August in Review

I threw together some of the videos I took from this past month to let you see what August looked like for us.  It includes footage from the biggest religious festival in our city, the picnic, traveling around the province, and baking class.

Enjoy :)

Picnic, the real post

So Aaron said I would post about our picnic....so here it goes:

The local people where we live love to picnic.  It's one of their favorite past times.  I can (and did) get behind that.  So when a friend from out of town came to visit, we decided to treat her to an authentic experience.

Aaron already included a few of the pictures from our picnic, so here are a few more you didn't get to see.

this is what a picnic looks like y'all.

guy in the front is filming a hip hop video.  guy on the left is doing the classic "girl at a ____" pose.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDpX1X4uBO0 for the reference

Pretty much our local friends don't like pictures where everyone is smiling -  so this picture and the picture in an earlier post where Aaron is looking awfully girly, are what happened.  Also, Aaron's pose is a classic Chinese pose.

Some More Catch up: The Hot Springs

We went to some hot springs about 2 hours out of town in May with some of our foreign friends.

the drive there

the inside pool

underwater picture....it was super hot.  i wouldn't have done that.
in fact aaron didn't even get underwater when he took this picture, he just put the camera below the water.
smart man.

the wind blew the steam off of the outside pool 

another picture of the outside pool.

how we celebrate

This is footage from a Christmas party I attended this Christmas season.  It doesn't seem like Christmas parties in China have changed much since I attended my first one in 2006.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXwYDnqWAho (in case the video below takes a while to load)

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!

Summer continued: cookouts & the fourth of july

Uncle Chris and Aaron
Chris is literally grilling every type of meat you can imagine

turns out I only took pictures of Eliza and/or Davis
on the fourth

getting the camera set up

got it working....still an awkward angle
friends from Charlotte!  Thanks for the cookout Graham and Seth!

Now back to good part

Aaron says that I must be getting bored with the blog because I haven't posted in a long time.  In actuality I put this pressure on myself to have something interesting to post about and most days I think, "that wasn't that interesting."  OR we travel as much as we have in the last two weeks and then it makes posting a blog the last thing on my to do list, because i play catch up on other areas of my life when we get back home (like studying for that Chinese exam we had on Wednesday this week).


The last couple of weeks have been really good - despite the busyness of travel.  Aaron and I feel like we're learning a lot in this stage of life and the trips that we've taken have helped spur on some of that growth.  A few weeks ago we went and visited some friends who live in a small city in southern Sichuan province.  We stayed up late eating shao kao one night (shao kao is grilled meat or vegetables on a stick.  it's a low cost, favorite late night snack of locals), went to some hot springs (read: natural hot springs that had been diverted to be the source of what looked like normal hotel pools), spent some time in the sunshine by a lake, and were encouraged by the conversations we had with friends over the weekend.

Pretty much straight from there we spent a week in Hong Kong and got some time of rest, refreshment, and got to hang out with our friends James and Laura!

Next stop: Kunming to say goodbye to Daniel as he heads home to get married!!  Also - I'm going to learn a bit about video editing :)

visiting friends

By this time next week, we will have had four different visitors and it is making me so happy!  Guess who the one that we got to see just last night was?

Kelly!  I haven't seen Kelly since her wedding almost FOUR YEARS ago.  After their wedding, they moved to California.  We never made it out their way and missed them when they came to North Carolina.  And then I see her again for the first time in China.  Crazy.  Kelly was passing through out city on a whirlwind tour through China, so we got to sneak in a few hours with her and catch up.  Brian couldn't join her on this trip, which we were bummed about - but we're hoping that there will be future visits with both of them.

 And she brought us some girl scout cookies!  double sweet.

Goodbye China's rose

Today Josh and Danielle leave China and head back to America.  This is an ode to them.

It seems to me you lived your life 

2005

like a candle in the wind

never fading with the sunset

turns out that I printed all my pictures from China.  and now don't have them on my computer, since I changed computers.  So this one is from senior year - a few months before they all moved to China.  I'm not sure what's going on.

 when the rain came in

Christmas 2010

Harvey! So glad I got to meet this little man.

your footsteps will always fall here along China's greenest hills

Okay...okay - maybe Elton John's Candle in the Wind is a bit much since they're going home, not dying - but we just watched the movie The Queen with Helen Mirren about Princess Diana's death, and that song (though never once played in the movie) has been in my head ever since then.

Josh and Danielle have meant a lot in our lives.  When we first moved to China (when we were not yet "we" and they were not yet "they") Aaron lived with Josh, and Danielle made sure the boys didn't eat just bachelor food.  Since we've been back in China it has been really sweet to visit them, always finding time with them refreshing, as we've been transitioning to being back in China, and encouraging, as we've seen just how God was using them in the city they lived in.


This isn't actually goodbye for us - we have family in the city they are from and the city they are moving to.  But we will miss them over here.


We're really proud of them and excited for their next step - as they are going to Memphis to be a part of Memphis Teacher's Residency.  Check it out:

Now is the Time from Spektical on Vimeo.

And this one is Aaron's brother who graduated from the program in 2011, and is currently teaching in Memphis.  I bet he doesn't even know we've seen this.

Micah O'Hare from Memphis Teacher Residency on Vimeo.

Also - what's up with the font, blogger?  they all say they're the same, but they all look different.  

Our friend Graham came to visit us for a week!  It was a whirlwind of a trip.  In the week he was here he spent only two nights at our apartment, ascended to 17,000+ ft, fled a oncoming blizzard at Everest Base Camp, ate Tibetan, Indian, Nepali, Taiwanese fast food, and Chinese, rode around in a Land Cruiser, picked up a hitch hiking nun.....the list goes on.


Unfortunately I don't have pictures to cover all of the things above - but here are a few pictures to get us started. 

Meet Graham

His album drops soon.

 Locals

The Girls

 The Boys

The Boys with Locals

The Land

Everest

The boys survived a blizzard at Base Camp....only they left before the blizzard started.  They FLED a blizzard at base camp.  Not many people can say that. 

Below is an artist's rendering of what it would have looked like if Everest wasn't being bombarded by snow.  She's a beaut, Clark, a real beaut.

Artist's Rendering

Also, please note - it took me forever to do that. If we had something like photoshop or even paint, that would have taken no time.....but i had to turn the picture into a pdf, then download onto another website, then embed into the blog.  phew.

Christmas.....finally

It's been so long since Christmas.  I'm a slacker.  At this point, I've lost the desire to write about it.  So hopefully the pictures will show how much fun we had at Christmas.  So here they are. Not many words to share, just pictures and smiles....and thankfully, i didn't wake up to a truck driver like I did last christmas.

Harvey's weekly photo shoot
after a Christmas eve brunch with Josh and Danielle

Josh and Aaron on Christmas eve

the rodgers jersey jarred and shelley gave aaron for christmas
(it's not as huge as this picture makes it look)

aaron and jarred on christmas day
playing with jarred's christmas chopper

playing outside after christmas brunch

aaron and john enjoying leftovers

two of John's (above) kids
they were watching the jungle book

skyping home

we had a second christmas on the 26th when we got back home
and opened the gifts waiting for us sent in packages

aaron getting a butter cream candle
thanks will and krista (you know how much he loves butter cream)

clocks!
i made a time zone wall with these clocks.

lit the last candle

reading all of the christmas cards that came in the mail!
thank you so much for the cards.  I love them.

one year ago today

One year ago today, we arrived in China.  We arrived in China a year ago?!  How did a year already pass by??

We haven't done anything to remember this day - maybe I'll talk to Aaron and we can come up with some tradition.  It just so happens that we moved to China on St. Nicholas Day- so maybe we'll remember both at the same time and eat oranges, chocolate, and nuts, and set our shoes outside of the door.  Although, I suspect they will be gone in the morning, not filled with treats.

To celebrate our one year anniversary of living in China - here is a video of the mess it was to pack and store stuff, and some pictures of our farewells.


The video below is pretty boring and messy.  And I'm not sure if I thought zooming in would make some kind of huge impact or statement.  because it doesn't.  and it looks pretty lame.

an oversized truck for our goods

pizza after our friends helped us move out.  we miss y'all!

goodbyes at the airport.

And a video of Josh - because he's a cutie.