Thanksgiving, or something along those lines.

It's been an eventful week.

Aunt Janet decided to come across the world to visit me while over her week off from teaching, so we've been visiting a lot of her old friends and meeting some new ones in the process. It's been fun to see and hear about how Xiamen and China has changed over the last 20 years, for both the better and the worse.

On Wednesday night (and shown) Leo, I, Spino, Perry, Tim, Jacob, and Matt decided to go camping on Gulanyu island. None of our Chinese friends had ever done such a thing, so it was an experience to go with them. These guys had also never had the pleasure of eating the staple camping food: S'mores.

After attempting futilly to explain what these melted pieces of goodness were, and finally getting across the humor of its name(you want s'more smores?), "chocolate," strawberry marshmallows, and buttery cookies combined to make the culinary combo. Leo tried the first one and answered, "I'm so confused...."

It was much colder than we realized. We had no tents and two blankets to split between the seven of us. We didn't sleep very much. Bamboo suffices as firewood, but it pops violently and burns really really fast.

In the morning we made our way back to XiaDa, but not before Matt and I stopped by Mai Dan Lao for an exceptional breakfast.

Janet knew some people through her school that were affiliated with an orphanage in town, so she and I went and visited it. They work mainly with the handicapped children who will probably not be adopted. It is a really great thing they are doing. Remind me to tell you more about it.

Janet, with Mom's help, also managed to bring the materials for an authentic Pumpkin pie, which she made and gave to me on my birthday. It was really great.
Our Thanksgiving celebration was a hodgepodge of Western fast food and Chinese dishes, which, combined with our team that has gotten pretty close over the past months, it was a really great and fun evening. After dinner and a birthday cake we watched Elf and listened to Christmas music.

Today Janet, I, Jeanette, Matt, Dan, and Nate managed to get a personal ride(thanks to Janet's former student, now business owner) to Yongding, a town with Hakka ethnic minority rounhouses. Many were build during the Ming dynasty and are still used. Think about a three-story circular house with an open courtyard made completely out of wood and you might get something close to the Hakka houses.Janet leaves tomorrow afternoon for home. We're going to the First Protestant Church in China(in Xiamen) tomorrow morning before she departs.

Its impossible to escape the influence of history, for everything we do will forever be apart of it.

Xi'an - 西安 - "Western Peace"

I apologize for slacking on my updates-

We've been on our "trek" for about a week now, visiting Shanghai, Beijing, and arriving in Xi'an today. These cities all have a different feel to them - Shanghai: the whirlwind of the free market and "new China." Beijing - The "center of the world" and pride of the country. Xian - the old capital before Beijing, the central hub of the Silk Road and the port of the West.

We flew from Xiamen to Shanghai and spent a few days there. I found a new hero of Chinese history - Sun Yatsen. Check him out. He had a house in Shanghai and a few guys and I toured it while we were there. Not far down the street was the place where the first Communist Party meeting was, so it was interesting to see these two places in one day.

We took the overnight train to Beijing. Taking trains makes me feel like I'm in the 1800's. I wish we would improve our train system, they're really great. While in Beijing I still felt like I was in "China," just with 15 million people. Hong Kong and Shanghai have a different feel about them. People in Beijing seem to make time for tea, and the older people make time for leisure and community, whether reciting Tang dynasty poems, singing propaganda songs about "the good ole' days," or playing hackysack (they were way better than I). Remind me to tell you about seeing Mao's body.

We traveled last night by another overnight train to Xi'an. This city still has its city wall intact, build in the Ming Dynasty around 600 years ago. Today we went about an hour and a half out of the city to see a Nestorian pagoda(Nestorians came to China around the year 600) and to see the place where Laozi allegedly wrote down his thoughts that later became the "Tao te Jing," one of Daoism's main texts. Both places were majestic and surreal.
Hope you all are doing well. I sure am.