Something to make you smile!

This is a dance that we performed for some of the kids and parents at the school on Saturday.  A 6th grade girl named Candy choreographed and taught us the dance over the past few weeks.  I figured this was far too funny to keep to myself so enjoy!

English Day!

Pictures from our performance.  The kids loved watching us and thought it was hilarious that we both sang and danced for them.  I unfortunately was not able to capture our group performing the Boot Scootin 'n Boogie but as you can imagine, we put on quite the show.  

I should have def worn more make-up

Our Chinese friends.  Candy, the choreographer of our dance is second from the right.

We love Judy!

The audience

Gwen- luckily she is not in my class because she is nuts!!!! She chases me when I go running on the track and tries to stop me from running.

My students. Even the boys are wearing lipstick, hah!  They sang the Hokey Pokey (sp?) and did a glorious job! 

Tommy

Sadie appears to not be digging her lipstick. Sam is so cute!

I may be trying to put James into my suitcase come June, he's pretty little so it might actually work...

Singing Upside Down.  Fortunately for me (and everyone else), I didn't have to participate, I am such a bad singer.

This is a play the kids put on and it was sooo weird and sooo funny!  It started out with the child stealing and the mom allowing it.  Somehow, it turned out that when the kid got older, he bit off his mom's ear (Mike Tyson style) and then the cops pulled machine guns on him.  The moral of the story was, parents should punish their children while they are little so they don't turn into hardened criminals.

Our Meghan singing "My Heart Will Go On".  They loved it!

These hats were SWEET!

The select group who were privileged enough to wear the white silk pants. We look good!

Arabian/Chinese princess???? I think so

Strike a pose

We thought we'd look good doing this... we thought wrong...

I am in the Woofer!

Last weekend, we decided to paint the town red and ventured out to a dance club in Hefei.  It was a lot of fun and I have to make a vast over-generalization about the Chinese- they really, really, really can't dance but they sure do try!  To really ensure that we stood out as much as possible, me and five of my friends were on the dance floor by ourselves dancing to a mix of American and Chinese music for an entire hour. It was a blast! At about 10pm,  all the Chinese decided to join us and it was so crowded, there wasn't much dancing going on but kind of just jumping around (did I mention that the floor was like mini-trampoline??? it was weird).  It was fun for a little bit but then the creepers started surrounding us and trying to grab us to dance and at about that point, we decided to leave.  All and all, a very memorable and fun-filled night at the Century dance club!

Me and Abby

Preparing to go on the dance floor

And you thought I was exaggerating about the fact that we were the only ones on the dance floor!

Hah, that's me in the green shorts!

A view from inside

ew, people smoking indoors. Lame

On the dance floor once everyone else decided to join us and that dude in black was crazy tall!

Meghan's excited!

The professional dancers,  the only Chinese I saw that had some rhythm!

This was a dude that was dancing behind me, hilarious!

Me and Danielle on the dance floor. Ahhh, she only has one eye!

Twins in ridiculous shirts!!!!

They seriously could not dance

The guy in black was totally creeping on me.  I ended up moving to a different spot so he would stop touching me....ew

Some more creepers...

Sweet arm Abby!

There was a sever shortage of ladies that night which made us even better targets...

The dj in what looks like a Mayan cave or something

I wish this picture had turned out better.  This guy got up on stage and was dancing soooo freaking badly, it was so funny!

Chinese Haircut

A few weeks ago, we went to a beauty salon on Women's street for Erin's birthday.  They promised her they would curl her hair for free and since we were there I decided to get my haircut.  It was a glorious experience and I highly recommend at some point in your life trying a game of charades with someone who is going to cut your hair.  Who needs to speak English anyways?

The beauty salon

Erin getting her hair done. That man looks intense

We couldn't figure out what this thing did but it def looks like some sort of torture device

Megan getting her bangs cut.  She told them she wanted bangs like them, hah!

This man is beautiful. I am jealous of his pretty hair

This is the guy who cut my hair.  He did a pretty good job although it's a bit uneven. oops, at least it only cost me about 2 bucks.

Food, Food, Food in Xi'an

spicy cucumbers at Mr. Lee's

I bought these from a woman off the street.  I totally thought they were raspberries but they definitely had a large seed in the middle of them.  They were pretty tasty.

tofu with weird stuff on top- kind of gross but kind of good

Ahhhh, schwarma, schwarma, schwarma is so GOOD!!!!

Peanut cookie

We saw these things everywhere and I felt it my duty to try it. In my travel book it's called the "eight treasure pudding" and describes it as a glutinous rice that is steamed and dusted with sesame and peanuts.  The thing wasn't particularly good but globbing a bunch of jelly on it made it taste a little better. 

so happy!

I totally tried the train food and I lived to tell about it

Xi'an Day 4

We saved the best for last!  We spent the whole morning at the terracotta warriors and it was absolute Amazing!  Check that off the list of things to see.  Again, my apologies for the mass amounts of photos I have posted but I thought they were soooo cool.  Enjoy!

Big statue in the parking lot

Paparazzi again, how could I not take a picture of a dude in a hawaiin shirt????

I'm excited to go inside!

Group shot

These were used during the Olympics (or so I read).  We totally forced these two nice guys into the picture with us

Pit 2

They are still in the process of excavating most of Pit 2

Close up

Outside Pit 3

Pit 3 is the smallest of the pits and is called the commanding center.

No heads and hollow bodies

Pit 1- the largest of the pits.  So far 2,000 soldiers have been discovered and they think there about about 4,000 more that still need to be dug up

Freaking huge!

While I was in pit 1, I decided that i really wanted to get some random tourists in my pictures.  This very nice english woman was more than happy to oblige me but her son was having none of it.  She did laugh at me though, she told me it was usually the asian men that asked for pictures of her and her son, hah!

Me and Abby

I am stoked that we got to see the terracotta warriors! so good!

Xi'an train station

This little boy was sooo cute. I spent about 10 minutes trying to get him to smile which I succeeded in doing by playing peek-a-boo with him.  His mom was super nice and gave us all some sunflower seeds, yay!

Our sleeper compartment which was an improvement over the sleepers I took while in India.

Xi'an Day 3

Hooray for Xi'an!!!! This city was amazing and I am so glad we visited it.  We had a rough train ride from Luoyang and didn't make it to the hostel until 5am.  We slept in until about 11 and then ventured out into the city.  We hung out mostly in the Muslim quarter which had a lot of shops and delicious food and overall it was a nice relaxing afternoon.

The Bell tower

I didn't actually get anything at this starbucks but I was highly amused by this gigantic cup.

I was also amused by all of these statues

Yes, yes, your eyes are not playing tricks on you, that is in fact a delicious doner/kebab/schwarma meat thing.  One word- Heaven!

I totally pulled a paparazzi and took a picture of this man as we walked by, i was digging his glasses.

Outside a Mosque

So truth be told, the only reason I took this picture was because I thought this was a dog but we asked and it was a sheep. It's still gross but not as weird as I was hoping 

The Xi'an city wall and gate

Models????