Our last day in HuoZhou!

Thursday August 4, 2011We had our last day in HuoZhou on Monday.  Gary and I visited the school (2 of the other girls were still teaching a small group of students) and did a few lessons with the kids and said the first of our goodbyes.  Our housewives invited us out for one last lunch together and it was fabulous, of course.  We ate delicious noodles and other food.  The chicken “stew” was complete with a chicken foot and a chicken head.  I’m glad I didn’t dig around in there too much with my chopsticks because I’m not sure how composed I would’ve been if I had pulled that out.  Next, they took us shopping at the mall and to get Chinese names!   They have a man who has a little kiosk in the mall, and he gives names.  People take their babies to him when they are born to get an appropriate name.  You have to give him your birthday, time of birth and last name and he has a computer program that he uses.  He asked us questions throughout the process to make sure we were getting the right name.  With the name, he also gives you a little “fortune” and tells you about your life.  According to him, I will be married this year and have a husband that listens to me, and Gary will have a beautiful, rich wife that listens to him. J  We’ll have to share our names when we get back because they are hard to pronounce out loud, let alone in writing—plus my keyboard does don have the Chinese characters.  Monday night we had our final show at the square with the kids.  We sang some songs and attracted a crowd, until the program of the night started and we got drowned out.  They do this huge program in the square of singing and dancing  and there is a HUGE audience that Gary estimated at a couple thousand.  We were watching from the outskirts and soon we were whisked away to the front row and handed stools to sit on.  It’s going to be hard to adjust to no longer being VIP back in the states.  The whole show was pretty incredible with a lot of talent and very well-orchestrated.  It was also very loud!  We said our 3rd round of goodbyes and left the square because we had plans to go out for karaoke that night but due to the language barrier, our driver brought us back to the hotel.  We made the most of our last night by getting a few bottles of wine and having a party in our room with some of our new friends from the trip.  We definitely went out with a bang!Tuesday morning we stopped at the school on our way out and said our FINAL goodbyes.  It was sad to say goodbye to our friends but maybe we’ll see them again.  We have offers to go back and teach there for a year or 2 if we want, we just have to name our requirements!  We’re pretty sure that they were asking us to come back together because they still think we’re a couple, no matter how many times we’ve told them otherwise.  After we left, we spent over 7 hours on the bus driving to the city of Da Tong, which is on our way to Beijing.  Da Tong is a much bigger city than Huo Zhou, quite a bit more modern and significantly cleaner.  We also didn’t get ogled so much on the street so there must be quite a bit more tourism.  Wednesday morning bright and early, we hopped back on the bus and went to see these really amazing Buddha sculptures and paintings called the Yungang Grottoes (google it J).  It’s a series of 18 caves that are about 1500 years old and in each cave there are these giant stone carvings of different Buddhas and stories.  The largest Buddha was 17 meters high!  The site around the caves was built in 2008 and the grounds were really nice.  It was a beautiful morning to just walk around and be outside.  Next we drove back to our hotel to have a quick lunch, and then headed back out about 2 hours away to see the Hanging Monastery.  Monks built the monastery into the side of a mountain face and it is pretty spectacular.  It was made of wood soaked in oil so it wouldn’t rot and anchored into the side of the mountain.  Our host asked us beforehand if anyone was afraid of heights before we went up there.  As far as I knew I wasn’t but when I got up there, I changed my mind.  The thought that we were in a temple, hanging off the side of the mountain was too much for me and I had to get down immediately, which was impossible because there wasn’t room to move around and we were in a line of people.  I eventually made it down all the little stairs on my rubbery legs and enjoyed the view from the base.  Gary had much more fun and many more pictures of the view from the top than I did.  We think we’ve hit our limit for how many temples and buddhas we can see so I guess its appropriate that there’s only a few days left.  After that, we drove back to the hotel in a rainstorm and were on our own for dinner.  We heard there was a McDonalds in Da Tong so Gary, Shelly and I and all the college kids decided it was a cheeseburger kind of night.  We took taxis to McDonalds and it was heavenly; we inhaled our burgers, fries and McFlurries!  After dinner we decided to walk around a little and guess what we found, a Walmart Supercenter!!!  I had no idea that they even had Walmart in China!  We obviously had to go in and check it out and it was so surreal!  We bought t-shirts that made no sense in English (they are all over China) and a few other random purchases (you can ask Gary later what he chose to buy J).  The store was set up like a Walmart in the U.S. with the major difference being the giant slabs of meat and seafood hanging out in the store.  I thought I was going to be ill when we walked through the meat section.  The bathrooms were also really yucky…I hope I never see another squatter toilet in my life after I leave here!  While we were shopping, we found a bottle of Absolut Vodka that we just had to buy.  Up until now we’ve only seen Chinese beer, an occasional red wine and the nasty clear stuff that the Chinese love to use to cheer.  Unfortunately there was a security tag on the top of the bottle that none of the Walmart workers could get off.  There were about 7 employees with various tools and things trying to get the tag off and finally they just gave up and sent us on our way with the security tag still on!  We were so worried that we were going to set off the alarm and get detained at the exit but I guess a few calls were made on our behalf that the Americans were coming through with a bottle of vodka, because we made it through with no problem!  We decided that our night of McDonalds and Walmart was our way of slowly easing back into American culture.  As I type we are back on the bus and on our way to Beijing, yay!  We plan to go to the pearl and silk markets, find some good karaoke places and hopefully catch a soccer game in the Bird’s Nest!  We may also try to get tickets to the Beijing opera, which we hear is amazing.  It’s a pretty ambitious schedule for only 3 days but hopefully we can get it all in!  We leave Monday morning August 8th and arrive Monday afternoon August 8th (due to the time change).  We have a stop in Tokyo again but then we fly straight to Minneapolis from there.  We’ve had an amazing month in China, but we are definitely ready to be back in the comforts of home.  We miss pizza and yogurt, American toilets, blue skies and clean streets!  We are also excited to sleep in our own soft beds after a month of very hard Chinese hotel beds.  This might end up being our last blog if we do not have internet service at our hotel in Beijing.  If something fabulous happens we will be sure to post it for you avid readers!!  : ) Thanks for following us on our journey.  We miss you all so much!!See you all in a few days!!!