A new place

Jami's "sisters" in Huai'an! They were so good to us. Lucia and Sara!

Goodbye Huai'an! We have friends that we will miss. But we will stay in contact....

Our last night in Huai'an at KTV! Rockin' our with Sean and Julie.

Easter weekend we were in Beijing. Elijah had his Youth Conference while we were there. If you are wondering why Youth Conference on Easter/General Conference Weekend it's because the LDS General Conference is a week later in Asia, this week. Easter in China really doesn't exist, instead China celebrates something called Qingming or Tomb sweeping, it's where they go and visit the graves of their ancestors or family members. Kind of ironic don't ya think?

We had a great time in Beijing again and this time we met up with Ruby and her parents for a couple of dinners AND to celebrate EVEREST'S BIRTHDAY!!! That's right our baby is 10 years old now! He got to choose where we went for dinner and we had some good Mexican food.

Our big 10 year old with his brothers!

A lego score on his B-Day!

 

Talk about parking close to the wall!

We also met up with a a friend from Church who had a daughter going to Youth Conference as well, the Blatmans. We went up to the Olympic Park and walked around and saw the "Nest" and picked up the boys a toy that they played with for hours. It was a good time. We explored a Hutong and saw some interesting things and enjoyed the spring weather.

Loving the spring weather and views

The "Nest" in Beijing

A Street performer in a Hutong

Throwing up and having a good time with parachute thingies

On Monday we took the trip from Beijing to our new home here in YongZhou pronounced (YONG-JOE) in Hunan provence. It's the same provence that inspired the views/mountains/filming (whichever one you want) for Avatar. The train ride was an 18 hour ride. It wasn't that bad really. It was a good rest from our busy Beijing weekend.

A Sunset in Beijing

The Beijing train station

All cozy in their beds ready for the long train ride.

We have been in YongZhou now for 5 days and have taught 2 days of classes. We teach at a High School now. The student population is about 6,000. Jami and I each have 18 classes a week and there is another English teacher at the school from California, Chaz. He's been in China for 6 weeks and he's a good guy. The class sizes are different than what we had the for the past 7 months. There are 65-76 students in each class. We are enjoying the classes and the English of the students is pretty good.

The High School from our apartment

View of our apartment building from one of the school fields.

What the classroom desks look like....imagine this with 65-75 students.

Students going to the field.

Students still pouring out to the field.

On Monday Morning the students all gather for some little exercise and a flag raising on the soccer field. 

 One great thing that we have here that we didn't have in Huai'an is a place to play!! The 1st thing we did was order and buy an American Football!!

All smiles!

Going long! We needed this!