Coming Home ~ November 18, 2008

We have been getting to our hotels late at night, so every morning is a gift when we open our curtains and see where we have landed. This morning we woke up in Guangzhou and found a beautiful view of a courtyard.

Before breakfast, we took a short walk to Shamian Park and saw people dancing with silk scarves. We watched for a long time.

After 18 days, 12 hotel rooms, 8 flights, 2 trains and tons of taxis, we are on our way home! I am so excited to see my bunnie, my friends, my family and sleep in my bed.

This is the plane that we took home. It felt like only four hours but it was really fourteen hours from Hong Kong to Chicago.

I am happy to be home and ready to see everyone!

Allison "out of China"

Saying Goodbye ~ November 17, 2008

This is the last day that we will be with the girls. I am sad because they are fun and I really like them.

This is a picture of me Haiyan, Zhi, Xiong Ping and Mintao playing Uno.


This a picture of me with the girls sponsored by Rye Elementary School. They seemed happy.






This is a picture of Zhi and me. I felt sad to just meet her yesterday and then have to say goodbye to her already. I hope to meet her again some day soon.

That's it for China! Tomorrow we will be leaving.

Allison in China

Visiting Zhi's home ~ November 16, 2008

These are tangerines given to us by Xiongping. They were really yummy. The smallest one had no seeds but the biggest one had tons.

It’s tangerine harvest time in Guangdong. There were tons of markets in a row selling only tangerines.


This is a building outside the hotel that we were staying at. Since there is a lot of construction and they have a lot of bamboo in China and because the bamboo is very strong, they use bamboo for all the scaffoldings. They even use it on skyscrapers.

This is Zhi’s dorm room. She shares it with eleven other girls. She sleeps on a bottom bunk. When there are twelve girls in one room, there are shampoo bottles everywhere in their bathroom. It sure is cluttered!

This is the view of the school from one floor up in Zhi’s dorm. She has a beautiful view!

This morning, we got to go to Zhi's house. This is the courtyard in front of her house and one of her dogs. She had rice drying in the sun outside of her house.

This are Zhi's small tangerines and peanuts. Zhi says that the tangerines are small because the plants are young. Next year, they will be big enough to sell. I sliently thought, "Another tangerine stand?!"

Zhi's mother put the tangerines and peanuts out for our lunch. They were very good.

This is Zhi's mother. I couldn't really understand her but she acted nice.

This is Zhi's funny chicken. It was a rare chicken.

This is Zhi eating a Lindt chocolate that we gave to her family. When they ate it, they said it was too sweet because they don't usually eat sweet things.

It was fun to see chickens hiding in Zhi's bushes and the food was good to eat. It was wonderful to see Zhi's house.

That's it for our trip today.

Allison in China

Western Guangdong - meeting Zhi

In China, you have to eat one of two things at the end of your meal or it is not a meal at all. It depends where you are. In the north, you eat noodles. In the south, you eat rice. They do it because it makes them feel full. In the US, there is a joke about being hungry an hour after you eat Chinese food. Maybe we should be ending the meal with rice or noodles.


Also, here is a little more about rice. When the harvest is done, you burn rice plant stumps in the feilds and it is used as fertilizer. So the air was very hazy as we drove up to meet Zhi, because there were fires everywhere.








This is a Buddist Temple that we saw on our five hour drive to western Guangdong.











This is our first look at the school! I felt like we were moving as slow as a snail because I was so excited to see the girls.







This is the courtyard in front of the school. As I was walking up it, I got really shy.





This is a wedding ball. Xiongping gave it to me as soon as we got here. A wedding ball is a ball that a girl throws into a crowd of boys at a wedding. Whoever catches it is supposed to marry her. My mom says that I shouldn’t throw the ball for a looooong time! So I just threw it and caught it myself.

This is Zhi (pronounced Jer.) She is much nicer and prettier than I thought. She seems very responsible ~ I don't know why I think that.

I was shy at first but she made me feel more confident. We colored together and played basketball together. She is really good at basketball. She only missed one shot! She is a good artist too.

This is Haiyan. She is a very shy first year student. She did not talk unless you asked her a question. But she was very nice and she played basketball with Zhi and I.

This is Xiongping. She is the girl who made the wedding ball out of paper. We call her "the doctor" because she wants to be a doctor when she finishes school. She is confident and is constantly getting awards for being in the top of her class. I love Xiongping. I taught her how to play Uno and in just five games, she knew enough of the rules that she could hold the cards up play by herself. She even helped me teach other people.

This is Mintao. She is great at origami. She made us beautiful flowers. I am going to pack them in my backpack and hopefully get them home in one piece. We also have cranes, hearts and tons of lucky stars. Mintao is very friendly and social. Toni says she will make a great sales person some day. (Mom says: "Just like her sponsor's mom, Amy!")

This is the school's back courtyard and classrooms.

This is the front entrance.

This is Xiongping and her family. On the wall behind her are some of the awards that she earned in school. She is usually in the top five in her grade, usually she's first.

They gave us all of those tangerines. They were delicious!!!

This is Xiongping's bedroom door. It was decorated realllllly well. It was cool.

This is a picture of a fancy car decorated with ribbons and stuff for a wedding. I wonder if they had a wedding ball....

Tonight we are on the fourth floor of our hotel. Until now, every hotel that we have been in has not had a fourth floor because in Chinese the word "four" sounds the same as the word for "death." I hope we make it through the night!!!

Allison in China

Lights at Night

This is me saying bye-bye to my bunny Bella on October 31st. I'm pet sick. It’s like being homesick but you want your pet. I guess I’m really bunnie sick for Bella.




Today, we went to the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, China but it was such a long trip. It was a 1 hour train ride and then a 30 minute bus ride, but it took four hours. How did that happen? The train was delayed and we had to wait an hour for the bus. We ended up being the only ones on the bus and there were only seven other people in our section of the train.





The lights at night are a beautiful sight. Or should I say, with the 13 hour time difference, the lights are in the morning for you. We were walking back to the White Swan and we decided to take a detour through Shamian Park. We just happened to be there at the right time to see the beautiful lights and lanterns.






This is a neon boat on the neon part of the Pearle River. Buildings, boats, sidewalks and trees were all lit up with beautiful reds, greens, blues, purples and everything. Especially green and red.



These are trees lit up with green lights. You might think they are fake but they are real and they were all over the edge of the Pearle River.






This is a close up of one tree.

These are the lanterns along the edge of the river.

This building was covered in neon lights. The circles were popping out of the middle, expanding, disappearing and coming back again in different colors.

Also we have been walking sooooooooooo much ~ just look at my new “white” shoes.

That's it for today! Tomorrow, I will meet Zhi!! (For the story of Zhi, see my first post.)

Allison in China

Hong Kong

This week we made a detour to Hong Kong. My favorite thing about Hong Kong is the architecture because all the buildings are different. Some have neon
lights, others are made with no metal and some are made in cool shapes.

There aren’t many cars. We used trains, red taxis and green taxis. The red taxis are for the city and the green taxis go to the countryside.

There are four parts of Hong Kong. The New Territories is the biggest one, Kowloon is the top one shown in orange and Hong Kong Island is the island that has Hong Kong written on it. Also there is the Outlying Islands - they are on the left. Hong Kong is hilly and mountainous and less then 25% is developed and 40% of the land is just natural parks and nature reserves.


Yesterday, we went to Tin Hau Temple. Tin Hau was the Goddess of Seafarers. The temple was built in about 1800 and was enlarged in 1864. It was smokey and smelled like fire. This is a picture of insense burning outside.




This is a picture of coiled insense hanging from rods in the roof. Inside the coil, there were lucky red envelopes with money inside. I think it was money to give to the gods.




This statue looked like a protector to the alter.

This one looked like a villian.

This was some carefully carved decorations on the temple roof.

This picture is zoomed in.

This is dragon fruit. It is a type of fruit that comes from a type of cactus. It tastes like a pineapple but less flavorful and it has seeds like a kiwi. One day they sliced it up for a breakfast buffet and I loved it!

Later, we went out and bought a dragon fruit. The dragon fruit is hot pink with green strips coming out. The white onion looking thing is actually a white pomagranite. Do you see the smooth red
light bulb shaped fruit? It's a Thai pear! It tasted bland but was juicy. It surprised us that it didn't have a core.

This is the cactus species that the dragon fruit grows on. We found this picture on Wikipedia.

When I saw this building on Victoria Peak, I asked my mom, "Do you recognize this?" She said, "No." Then I said, "It's on the 20 dollar bill!" Then we had a mission to find all the things on the Hong Kong money. So far, we found the things on the 10, 20 and 100 dollar bills.

This is a picture from the top of Victoria Peak at sunset. It is also know as Mount Austin or "The Peak" to the locals. Victoria Peak is very tall; it is 1,810 feet tall but it is not the tallest mountain on Hong Kong. We ate dinner at an Italian restaurant called Simplatico at the top of the peak.

That's what we did today and yesterday.

From Allison in China.