Livin' on the other side of the world.

China - my home away from home.

We live in a nice little gated community in a pretty small town for China called Zhongshan. This is the road that we live on. Our apartment is one of the buildings on the left. We're on the 5th floor. Our elevator always smells bad.

Our little town. About a 10 minute walk from our apartment.

Humble abode. We even have a flat screen with lots of chinese channels. Our couch is deceiving though, every time I sit down I think it will be squishy like a normal couch, but it's not. Same with our beds.


Freda, our chinese coordinator, teaching us how to make dumplings! She's the best!

Hello neighbors. We never actually see each other, just each others laundry hanging out to dry.

Fishes and turtles in the market. Not sure if they're to buy as pets or dinner.

I really want one of those bicycles.

The market. I love it. I usually only recognize about half of the fruits and veges.

The chicken lady at the market. I just wanted to pet the chicken but she wanted to chop its head off!

Naked baby. Strange fruit.

Everyone stops and stares. All the time.

Crazy traffic.

Best way to get around town. Only 4 yuan or about 60 cents.

Back alley.

Such happy people here. They have so little, and work so hard. We could all learn from them.

The Walmart palace. About 30 minutes away by bus. We were hoping it would be an exact replica of Walmarts in America but it was nothing like what we imagined. It was quite dissapointing. But we found butter! We had been searching for it everywhere in our part of town. So we bought all the butter in Walmart. Yeah, all 3 sticks of butter. That's all they had! Craziness.

Riding the Walmart bus. Yes, there is a bus, that only goes to Walmart. It's awesome.

Our school! It's so cute and fun. And it's just down the road from our apartment. I love that it's so close. Teaching is so much fun! I was really worried and nervous about it at first, because I had absolutely no idea what to expect. Our kids have never had english classes before so when I'm trying to tell them to glue on the googley eyes, they have no idea what I'm saying and just look at me like I'm a crazy American girl. They're so fun though. I'll have to take more pictures of the kids soon. We have 3 different age groups that we teach, two 3 year olds, four 4 year olds, and then three 5 and 6 year olds. We come to the school around 8 in the morning and do little dance exercise things with all the kids in the kindergarten, which is about 100, then eat breakfast, teach 3 classes, eat lunch, and then we're done! Next week we're going to have 90 minute Kung Fu classes twice a week. And hopefully we'll start our Chinese classes soon too.

Cute kids! Ah I love the kids already! We've only been teaching for 2 weeks and they've already stole my heart. All the kids are so sweet and friendly. Every single day they always yell "GOOD MORNING TEACHER!" at us from in their class rooms or when they're eating lunch or whatever. I love it. It's so cute when our english students try to say my name. It always sounds like "Hallo Teasher Aberal." So stinkin cute.