Having fun on our vacation!

Hello Everyone!











Well, our week-long vacation has begun and we have already been making the most of it. It started yesterday (Monday) when we walked on the Binhai Road, which is a 12 mile walk along the East coast of Dalian. We started off at Xianghai Square, where we saw sculptures of all of the Olympic sports (Yes, we even thought we saw one for Speed Walking). I saw this sculpture of a woman volleyball player and it reminded me of you Nikki! These sculptures are pretty amazing, we figured out that they display the three key movements in each of the motions...pretty cool! On the rest of the walk we saw some beautiful views of the Yellow Sea, got invited to join a group of wonderful (non-English speaking) Chinese people for lunch on the side of the road, and ended up at Tiger beach. It was a great long walk and we got to see much of Dalian that we never knew existed.











While on our walk we went passed what was Dalian's Forest Zoo, known as Asia's largest zoo (so we heard). So, we decided to visit it. The zoo was enormous..not many more animals than you would see at a normal zoo I don't think, but the amount of space it took up was amazing! We even had to take a 15-20 minute long gondola ride to get to another part of the zoo! The zoo was unlike one Josh or I had ever been to in America. For example, feeding the animals was a common trend and animals being let to roam around the park. One of our favorite parts of the zoo was visiting the bear exhibits. Both of us were expecting to find a few different kinds of bears sleeping in their caves and barely being able to get a glimps of them...wrong! All of the bears (including polar bears, sun bears, and a few others) were out and putting on a show for the crowd. We were able to throw apples and cucumbers to the bears to make them do tricks like spin around or wave...it was amazing! And we were able to see them up close and personal, only having about 15-20 feet distance and a deep moat in between us!
After the bear exhibit, we went to our first show titled "Violent Animals Performance." Here we saw four tigers and one lion doing tricks and walking on balance beams...but that's not all. After the show the crowd was invited to come into the giant caged in stage and take a picture with one of the younger tigers for only 10 yuan ( about $1!) How could we resist! :) It was one of the scariest things we had ever done...but now we can say that we touched a tiger with our bare hands and never do it again!!



Next we took a beautiful gondola ride to the next part of the zoo to catch the Thai Elephant performance. As we entered the park, standing straight in front of us was another photo opportunity of a lifetime.. being lifted in the air by a Thai Elephant! After I had already encountered a tiger and survived, what was there to stop me? After watching many other individuals successfully be lifted up and down I decided I would pay the $2.50 and experience another feat I never thought I would accomplish! It was pretty amazing, I don't really remember thinking anything while up in the air, only feeling an odd sense of security with the elephant's trunk wrapped tightly around me. You can watch this video for yourselves on our youtube link!




















Well, other than walking around the park (with little to no lighting) trying to find an exit and encountering a heard of free-roaming alpaca, the rest of the zoo trip was pretty uneventful. :) Needless to say we are having the experience of a lifetime already! Can't wait to fill you in on our next adventure in China!

We love you all so much!

Love,
Ashley and Josh

P.S. Tomorrow is Dalian's version of Disneyland called Discoveryland! Woohoo!

Second BIG update!

Hello everyone!

Sorry it took so long for us to update you on what has been going on since our first blog...things have just been a little hectic around here, but they are finally settling down I think.

OUR CLASSES:

Since our first blog we have started teaching in our own classrooms. There were quite a few switches and changes to our schedules which made it hard to get a routine going, but I think our classes are finally set, which makes it easier to plan and prepare. Josh and I are both teaching two classes: one intermediate class and one low level class each. At first they were going to give me a class of 26 low level students, but after my first day I knew it would be close to impossible to give attention to everyone of them like they needed, so I fought to have the class split in half and shared between Josh and I. Since the split the students have shown a lot more confidence in speaking up and asking questions and it seems as though they will be able to learn so much more since the students will be able to get more individualized attention with the smaller class sizes.
These classes have proved to be quite a challenge, especially the low level, because most of the students' have very very limited English comprehension skills when it comes to listening and speaking. So we are trying our best to communicate with our students through pictures and modeling. The students are great though, they are so eager to learn and are very respectful to us as their teachers. It is so awesome to see our students' faces light up when we see them outside of the classroom! It's so great! Overall I think it is going to be quite an enjoyable and rewarding experience for the both of us.

THE BIG PERFORMANCE:
















Well the big performance finally came and went this past Thursday. The four of us had been preparing for a few weeks to sing a portion (yes including solos!) of China's Olympic Song, "Beijing Huan Ying Ni" which means "Beijing Welcomes You." None of us know how we were signed up for this gig and all of us were in denial that we were going to be singing in front of thousands of people for the University's 50th anniversary celebration! As the date of the performance came closer, we each became more and more nervous about the performance because we began to see what a big deal the celebration was when we saw the campus going through a whole beautification transformation before our eyes! There were ladies scrubbing the steps of the buildings, tons of decorations, and truck loads of flowers being planted all around the campus.
















The day of the performance we all four had to go in four hours before the performance to get our hair and makeup done by some of the fashion students of the college. (Yes even the boys got makeup!) Once we got all done up all of the students lined up to take pictures with us like we were movie stars! Finally our time had come and we all belted out our tunes barely even understanding what we were saying. But the crowd loved us! There were fireworks, smoke machines, bubble machines, the whole works! The experience will be seared into our memories for a lifetime! (There is a video of this on our Youtube link! Check it out!)

LOOKING FORWARD TO:

This next week is what China calls its National Holiday, where the whole country gets a week long vacation! We are so excited to get a rest after these crazy past two weeks. We plan on using this time to do more sight seeing in Dalian and do all there is to do in our city, that way when the long vacation comes we can use that time to see the rest of China.

So far we are having a great time here, but miss everyone at home immensely! We love you all and appreciate all of you so much for following our updates and watching our videos. It makes us feel very comforted and loved to know that we have all of you at home thinking and talking to Big Papa for us! We love you all soooo much!

Love,
Ashley and Josh

P.S.
Happy belated birthday Nick! And happy soon to be birthday Anthony and Jordan! We love you!

How to use a spoon properly

Yesterday we ate at Pizza Hut! This was not the ordinary Pizza Hut that we had experienced before in the past, no, this was a sit-down, full-service restaurant. This place had nice music, excellent service, and mood lighting! Anyway, after the best pizza ever (we're getting desperate here-but it really is better in China, promise), when it came time for dessert we ordered an ice cream sundae. Another note, ice cream is not very good here, it tastes like freeze dried, watered- down, wanna-be ice cream. As we gorged the sundae, we all noticed that I was holding my spoon just like I hold chopsticks. It was pretty hilarious! I can only imagine what I am going to forget how to do "properly" (the American way, that is) over the next months.

By the way, everyone needs to check out our videos on YouTube, we have been trying to update them a couple times a week at least so you can all see how our China experience has been. Just click on the link "Our Videos" on the left of our Blog. We love you all!

Our first blog!

Well, here it is!! Our first of hopefully many blog entries to keep you all updated about our adventure!

As some of you know, we have been in Dalian, China, for about six whole days. We are slowly getting used to being in a totally different country. There is definitely a culture shock...whenever we need to do anything outside of our apartment it is a struggle to communicate. Luckily we have our handy phrase book and our wonderful helper Harry who has gone almost everywhere with us.

Things are a lot more comfortable now that we have our own apartment to retreat to. For the first few days we were living in a "teacher hotel" on campus, which was fine for a little while, however we did have trouble with power shortages, strange smells, and the wonderful sound of freshman students doing military drills outside of our room at 5:30 in the morning!

The food here has been great! Every restaurant that we have been taken to has been delicious in its own way. So far we have gone to Korean, Japanese, and a few Chinese restaurants. We have also made it to a McDonald's, which is actually better than what we have in America...or maybe we were just dying for western food. :)

We are supposed to start teaching next Tuesday, however we have yet to find out the level of our students and so we have been unable to prepare. Hopefully we will find out our schedule and all the information we need at tomorrow's meeting!

In general we are having a great time! I'm not sure if it has hit us how long exactly we are going to be here...but we are just trying to take each day one and a time!

We miss everyone soooo much! We will try to keep this blog as updated as possible...please take a look at the pictures and videos we are going to post also!

We love you!!!!