In the spirit of the season...

I asked myself this question today...is a quarter marathon something to be proud of??? I quickly found my answer. For me....absolutely!!! This morning, I ran a quarter marathon with 8 friends from school to train for our 1/2 marathon in May, but more importantly to raise money for the relief effort in the Philippines.

I'll be honest, I wasn't very excited to run this morning. I just wanted to sleep in and be lazy with my coffee on my couch. But as soon as I got to the school where we were meeting, I saw my new friends gathered together, supporting and encouraging each other to earn money for those in need...and at the risk of sounding really cheesy, it totally warmed my heart. I am thankful for new challenges and friends that support you and encourage you in these challenges.

During the run, something that I just couldn't get over, were the many many Chinese people that not only watched us as we ran by them in the park, but they waved, nodded, smiled, honked their horns, gave us a thumbs up, and one older lady started running with us up and down a set of stairs. It was so awesome! I felt welcomed and in a way...very much at home. I'm thankful for opportunities to meet new people, learn new cultures and see good in others...all around the world.

After the run I came home, showered and prepared my food for our Thanksgiving Dinner. About 3:00 I made it to the dinner, got some wine and chatted with friends. The food was absolutely amazing! I tried things I've been avoiding at home for years and years and guess what???? I liked all of them! I'm thankful for finally growing up! I'm thankful for the fact that I never have to be stuck in one place...I always have the opportunity to change and grow as a person.

Sitting around the room full of people from all different walks of life, different countries, different perspectives was truly amazing. I am thankful for opportunities that open my eyes to different opinions, beliefs and ways of thinking. These opportunities make me a better person.

And in exactly 4 weeks, I get to fly to Portland and spend the holidays with the most amazing family I could ever imagine. I am unbelievably thankful for a loving, supportive family to come home to.

Happy Thanksgiving :)

November Holiday

I'm starting to get a little too used to these frequent holidays. It was extremely difficult to make it the last 5 weeks of school! My friends at home are, I'm sure, rolling their eyes and cursing my name but...it's true! ;) Alas....my November holiday has come...and  now gone!

I just got back from Hunan Province and it was absolutely amazing, but the week and a half before I went, some interesting things happened right here in the quaint little town of Wuxi. :) First off, I celebrated...I mean truly celebrated Halloween at school with my kids! I never in a million years thought that would be something I would do, but at TIS Halloween is evidently a very big deal! Friday after school, the PTA hosted a pretty decent Halloween party in which everyone dressed up and I, for the first time since....I don't even know when...dressed up to be scary! I know that's officially what you're supposed to do on Halloween, but, correct me if I'm wrong, Halloween in the states for adults without children, has become more a contest of how sexy/slutty you can look, and much less about how scary you can look. I must say, it was REFRESHING! Not only did a group of teachers dress up as zombies, but we also did a little dance to Thriller by none other than the King of Pop! It was so much fun and the kids, as well as the parents, absolutely loved it! I think I only made 1 little boy actually cry,  but I was told I was the scariest. A very proud moment.





After the party at school, we had our own little party. ;) Trick or Shots they call it....we traveled to 3 different houses....ate....and drank! I like it!








After all of the crap we ate during the Halloween festivities I noticed a couple of my teeth started to hurt really bad, so I decided I would brave it and go to the dentist! If you had asked me before I moved here, if I planned on visiting the dentist while in China I would have replied with a big fat NO...however I'd heard there was a woman dentist who spoke no English, but was very nice and did a good job. So I had the secretary at work make an appointment for me and off I went! For those of you who don't know...I tend to have some anxiety about the dentist at home, so you can imagine how much my palms were sweating and how freaked out I was on my way there. I ended up waiting for about 30 minutes to be seen and while I waited I just took it all in...including the dentist who left a patient and lit up a cigarette right there in the office!!! Wow! When they brought me back to be seen, it wasn't so different than what I was used to, except that it wasn't very clean! Not the best feeling when you consider where these tools end up! So I ignored the fact that nothing was covered in plastic, there was splatter marks all over the trays, machines, tools, etc....and I just closed my eyes and thought about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with strings....you know...just a few of my favorite things. ;)  And with one phone call to the secretary at school and some time spent with google translate,communication was a breeze. :) I survived my first dentist visit in China....I can do anything! :)

Last week I enjoyed my first hot pot dinner with a family from my class..it was delicious! And I also had my first "blind massage". :) 60 quay ($10) for an hour long massage done by a blind person. I went with 3 other people from work. We were all in one room (fully clothed of course), it was very cold, we laid down and laughed for a good 10 minutes because it was completely different than anything any of us had experienced before, and then the massages started and I have to say...it was awesome! Not necessarily relaxing...but awesome nonetheless!

I also bought a new bicycle right before I left for holiday...a real grown up bike with gears and everything! :) And while Doug and I were sitting there, waiting for them to finish fixing it all up so we could go, we couldn't help but notice the man waiting next to us with his long ass finger nails which he was trimming right there in the store with wire cutters!!!! Hahahahah! At that point Doug and I decided the new phrase to use when describing life in China...."You can't make this shit up." :)

So Tuesday morning, my trip to Hunan Province started. I went with my friend Cordelia and with the exception of a couple of hostels that Cordelia booked before we left...we had very little plans as to what we would do on this trip! We knew we were heading to Hunan to go to the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, and we knew the sights would be amazing. Well...we were right! Our first day started with a quick plane ride to Changsha in Hunan Province, where we caught a 4 hour bus to Zhangjiajie City. The bus station in Changsha was absolutely disgusting....absolutely disgusting!!! I went into the bathroom and there were dividers, but no doors and the toilet was one long trough basically. Not slanted, no running water... everything just sat there. It was so so so so gross. :( The worst part for me though, was when I see women squatting, and then they whip out a packet of cigarettes and light up, or they whip out their phone and start a conversation, text, or game. It was a very difficult couple of minutes.

Anyway, we got on our old nasty bus and 4 hours later, made it to Zhangjiajie City. We were told our hostel in the park is very difficult to find and if you arrive in the city later than 2pm, it's best to stay in the city and find the hostel the next day. We arrived much later than 2pm so we met up with a friend we work with, found a hostel in town for the night, and went to a play that was set in an amphitheater that was built into the side of a mountain. It was freezing cold and I quickly realized, that I did NOT pack well for this trip. Despite the frigid temperatures and my terrible clothing, the views of the mountain were pretty amazing.

The next morning we woke up early and got on a bus that took us to the entrance to the park. The park itself is a pretty decent size, just shy of 20 square miles. It's set up for people to tour it, so the hikes we did were mostly concrete pathways and lots and lots of stairs, with the occasional climb up rocks to get to the very top. Inside the park there are areas you have to walk through, but they also have buses, cable cars and the world's longest elevator, to get you from point A to point B.

So Cordelia and I knew all of this before we went, but like I said, we had no real plan as to what these few days would look like for us. But lucky us, on the bus ride to the park we met 2 guys who had met a couple days prior, who were also touring around the park and they were very prepared!!! They had a map with highlighted routes they wanted to take to see all the best sights, and they could not have been nicer! So, while we thought we would go straight to our hostel, drop our bags off and then tour around a bit, we actually ended up walking the entire day with our new friends...just shy of 10 hours...carrying our packs (did I mention I didn't pack well????). It was absolutely amazing! And honestly, I'm so glad I didn't know I'd be doing that all day, because if someone had told me I would have to carry my backpack all day long....I probably would have bitched and complained about it and made it a huge deal, when really....it was fantastic! Yes, I was incredibly sore by the end of the day, yes my shoulders were killing me and my hips felt like they were full on bruised, but the important thing is....I did it. :)

Entrance area of the park. I was beyond excited to see color on the trees! 

Cordelia, Korben (from California), Me, Ram (from Sri Lanka)
It was a little cloudy/foggy out, so it's difficult to tell in some of these pictures just how amazing these Karst mountains were!

Something we had heard we might see in the park were monkeys. I myself, was very excited about this because I'd never seen monkeys in the wild before. So imagine my surprise and excitement when we were about 5 steps into the park and we saw about 10 monkeys scattered around! They were so cute!!! Even when they were stealing bags of food from people. :) Anyway...we kept seeing these monkeys all day long. I dealt with it by taking an obscene amount of pictures...Cordelia dealt with it by carrying around a stick to ward them off. ;)

I'm sorry...but how can you not fall at least a little bit in love with these faces??? :)

After our first, very full, day of hiking, we got on the last bus leaving the area of the park we were in...totally dark outside...and headed toward what we were hoping was our hostel. We figured if we didn't come across our place, we would just ride the bus into the village area and stay at the hostel our new friends were staying at. So as we got on the bus we showed the driver the address of our place, and about 5 minutes up the road, he stops the van in what looked like the middle of nowhere, told us to get out and pointed back in the direction we were supposed to go to. Our jaws both dropped a little because we thought he had to be mistaken! We were in the middle of nowhere! But he pointed again, so...on a leap of faith we got out! We walked up the road just a little bit and saw what looked like an old abandoned house, no outside lights, no signs, nothing. But we walked in thinking this was our only option. Lucky for us...it was our hostel! It was very very cold, not nice by any means...but it worked. However, at this point we were pretty much frozen. My feet were totally numb and our room was like an ice box. We paid the extra money necessary to make our heat work, and cranked it as high as we could. While we were letting our room warm up we stayed in the common area, met some people, ordered some extremely salty Chinese food that we waited a very long time for! We met a guy from Michigan who has been living in China for 6 years; he is fluent in Chinese and works in Taiwan as a translator. He and his friends were very nice and told us they had been waiting for their food for a long time as well, because they actually had to go out back and kill the chicken. Hmmm... I'm sure for a lot of people this is actually very normal... but it's very different then the world I grew up in.

So after our meal, we went back to our room and the only way I could warm my feet up was to run them under hot water....thank God the hot water was in fact hot! I got into bed still totally cold, wrapped in clothes head to foot including a scarf and we attempted to go to sleep on the rock hard "things" that were our beds. Let me just tell you, it felt awesome on my newly bruised hips. :( About halfway through the night it did warm up a little; we were able to move around in the cocoons we built for ourselves without letting in freezing cold air. The great part is, the next morning we realized...we left a very large window open all night long!!! Not our finest moment...but funny nonetheless. :)

The next day we got to leave our packs at the hostel....yay!!! And we met our friends for another full day of hiking and amazing views! Truly breathtaking and at times I really felt like I was on top of the world. The really great part about these mountains..is that they are extremely dimensional. That probably sounds stupid, but it's the best way I can think of to describe them! I always say to people at home, when you drive across the 205 bridge on a clear day and you can see Mt. Hood...I always want to stick my finger out and touch it because it's so insanely clear and crisp and when I look at it on these days...I can imagine exactly what it would feel like. These mountains kind of reminded me of that. Not covered in snow of course, but there was so much dimension and texture to them...it was insanely beautiful!

Our last day Cordelia and I traveled on our own just outside of the park, to Baofeng Lake. We went up many more stairs and at this point, every step we took up and especially down these stairs we were wincing and basically limping we were in so much pain! The pain might have even rivaled daily doubles during pre-season volleyball. Truly painful!

But of course, the lake did not disappoint and was absolutely beautiful! We were lucky; it was almost empty when we were there. We took a ride on a boat around the lake and we pretty much just sat and took it all in. So serene, peaceful and just beautiful. A great way to end an extremely amazing, exhausting, freezing and at times a little nasty...holiday. :)

Leaving the park on our last day...we were blessed with beautiful blue skies!