Huai'an....Home for the next year

 Here we are in Huai'an China in the Jiangsu Province. We arrived late Wednesday night on Sep 3rd to our new apartment. It was a 2 hour flight and a total of 4 hour rides by car from Yangshuo. (90 min Yangshuo to Airport in Guilin and then 2 1/2 hrs from Nanjing Airport to Huai'an). Bruce (our boss and FAO (foreign affairs officer)) picked us up and has been great to work with and very helpful in showing us around. He speaks good english.

We are in a 3 bedroom apartment on a bottom floor. It's very nice and spacious. We have 2 bathrooms with showers only (missing our big tub about now). We have a small kitchen with just 2 stove top burners and a small fridge. A dinning room and a big living room with a little bar, the boys love playing behind it and serving us bottled water. We also have a washing machine and a clothes drying area. Each room has an A/C unit which we don't have to use as much here as we would have in Yangshuo. Since we are more north it isn't as hot and muggy. It's been really pleasant.

Above is our apartment complex, we are in the way back.

The food! We have been to several restaurants and have not had any bad tasting experiences at all! They have been real good. The trick is the ordering (unless we have Bruce with us) in Chinese...remember we don't speak any. It's Chinese roulette and so far we are winning! We really enjoy the noodle soup, fried and boiled dumplings and the duck.



This is an example of a menu without pictures.

Here's a list and some pictures of some of the food that we have
Cow stomach
Jelly Fish
Octopus
Eel
Fish and Crab eyes
Crab eggs
Chicken and Duck feet
Tea eggs
Also tons of new fruit (I can't remember all the names), but the favorite has been passion fruit so far.

Here's our spread of food with the other foreign teachers...yum, yum, yum!

Crab roe and crab (roe=eggs) It was like a custard

Clam

Eel. Tasted good, it was boney.

Fish eyeball, a delicacy. No real taste, felt like a mint.

Jelly fish platter

Eating Jelly fish (take 2). it was crunchier than expected and tasted almost pickled. It was good.

Squid. It was soft and delightful with a garlic flavor.

Our 1st weekend here we got to meet the kids we will be teaching and introduce ourselves to them and their parents. They are excited to learn more english and teach us some much needed Chinese.

The kids we will be teaching. There are 82 and we have 10 classes each per week.

Elijah and Ethan already with a following! J/K..anxiously learning Chinese.

Close to us is an amusement park that is free to get in and walk around and if you want to ride rides you pay at the ride entrance. Bruce and some of the kids from school took us there and we got to ride everything for free. The boys had a great time!

Made in front of our eyes! What talent and skill.

We went with some of the students and their moms and at the end they bought each of the boys a sugar candy design of each of their animals representing their birth year.

Dragon

Horse

Rooster