Well, it’s been BUSY.
I guess that kind of goes without saying…the ends of things often seem to be busy.

These past couple of weeks have been absolutely packed full of lasts….
Last trip within Guangxi (Beihai beaches….lovely!), last dinners at the usual restaurants, last lessons, final exams….

I’m really quite sad about leaving! It’s heartbreaking that I’ll probably never see most of these people again.
Except for Kate, that is- I’m planning on seeing her again at some point, fortunately.

This morning, the school is giving me a ride to Nanning where I’ll spend the day before catching an early flight tomorrow. Many of my students and friends from Yizhou have promised to “see me off” at the car. It seems to be a tradition here- just saying goodbye isn’t enough, you need to actually wish the person good luck as they’re driving away. I think it’s going to be absolutely heartbreaking and wonderful.
Unfortunately, my camera has broken (apparently a common thing for the particular camera that I have…there seems to be a design flaw) so I’ll just have to remember it.

I should be getting ready, so I should go.

zai jian!

My blog is getting spammed like crazy every day.
I get loads and loads of comments about stuff that I really don’t care to get messages about. Ugh.
Good thing I moderate all the comments before they go up otherwise you’d see 29 comments a day about getting cheap prescription drugs.

In other news, my Nanning photos are now up. Huzzah for that! I’m actually keeping up to date on one small part of my life.

Next week Kyle and I are going to Vietnam for a few days. I’ve managed to rearrange three of my classes so this week I don’t have my usual Friday off and next week I don’t have my usual Monday off. I’ve got classes all morning tomorrow and then afternoon on Monday. However, it’ll be worth it to have an extra day in Hanoi.
I’m really excited. I thought Hanoi was quite lovely last year, but there were a few things we missed…well, many things that we missed. It’ll be great to get to see what we didn’t see before.

As far as things go here, we’ve got what apparently seems to be Yizhou’s spring right now. It’s a strange mix of heavy rain, cloudy skies, and warm sunshine. Sometimes one of those will stick around, but often we get all three in a day which is, to say the least, confusing.
However, it can stick around for as long as it wants! I definitely prefer this to the summer weather that’s just around the corner.

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, it’s been a terribly long time between posts.
Sorry about that.
There isn’t much time for this one either, so I’ll try to keep it short.

Summer holiday…

Well, I spent the first week of it in Longzhou, just hanging out while Kyle gave his final exams. That was pleasant and relaxing. (for me, not him)

Then, the next few weeks were spent in Yizhou. It was incredibly hot and humid, as expected, so most days were spent indoors and in the evenings we went out and explored more of the city. I saw bits I’ve never seen before…that was fantastic.
While we were there, a few teachers came from America for a summer course. I had heard from students who had taken a similar summer course, actually, from my understanding, they were from the exact same organization, so I knew what it was about. Kyle and I tried to invite them to do things with us- we were happy to have other Americans and other Christians around and we were hoping that they wouldn’t mind spending time with us. Unfortunately, it turned out that they were willing to take us up on our offers, but they never reciprocated. We heard afterwards from my friends at the school about parties and all of the fun they were having. Honestly, that wasn’t really the most annoying part. The frustrating thing was how open we were with them and how they most certainly lied to us. It seems like an entirely unchristian thing to do. On top of that, they actually took people to the river to do something that’s illegal in China. That maybe makes sense in some places, but in Yizhou there is a great church community and a way to go about all of that without doing anything illegal. I personally don’t see why you would do that kind of thing outside of a community of believers when the option is there. Since they were only there for three weeks, I hope that they remain in contact with the Chinese that they took to the river because there are going to be questions…
They were really nice people, these Americans, so I wish them well, I just wish that as Christians they would have been willing to work with us, rather than so obviously trying to work separately and almost against us.

Anyway, after that, Kyle and I headed to Guilin. Kyle headed on to Hong Kong from there so that he could meet his parents and two youngest siblings. I stayed in Guilin to wait six days for them to come into China. I planned to stay in a nearby village with a friend who is a student at my school, Jane, then I would stay in a hotel in the city and hang out with Lizzy, a friend who is a chemistry student.

Jane’s family was absolutely wonderful to stay with. While I was there, I actually ended up going to the hospital for was basically a type of food poisoning. It was horrific. I’ve never felt so much pain in all my life. I actually wasn’t sure what was going on. I ended up having an ultrasound (to check for stones), a painful blood test (really unsanitary too….there were drips of bloods from others before me scattered across the counter!), a shot in my butt, and an iv for three hours. I don’t know what the shot was for, what was in the iv, or what any of the four medicines I had to take afterwards were.
The whole experience was stressful, and I don’t want to even start on how this hospital would never, ever, ever be up to standards in the States.
I survived though, and I did get better, so I guess that means they knew what they were doing.
After talking to a nurse at home through my mother, I found out that I had probably eaten something with bacteria in it a week or so before going to the hospital, but I had been taking stomach meds, and that was just covering up the symptoms, not curing anything, so it just got worse and worse.
Well, that’s mostly over with, but I’ve had stomachaches off and on since then, but they said it’ll be a couple of weeks until I’m completely back to normal. I’m not going to lie, I tried to be brave, but it’s tough being in pain and not knowing what’s going on.

Other than that, things have been good. Jane and I got a chance to go to Merryland, an amusement park in Guiln. Then I went to Lizzy’s cousin’s wedding, then Kyle’s family arrived.
Since then, we’ve been traveling….spent some time in Guilin, then the rice terraces in longji (my 4th time there), Yizhou, now Longzhou. Tomorrow we leave for Nanning and we’ll fly from there to Shenzhen and then we’ll go to Hong Kong. Kyle’s family flies out on the night of the 13th and on the 14th, Kyle and I will go to Nanchang to visit Lucretia (the awesome woman that we had our training with to come to China), then four days in Beijing, and then we head to the Amity conference in Nanjing.

Then it’s time for a second year of teaching in China!

I haven’t updated photos lately, but hopefully I’ll have a chance at some point. I’ll try to be better at posting on here and responding to emails during the rest of the summer holiday.