquitoes.
This is such a fun picture. These two girls are Jeff's students. They are now assisting with me Monday nights, and we are currently trying to place them in an internship at the other school I teach at. Wendy on the right and Christine on the left. You may remember Christine from last year, she traveled with us and helped translate when Lexi was on Yunnan TV. We have also mentioned Wendy before, please keep her in your thoughts.
ET assistants and manager. From left to right: Christine, Charlene, Me, Sara (who always comments on my hair, it's a good thing she's so cute!) and Kathy the manager.
Entrance to ET



Card game for money
This woman is such a sweetie! She in our neighborhood's local recycler. She is always smiling and always asking me if I have eaten today.
Sometimes cars decide to drive on the sidewalk

China Overview Clip

Here is an interesting overview of China. Click below on China Video.

China Video

A walk through China

Statue in Guilin

Making peanut brittle! Yummy!!!

Pic: fishing birds, the Chinese tie string around the birds neck so it won't swallow the fish and then take the fish from the birds mouth.

On my way to work

I always think of you on my way to work. I think to myself I really need to blog about this. I wish I had a camera to film the streets I walk down, so you could experience it as I do.

I teach English two evenings so; this is one of my routes to work. I leave about 6:00pm and believe it or not, I initially fight the crowds from the elementary public school just getting out. I come to a large busy 4-lane street where I have to cross the road one lane at a time. It is not unusual to be stuck on the center line while busses pass me both directions. It is not for the faint of heart. On the sidewalks there are several serious games being played this time of day by men; cards, that they slap down as hard as they can with an outburst here and there, and some kind of checkers with very large pieces and a board 4x the normal size. The games draw very large crowds.

Several men sit on their scooters along the canal. I have no idea why they are sitting on their scooters……perhaps to people watch. The canal is called the “Stinky Canal”. You can be sure that if China calls it stinky, that indeed it IS stinky. Part of the year they grow lotus in the canal, which helps a bit.

I turn the corner where there is a nonstop line of small businesses. All the size of half a one car garage including the garage door rolled up. Probably the majority of the people live in these windowless dwellings. People and families go about their business and home life for everyone to see. Kids run rampant all ages everywhere, while others have mothers hovering over the top of them to do their homework. It is a striking disparity from my own home country every single time I walk down this road. I can never get used to it.

I turn another corner down a small street and then I duck into a dark alley with an entrance the size of a doorway. This area is what I call China’s China; poor, dark and foreign. To my immediate right is a garbage house where dogs, cats and people are often pillaging through. I turn several more corners through apartment buildings with iron bars covering the entire apartment.

I turn my last corner where things begin to brighten and walk through the gates of Easy Talk. I have two lively groups of children and wonderful assistants who I will soon share pictures of. Often when I walk into the school, one of the assistants has a comment about my hair. To her it looks like my hair has exploded, and she must comment on it. It always cracks me up.

Signs from the Gui Lin trip

As always, there are entertaining signs in China, usually from 'interesting' translations.

Lots of emergencies here. We actually used the "Emergency Toilets" and I would agree...they should only be used in case of emergency. Do you have a makeshift tent?

I know this is where the trash goes, but did he rip up his head and throw it away?


I think they mean, "If you pay attention to what you're doing, you'll be safe" but it doesn't quite work like this:

And finally:

Guilin Trip

Click to Enlarge

We seem to have a hard time getting around to blogging about our trip to Guilin. It was a beautiful area, but in some ways it was a hard trip. I think we usually come to the blog hoping to give a little glimpse of life here, but not wanting to get negative. We may point out poignant or even heartbreaking things, but try to avoid griping for the most part. I think it’s hard to talk about this trip without a little griping.

Tour groups are a lot more common here than at least how I grew up in the U.S. You put a bunch of people on a bus and go to as many famous sites as possible in a day. Your tour guide puts on a squawk box, holds up a tall flag and you follow along, look and listen. Of course here in China, there are 8 million other tour groups doing the same thing over the holiday. So lots of flags, squawking and people.


The tourism company that you sign up with arranges everything: hotel, where you eat, where you go, and the itinerary. They maximize profit by charging you what they can get and then getting the prices lower on the goods and services they deliver. For us on this trip, that resulted in hotels with bugs and pretty bad food. With a very full schedule, tons of walking, long days and bad food you get really tired.

Okay, now the bright side. Despite being tired, grumpy and hungry, nobody got short-tempered, with each other or the people we met. One night we all played hooky and the group (foreign teachers and families) said we are going to get dinner on our own. It was the best meal of the trip, we got full and had a lot of fun. Here's our great waitress and a couple of the other foreign teachers (and my friends) Bill & Brandon.


Guilin really does have one of the most unique landscapes I’ve ever seen. We took a very enjoyable 4 hour boat trip from Guilin City to Yangshou Village.

We saw a show with great acrobats, dancing and stage effects:

Two caves in two days (probably one would have been enough)

We will post more pictures/stories as time goes by.