Catching back up: part 4, we live in a dorm room

So at the new school we're attending, foreign students are required to live on campus.

Here is a little video preview of what our dorm room(s) looked like before we moved our stuff into it:

we had already taken the furniture out - so here's what came in the room

to show just how small the kitchen is

Catching Back Up: Part 3, Final Destination

To get to our final destination, we still had one 24 hour train ride left, with my stomach still feeling a little bit uneasy.  But we made it with no major issues!

This last part of our trip is beautiful, climbing in altitude to 15,000 ft in some places.  The scenery was beautiful and Phil gave us some Sherlock episodes, so the 24 hours passed pretty quickly.

We hiked to the top of the smallest mountain (14,000ft) our first weekend in town.

Catching back up: part 2, The Steiners

24 hours on a train.......it's long.  But it's actually not too bad if you take it in the afternoon - because then you just enjoy the ride, eat dinner, sleep, wake up (at like 11:00), eat breakfast, and then you're pretty much there.

It's not that bad....unless you are throwing up and having diarrhea for the 24 hour trip like I did. (sorry if that's too much information, living in China we just talk about these things).  The train attendant actually got mad at me for asking her for trash bags.  She said they were going to run out.  So I asked her what I was supposed to do then about my "issues"....she had no answers.  So she just gave me another bag.

sign in the bathroom on the train.

At the end of worst train ride ever, we ended up with our friends Phil and Julie and their girls.  Phil and Julie are amazing.  It has always felt so natural hanging out with them.  Conversations with them are both challenging and fun, and we're pretty much guaranteed to always spend time laughing with them.  They were a great last stop on our way up the mountain to our new city.

steiners!

The world as I see it

Here's a view of our town, looking from just over top of the monastery to the north of town:

Catching back up: Part 1, the return to China

We got back to China at the end of August to a home covered in mold from not being aired out all summer long.  Also, our flights got messed up on the way back to China, so we didn't have luggage for a few days.  So we spent our first week cleaning up our apartment, very reminiscent of when we first moved into that place.  I didn't take any pictures of the apartment covered in mold, though Aaron wanted me to, because I just didn't want to remember it.

A week after being back in China we packed all of our stuff onto a moving truck, cleaned out our apartment, got ripped off (didn't get the extra months we had already paid for our apartment back), said goodbye to our favorite neighborhood people then got on a 24 hour train to spend the next couple of days with our friends Phil and Julie.

This lady runs our favorite dumplings restaurant down the street from our old apartment
We saw her at least once a week for a year.  She cried when we told her we were moving.

random neighborhood girl whose homework for her english class
was to take a picture with some foreigners.
so when she heard we were were packing up our house, she came running over.

packing it up

a blurry picture so you can see the stuff in our truck