Well, time sure flies.
I haven’t written in a while and you may have noticed that some of my posts of ‘disappeared’.
I’ve got to be a bit more careful about what I write, so that had to be taken care of.

Anyway, I’m back once again.

For those of you who happen to check out my Flickr photos, you may see that I’ve been uploading (more to come) photos of all of my students. I just had midterm exams, so I’ve gotten a picture of each of them. Labeling them to post them up has been quite helpful as far as getting me to remember names and faces. Too bad I don’t have much time left.

Thought I’d share a quick humorous exam story. The freshmen, as one part of their exams, had to give a short (2-3 min) speech about themselves.
I was listening to one girl’s speech and suddenly she surprised me with this sentence:
“I’m not very good at intercourse.”
I’m sure that she didn’t mean it as I heard it, but wow, it was terribly hard not to laugh out loud at that one. I wrote in her comments that she might want to rethink that phrase, so I’m sure she’ll be asking me about it later this week.

This weekend, Kyle and I met up in Nanning. We’re planning a (very!) short trip to Vietnam at the end of the month, so I had to pick up my passport and visa.
It was incredibly hot there (I am absolutely dreading this heat…I despise humidity) and it seems, now that I am back, that the heat has picked up in Yizhou as well.
I had a fantastic time. We met up with other teachers that we know for dinner, we walked around the city, found real ice cream, (No joke! New Zealand ice cream for only 6 yuan per scoop. Anyone who’s in Nanning should look for it. It’s amazing.) working on wedding/marriage planning, and we visited the medicinal plant garden.
I’ll be posting photos on Flickr sometime this week. Perhaps tomorrow, if I get around to it.
One of the great things about the weekend was attending church this morning. We went to this church with other teachers last year and it was quite similar to other Chinese Christian churches. However, this time it was different. They had an English translation of the service! We got a headset and the translation was broadcast over the radio and into our headsets. It’s such a fantastic thing to know what’s going on rather than constant guessing. This is the first time I’ve sat through a service in Guangxi and had the whole sermon translated for me. I loved it.

Speaking of churches and China- I don’t think I ever remembered to post this article from last fall. I was contacted about the use of some of my photos for an article about Bible printing in China. It’s definitely worth your time to check it out:
http://shanghaiist.com/2008/01/03/godless_china_t.php

Ah, yes- and the BIG news-

I finally have plane tickets to go home! Huzzah!
On the morning on June 26th, I will be flying from Nanning to Beijing, then Beijing to San Francisco. I will stay there for a while and then on July 8th, I’ll fly from San Francisco to Texas (strange layover, if you ask me!) then from Texas to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
It feels good to know when I’m getting home now.
To be honest, simply knowing that I have a flight makes me itch to get out of here.
It’s probably for the best that I didn’t have tickets earlier.

It’s going to be really hard to leave China, but for the moment, the idea of seeing people that I haven’t seen in nearly 2 years over-rides all of that.

Well, now that I’m back in Yizhou and my internet seems to be working fairly well at the moment, I thought I’d take a few minutes to tell you about my week holiday in Vietnam.

To begin with, Vietnam is beautiful, at least the limited parts of it that I saw. The buildings are colorful and have quite a bit of character. They are really very different from the buildings here in Yizhou and in this part of China as a whole. The buildings here are mostly dull browns and grays and very square and standard looking. Although the trees and mountains in Vietnam were similar to Yizhou, the man-made structures were a change of scenery. They had a French feel to them, which makes sense since the French controled Vietnam for a period of time.

We spent the first few days in the capital- Hanoi. There was plenty to see, do, and eat in Hanoi. I had a really good time. We even went to see a show at the Hanoi Opera House. Although, I will admit, the show was not quite my style. It was interesting- it was called “Vietnam Songs” and it was basically people on stage dancing and singing to Vietnamese songs. I suppose that I was expecting something a bit more traditional and I was expecting live music instead of people singing along to prerecorded instrumental tracks. Still, it was an interesting experience. Kyle and I met a couple of cute little Vietnamese girls who came into our box at the opera house to talk to us. I think they were 8 and 10 or so and they were adorable.

We visited museums, did the obligatory shopping, ate some French food and some Vietnamese food, and soaked up the sun. Probably soaked up a bit too much sun, I must say.

Then, the four of us spent a couple of days and one night on a boat in Ha Long Bay. It was spectacular. As Kate pointed out, it looked the way Yizhou probably would if it completely flooded and all you could see were the mountain tops.

We visited a cave which was a strange experience. It was huge and amazing, but also filled with colored lights just like the caves in Guilin and elsewhere in China. I love the caves, but the colored lights give it a strangly fake feel.

After that it was back to Hanoi to see what we had missed before. The art museum and the famous prison were our big visits for the end of our time there. They were certainly worthwhile and very interesting.

The entire holiday was absolutely fantastic. I would definitely recommend a vacation in Northern Vietnam to anyone who’s looking for somewhere to go!