Trip Summary

Well, hello, hello! Fancy meeting you here!

I'm back from my big overseas adventure and haven't told you all about it yet. Never fear, my summary is here.

So I have just come back from a three-and-a-bit week trip to the land of China with my sister Danella. We went with a team from New Zealand.
We had the most incredible time!

Most of the time we were helping foreign English teachers teach the English language in university classrooms. They would usually do some sort of lesson, then divide the class into small groups and we would discuss the lesson together so they could practice their English. 

We met (and promptly forgot the names of) heaps of Chinese university students, spent some time helping in various group gatherings and did a tiny bit of touristy sightseeing. 

As I said before, we had the most incredible time. We did things like tasting chicken feet, climbing a mountain that was literally a giant staircase all the way up and took us four hours to get to the top, experiencing many crowded Chinese buses and underground trains and meeting lots of wonderful people!

Thanks so much to all our amazing friends who prayed for us before and during our trip. We feel like it was a very fruitful time.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, it's really good to be home. :)

Below are a few photos. Enjoy!

View of a small part of the city from the 25th floor of an apartment building

One of our favourite street foods: deep-fried potato chunks coated in spice! Amazing.

They had all sorts of random potato chip flavours... here are just two we discovered.... grilled squid and cucumber. Who's hungry?

The travellers

We hired a tandem bicycle and rode around a wall for 13.7 km. It was really neat.

Typical university classroom - their classes are usually two hours long.

Here I am, being really intrepid and trying chicken feet! They don't actually taste awful, they just taste like chicken. I think it's the thought of them that is so off-putting. You know, knowing where they've walked and so on...

And here's Danella trying chicken feet. The funny part of this photo is not her or the chicken foot, it's the expression on the face of our team member beside her! Hahahaha! :)

Danella and I had the opportunity to teach a craft to a group of university students. We taught them quilling (rolling up paper into designs). They loved it.

At one point we went out of the city to a village school. The kids at the village school loved playing games with us.... I taught them all sorts of games through mime since I know virtually no Chinese (here we are doing follow the leader) and they knew basically no English at all... that's why we were there, to teach them English. 

We climbed a mountain that was 944 meters high and was basically a giant staircase the entire way.... singing Christian songs all the way up! It was awesome.

We visited a tourist attraction that had a whole lot of miniatures of famous touristy places in China. Here we are in front of one of them, I don't remember what it was. 

And here is Danella hugging a nice big terracotta warrior statue.

We saw all sorts of things, including these animals, coypu. They are about the size of otters but look like giant water rats and have webbed back feet! 

China was fantastic... I'd love to go again some day!

How has the last month been for you and your family?