Where the Rice Rows Grow

So one amazing thing about China, and Guilin and Yangshou in particular, is how they grow rice. They have a lot of people to feed and not enough land, so they literally grow rice on the side of mountans. The thing is- rice grows in water, not just in the ground. Solution? Rice terraces! 

Rice terraces are like stairs of water, and so beautiful! Last time I was in China I was disappointed I never got a chance to go to Yangshou, so when I had the opportunity to go this year I was estatic! Yangshou truly lived up to my imagination, it was just so wonderful. When taking the bus to the rice terraces, I was surprised at how far up the mountain we had to go. It was a long, misty, and windy road to get there, but worth it!

One fun thing that happened while at the terrace was me getting separated from my group. I have asthma, so that combined with the high altitude made the hike up the terraces not particularly fun [or possible]. I decided to sit down and tell Brenna to go on without me, but after a few minutes I realized how worn out I was. Long story short, I was separated from them for about three hours before being happily reunited, bought six scarves, and made friends with a plenty of interesting people. I'll have to write up the long version of the story, or just put my video documentary of the whole even together… it's pretty impressive. 

The greenest place I've ever been!

Rice: up close and personal.

Toxic Toads

The awkward moment when.… a few weeks ago, I saw some really cute frogs hopping around outside our apartment, so I of course had to pick them up. I have always loved frogs, so I was excited to learn that we had some living near by. Tonight I was outside and Kallie pointed to the ground and was all excited because there was two adorable ones hopping around. I made a dive for them and was super excited to walk around holding the cute little froggies. After a minute, I showed an older chinese woman and she smiled and told me the Chinese name for them. But then when I showed her them again but more in the light, she gasped, told me a different name for them, and started urgently telling me to wash my hands. Turns out, the frogs are actually poisonous and shouldn't be picked up. When I told Daisy the story she said "Oh, well yes, people here don't pick up frogs…"  Moral of the story is don't pick up frogs no matter how cute they are. 

**Update. Found out this creature was a toad, not a frog. His name is also Todd. I saw Todd hoping around outside and it broke my heart I couldn't pick him up. Poor Todd, he needs love.**

Halloween Horror

It’s almost Halloween so here’s a horror story. 

Today my lesson was making sandwiches out of moldy bread, but they obviously didn’t eat them. I would make a sandwich and put leaves and clean tissues and toothpicks onto the bread to make a yucky sandwich. It was a lot of fun to see the kids reactions and about half the lesson was on not eating yucky food, especially not moldy bread. It was a good lesson and in my last class they pretended to eat the bread, then reenacted puking and dying and stuff like that so I thought the message was pretty clear “you don’t eat moldy bread". (It was literally covered in green mold because I forgot about it for three weeks.) At the end of my last class they weren’t listening so I had them help clean the classroom and they threw away all the fake food and the sealed bag of moldy bread and tissues. I thought the lesson had gone well and I only had a few minutes left in class when I heard kids yelling “TEACHA!! TEACHA!!” and I turned around and Romeo the king of pills was standing over the trashcan with the bread bag ripped open and a huge mouthful of bread. EWWWW!! Why WHY would you do that??? I freaked out and had him spit it in the trash can and tried to get him to spit it all out and I think he got most of it out but another little girl named Chris also ate a little of it and I don’t know if she swallowed but I told her to spit it out, too. I was terrified thta the kids would get sick and I would get in trouble and the Romeo kept saying “Teacha, me no bleh (pretending to throw up) me no yucky” but I wanted him to know it was not ok that he did that so I pointed at him and motioned that he was going to throw up. In the end, both kids came to class the next day perfectly fine so I guess they're ok! That was definitely a scary teaching moment, though!

Getting a Passport: Not for the Faint at Heart

Time for a passport! I was (finally) able to get an appointment. Yay! The only place I could get an appointment in a reasonable amount of time was almost an hour away at the passport agency in San Diego.  Not yay! But it all worked out. My mom is great and drove me to San Diego for my appointment at 10:30. We parked in a minuscule parking lot that charged a (ridicules) amount. $11 dollars for two hours of parking? I guess that's what it's like in a city, and considering I'm moving to China, I'm going to have to get used to it. After a little adventure of fitting a mini van into a spot that looked like it was designed for a smart car, we proceed to the huge shiny building.

After taking the gut dropping elevator to the tenth floor, we got in line for security.  So, you know those little kid's scissors that are about 4 inches long? Did you know that you can't bring them into secure government buildings? Whoops. I keep an emergency kit in my purse and I completely forgot about the scissors. After the X-ray machine went off and the security guy started digging through my purse, I remembered the scissors, 'fessed up, and found them myself. My purse is far from clean, and I wanted him to spend minimal time digging through it. The security guard then instructed my mom to throw the scissors away, "just not on the tenth floor." Because as we all know,  little safety scissors like to jump out of trash cans and and poke people, but they of course can not use elevators. Anyway, we made it successfully through the first stage of applying for the passport, then sat down to wait. The passport system is very similar to the DMV, but as previously mentioned their appointment system is even worse. Wouldn't it be fun if healthcare worked with such efficiency? 

After waiting for an hour, I raised my right hand to give the little oath they give, signed a paper, and was out of there! It was perfect because we made it back to the car just before our expensive two hours ran out. I'll have my passport very soon because we expedited it, then I can get my visa!

Moving to China is starting to become more and more real!