Chinese wedding

Tonight we got to experience our first Chinese wedding!!! It was… very very very very very very different. They call it a wedding party, which is exactly what it is! A huge party. When we got there everyone was sitting at tables eating food and the bride and groom were at the front taking the presents as you walk in and greeting guests. We sat down and then things started to get interesting. The music was BLARING throughout the entire wedding so keep that in mind. Everything went dark except for a spotlight on the groom who ran down the aisle holding the bouquet. The person conducting the “ceremony” was a girl who basically just seemed like a talk show host or something. She and the groom yelled some stuff then the groom ran back down the aisle where he asked the bride if she would marry him. Then she said yes and there were lots of cheers and horns blowing while the music was still blasting and the microphone kept making that terrible screeching noise and I felt like I was going to go deaf. Then they ran down the aisle together and they exchanged rings and lit fireworks (the fountain ones cause this was inside) and did some other stuff I don’t understand. I really don’t understand anything else that went on after that. All I know is there was lots of laughing and terrible singing and loud loud loud everything. Haha it was fun though! It was definitely VERY different than our weddings in America. Just take the sacred and fancy out of wedding and there ya go! And DEFINITELY in no way was the bride the center of everything like in America. Haha It was fun though!

When the lights went out the first time when the groom ran down the aisle the only light for a while was the spotlight and the light from the disco ball and stuff. So we were basically eating in almost the dark. In that time I ate pigs ear, tiny fish, and nasty pigs leg without knowing it. After those three things I just stopped eating until the lights came on. Then I saw a turtle on the table too. I didn’t try that. The pigs ear was enough for me. Yuck yuck yuck.

I can’t get over the shrimp here. I love shrimp. It is SO delicious. But I just can’t handle the eyes!!! I can tear apart a crab and eat other fish with eyes on it but I can’t eat the shrimp. I just can’t do it. It is too yucky tearing off the head with those big black eyes and then the long antenna things. Ewwww. I just can’t get used to it. The school has shrimp for lunch a lot and they are always at fancy dinners. Today for lunch we had shrimp, rice and tofu which had broccoli in it too. All I ate was the rice and broccoli. Haha

Tonight I was looking in the “Downloads” folder on my computer and found all of the pictures that Jay has sent me of Thomas that I couldn’t ever figure out how to save. They have just been staying in my email. I didn’t realize that when I downloaded them they were saving on my computer! So that was a happy moment when I found 114 pictures of Thomas. He is SO CUTE I seriously CAN’T stand how cute he is! I looked at the pictures over and over and over again. He is just so cute. I have the CUTEST nephew. He is so cute.

Here is a picture of how gross the shrimp are... they are even grosser in real life!

the end of our Xian trip

I still have to finish talking about our Xian trip! On Sunday night we went biking on the City Wall in Xian. It was one of my very favorite parts of the whole trip. It was seriously SO amazing. We rode tandom bikes, which was my first time ever doing that. Mekena and I rode on one together. At first we had a really difficult time with it. Haha It didn’t help that they were really really old bikes too. We got the hang of it after a while though and it was so much fun. It was dark out and the wall was all lit up and the city surrounding the whole wall was lit up and everything was so beautiful. There were even floating lanterns in the sky. It was all so magical and beautiful and probably my favorite part of the whole trip along with the Terra-cotta Warriors. It was just so amazing!!! We were biking on a wall built in the Tang Dynasty!!! Seriously, amazing.

Not too much else happened. We spent the next morning souvenier shopping on the dreariest day of my life I feel like. The weather was nasty. I had such a fun time in Xian though! It really was such a good week.

On Tuesday we got back at about noon after a really long train ride. I had to teach my fifth grade class that afternoon and didn’t have any idea of what I was going to teach so I taught them Happy Birthday. We spent the whole class making birthday cards for Sara since it was her birthday last week and I taught them the Happy Birthday song. It was basically a lesson about Sara. Haha

Wednesday night we went over to Marie and Mekena’s apartment and we all went to Tai Chi together! It was the first time ever that I have done Tai Chi. We all loved it! It was so fun and really hilarious. All of the Chinese people were trying to help us do it and there was a crowd of people who stopped to watch. Apparently I am pretty good at doing Tai Chi though because everyone kept complimenting on how good I was doing. J

Yesterday we watched conference finally! I had already watched most of it but it was fun to watch it with everyone together. We tried to have an American breakfast, so we made French toast! We can’t find butter anywhere here so we used oil instead which gave it a Chinese taste. We also couldn’t find syrup so we had cream cheese and strawberry jam on it. We also had lots of fruit and it was so delicious! For lunch we had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches which tasted amazing as well. J Conference was so so so so so so so amazing. I love it so much.

Week vacation in Xian!

So this is my super long blog post of our week vacation in Xian so far! J

When we got to Zhenjhong we went straight to Jordan and Morgan’s apartment. Zhenjhong is so busy! We went to a fancy mall where we played on the escalators forever taking cool pictures. Haha People were watching us like we were crazy as we were going up and down them over and over again. Then we did some karaoke! We went to this fancy karaoke place that Jordan and Morgan had been to before. You go in a private really fancy room and just sing forever! So it was just 8 of us girls in our own little room and we sang Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift and Justin Beiber! They had a ton of American songs and all of us sang the whole time and it was so fun. I love these girls, it was such a fun party!

On Monday night Sara, Julia, Mekena and I went to a music festival thing. Orange got us tickets for it. We drove a bus way out to the middle of nowhere. Like literally, we drove a bus over a huge bridge to an island and drove down a windy rode surrounded by tons of trees. I was sitting next to Mekena and said to her, “This is by far the weirdest thing I have ever done.” It really was. Haha It was fun though! Basically just a ton of the famous Chinese pop stars performed. It is a way huge deal here and was seriously just hilarious.

On Tuesday at 11:30 we got on the train for our trek to Xian. When we got on the train Mekena said, “THIS is the weirdest thing I have ever done.” It really was. Haha it was such an old train and people were standing in the aisles who couldn’t get a sitting seat and an old man would walk down the train sweeping and totally disregard there being feet and sweep right over them. We thought it would be a 13 hour train ride. But then 14 hours passed… then 15 hours passed… then 16 hours passed… and 17 hours later we finally got to Xian. It was so long!!! We got to Xian at 5:00 in the morning. We tried to get a taxi to go to the hotel Orange made reservations for us at but for some odd reason they wouldn’t take us! I think maybe our hotel was too close? But I don’t know. So we had to walk to try to find our hotel and it was freezing and sigh… it was miserable. We went into other hotels to ask where the hotel was that we were staying at and nobody knew where it was! It was the weirdest thing. Some people pointed us in the general direction. We walked for what seemed like forever and finally found it. We were all worried it wasn’t going to be a very good hotel because nobody knew where it was, but it is actually really nice and the workers here are really nice too. So we found it at around 6:30 a.m. and they told us we couldn’t go into our rooms until 9:00. So they let us sleep in the lobby. None of us had gotten any sleep on the train because it was so uncomfortable. So we laid down on the couches and the floor in the lobby and I slept like a rock until 8:30 when I woke up to a ton of Chinese people staring at me. It was so weird. I can’t remember ever being in a deeper sleep than I slept that morning for those two hours, so when I woke up I had totally forgotten where I was. It was the oddest thing waking up and seeing all those people just staring at me. We all slowly woke up and they finally took us to our rooms where we slept for 2 more hours, getting about 4 hours of sleep total before heading off for a fun day in Tang Paradise! It was a miserable morning, but quite the adventure!

When we read about Tang Paradise on the internet it was described as Disney World meets the Tang Dynasty. It was SO FUN! It’s not an amusement park, so no rides or anything, it was just a paradise! It is so beautiful! They had people dressed up and parades and there was a magic feeling like at Disneyland. We were all so excited to be there! It was such a cool place. We walked around at first really just trying to figure out what the place was exactly. We found a waterfall and took pictures by it and on it. Then we kept walking to a huge gold lion sitting on a hill. Then we found real camels and sat on them! And the camel moved while I was sitting on it so I got a little ride! It was so fun. There were cool people dressed up all over and doing cool stunts and stuff. Then we found a parade!!! And guess what was in the parade? Real Chinese dragons!!!!! We were all so excited and I was taking a picture of it and it came right up to me and shimmied in my face! Haha It was so scary but hilarious! The parade was amazing. Once it passed we realized all the cameras around were on us. Haha We took pictures with people and I seriously haven’t seen that many cameras all at one time in my life. They just kept taking them and taking them until my smile was making my mouth hurt so bad and eventually all of us just had to walk away even while pictures were being taken. I guess it is pretty exciting to see 8 American girls all at one time! Anyway, after that we walked by a lake that started squirting up water like the Balagio does. We watched that for a while which was amazing then explored a pagoda. When we came out of the pagoda we saw more Chinese dragons!! They are seriously my favorite ever. They dragons were doing awesome stunts! One was a two person dragon and it was on top of these pole things. It was jumping from pole to pole and was so amazing! I can’t even describe. I seriously felt like I was in China more than I had before. I love love love Chinese dragons! They are awesome! After a long wonderful day exploring we ended our day off by watching the water show. It is kind of like the World of Color show at Disneyland but not nearly as cool. Not even close to as cool. But it was still SO AMAZING! It started off with fireworks right above us and around us and it scared me way bad. Haha it was hilarious. Then they told a story about some dragon and people saving something or something. It was all in Chinese so I didn’t understand. But it was so awesome! Then the show ended with fireworks as well. Then we took one more walk around the park which was absolutely gorgeous because it was all lit up. We took tons of pictures. It was seriously so amazing. Such a good day.

Getting back to the hotel from Tang Paradise was really rough because we couldn’t find a taxi and had to wait forever for the bus and then transfer and then wait again then transfer. We finally got back to the hotel which is always a relief and got to bed at around midnight.

The next morning we woke up at 6:30 for our private tour to the Ban Po museum, to the Qin emperor tomb replica, and then to the Terra-Cotta Warriors!!! Our tour guides English name was Mary and she was so sweet and spoke English really well. The Ban Po Museum is a museum of the oldest village they have discovered. It was amazing. They had live human bones in the dirt and put on display and stuff of the people that lived in the village. It was amazing. Then we went to an art exhibit of paintings from a farmer. They were beautiful! It was a fun morning.

After that we went to the Qin Emperor Tomb replica. It was a redesign of the Emperors tomb that is protected by the Terra-Cotta Warriors. So much went into building this tomb! There was everything in there that he wanted to “take with him to have in his next life”. He believed he would live again so that is why he built the Terra-Cotta Warriors to protect him. He also had all of his concubines buried with him and all of the prisoners who built the tomb where buried with him as well because they knew the secrets of the tomb. So it totaled to about 700,000 people being buried alive with him in his tomb. Terrible.

After the tomb we went and got lunch in the Terra-Cotta village and then headed over to see the Terra-Cotta Warriors, which is the part we had all been anxiously waiting for! There were three farmers who were digging a well about 40 years ago who stumbled upon the Terra-Cotta Warriors. One of them is still alive and we got to meet him! Cool cool cool. Then we went to all of the museums that built up to the Terra-Cotta Warriors. By the end of walking through all of the museums telling all about the Terra-Cotta Warriors we were really really really excited to finally see them. It was incredible. There was a huge crowd when you first walked in looking at them but I am really good at pushing through. It helps that I was so so so anxious to see them. I got to the front of the crowd of people trying to see them and it was incredible! I can’t even describe. I got a billion pictures of them. I just kept taking them and taking them. It was so amazing!!! I can’t believe people actually built those one by one. It was incredible. I wish I had more to say about it but I don’t, only that it was incredible! Just like the Great Wall. The same kind of feeling of amazement that there are no words to describe it. It is giving me the chills just thinking about it now! There are just no words to describe anything about China. I can’t believe I am actually here.

After a long day of sight-seeing I got a headache. So after a long drive we got back to the hotel at around 6. I went right asleep while everyone else went to get dinner. When I woke up an hour and a half later all of the girls had gone back out to explore some and Mekena and Julia had stayed home with me. When they got back from dinner they had the hotel workers open the door for them so they wouldn’t wake me up by knocking. They brought me a delicious dinner and so when I woke up I had some noodles and oranges waiting for me. Then we all watched a movie and giggled and had fun. I love them so much.

On Friday Jordan and Morgan had to leave because they had to get back to their classes that started before the rest of ours. The rest of us went to the art and calligraphy street which was absolutely gorgeous and had a ton of stands and shops where I got a ton of souveniers. It was all incredible stuff and just SO fun! There were beautiful artwork and people doing calligraphy on the streets. It felt like how I thought China would be. It was so fun! I CAN’T WAIT to get home and give everyone their presents!!!

After that we went and got dumplings and then got on my first ever double decker bus! We sat on the top floor of the huge bus and went to the drum and bell tower which was also very very beautiful. We stopped and got some fruit slushy things that were SO delicious! I got peach. Every time I get something peach flavor I always think of Jay for some reason. I always feel like I am her. Haha I don’t know why. But I associate peach flavor with her. JXian is so beautiful but very very dirty. There is trash all over the place and it smells so so so bad in a lot of places. The first night when we got here and we couldn’t find our hotel it was so miserable because of the smell and trash. But now we have seen so many beautiful places in Xian that I love it so much! China is so amazing. I love being here.

Saturday was one of the lesser exciting days but was still so much fun. We went to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. It was so beautiful! We took tons of pictures and met our first monk! He took a picture with us. We just walked around this huge pagoda and park area forever because it was so pretty and peaceful. There was a huge rock area where you can leave your mark. So we all wrote China Sisters and around it wrote our names. After that we ate lunch and got more of those fruity drinks that we love so much. Then we came back for a rest and took another walk to a fancy mall and stopped and got dumplings on the way home. It was a nice day. Two more days here!

This blog is so extremely long. I have been having such a fun time here in Xian though! Vacations with my China Sisters are the best and I just love being here in China!

Oh and a little side note, I CAN NOT believe there is going to be another temple built in Provo! I just think that is so amazing and wonderful! It makes me so happy to think about how much the church is growing.

Oh also another side note, the Chinese name for America is Mei Guo. Mei Guo means Pretty Country. America is so pretty, so I think that is a perfect name for it. J

 In Zhenjhong!

Really fancy mall

 Strawberry Festival

TRYING to get sleep on the train...

about to go in to Tang Paradise

Inside of Tang Paradise

Riding a camel!



A real Chinese Dragon!

We are literally on opposite sides of the world! :)

 This is in the ancient town. These are four sisters who were buried together because they wanted to be together forever.

Standing by the bones of the four sisters buried together.



Us with the Terra-Cotta Warriors! ;)

 Getting ready to go inside the building to see the Terra-Cotta Warriors

The Terra-Cotta Warriors

 Paradise

Me and Julia on our first ride on a double-decker bus :)



The Drum Tower

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda

This one was taken with you in mind :)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SARA!

Hi! I am in Xian and will send a big blog at the end of the week. But for today here is Sara's birthday blog. HAPPY BIRTHDAY SARA! I miss you so much. I hope you have a wonderful day. Oh and be sure to read my hand in the picture. :) haha I love you so much.

Happy National Day!

Happy National Day! :) Our ten day break has officially begun! We leave for Zhenjhong today where we will take a train and be on our way to Xian! Yesterday Sara and I slept in which felt SO good after a long week. Then we went to Orange's moms house and made dumplings and won-tons (I don't know if that is how it is spelled). It was so fun! We learned how to say Happy National Day in Chinese and surprised everyone we passed on the streets as we said it to them. haha Sara and I had a fun night together and did a little shopping and went out to eat! Then we came home and painted our nails and watched Tangled. Overall the whole day just felt like a holiday, you could feel the holiday spirit in the air! :) It was a good day.

Oh and I guess I didn't say this but I am the first foreign teacher my students have ever had or seen so we have lots of fun! They all touch my hair in awe. haha I gave them all their English names. Surprisingly a lot of the first graders remembered theirs! Daniel was the only one who already had an English name. The fifth graders are required to remember theirs. We go over them every class so they say it right and know each others English names. So I have an Annie and a Jared and a Dallin and a Pam in my fifth grade class. Everyone who has an easy name. :)

I am so so so jealous for everyone who is watching General Conference. We tried to pull the Saturday Morning Session up on our computers this morning but it just won't work. When we get back from our trip though we are going to have a big party and all of us watch conference together! I am excited. :) I love conference!

Time to make lunch! :)

 Making dumplings!

Me and my Chinese Grandma. She brought in live crabs and lobsters to show us. They were climbing all over each other in that bucket and trying to crawl up the sides. Yuck!

Orange holding the live crab.

This is Orange's parents neighborhood. It is a really nice and fancy neighborhood. The houses are beautiful!

The river lit up at night. Sara and my night out on the town!

A yummy fruit stick covered in a kind of honey glaze stuff.