Catch Any Big Ones?

At the Summer Palace in Beijing, this man decided to do a little fishing.  Turns out he had a magnet on the end of his line, he was fishing for money people had thrown into the lotus pond!

Up, Up, Up.

Apartment tower balconies in my neighborhood, Tao Yuan Cun.  The Chinese have a tendency to repeat buildings.  They will have a single building type for an entire cluster of apartments, and differentiate them by painting big numbers on the side.  This guy was number 8 of 46.

Just Another Monday...

Every Monday morning, all the students and teachers gather for the weekly flag raising ceremony.  Pictured here are about half of the students at my school and all of the students I teach in 4th-6th grade.  They line up in order, from 6th grade to 1st, and listen to a speech by the headmaster of the school Mr. Cheng.  I assume these speeches are very boring (as I was told I didn't need to go to them) and that all the other teachers and students dread them.

A Yunnan Zombie

After hiking out to the Tiger Leaping Rock, climbing onto said rock, hiking back in the rain, getting lost in the Yunnan underbrush for over an hour, and falling down multiple times, this is what you look like.  Not a pretty site.  Dinner was especially tasy on this night.

Home

The view from right outside my room at Tao Yuan Primary School.  The school class wing in the foreground, residential towers of the neighborhood in the back.

TLG

The Tiger Leaping Gorge, western Yunnan Province.  The mighty Yangtze River begins on the Tibetan Plateau, and flows all the way to the lowlands and Shanghai on the eastern coast of China.  It is hard to believe the river carved these giant cliffs!

Chinese Trains Have Some Little Perks...

This is Fei Fei, a really sweet little girl riding with her family and us on the train from Guangzhou to Kunming.  She LOVED us.  She would watch us play cards, but unfortunately would count the cards in your hand in Chinese!  She also loved taking pictures with our cameras.  Her parents probably thought we were great - free babysitting by the Americans on a 26 hour train ride!