Zhangjiajie: The Avatar Mountains

I know I just posted about vacation to Sanya, but it was vacation time again! This time we went to Zhangjiajie, a.k.a. the Avatar mountains. They're called this because some of the landscapes from the Avatar movie (blue people, not air bender) was based off of these mountains. And they are AMAZING!

Thursday, April 3rd

After we finished teaching this day we went back to our apartments to grab our stuff and head to the train station. We had to take a train to Guangzhou and then catch an overnight train to Zhangjiajie. We had bad luck though and our first bus to the train station drove super slow (buses are usually scary fast). We were then cutting it close so we opted for a taxi. But since there were 9 of us, we had to take 3 taxis.

The first two taxis made it to the station on time (with some running involved) but when Chrissy and I arrived in the third, the train was gone. Luckily trains leave for Guangzhou regularly, and even more lucky we were able to change our tickets at no additional cost. Our new tickets were for a train 40 min. after the original and we briefly considered sneaking onto an earlier train. At that point, a station worker came over, looked at our tickets, and then told us to get on the earlier train. So Chrissy and I got on and tried not to look suspicious. We made it to Guangzhou without further incident, found the rest of the group and took a moment to breathe knowing that everyone was alright.

Then we took the metro to the other train station and got on our 14 hour train. We took hard seats again, but I think everyone agreed that this one was much better. I know I slept much better. Noor was out almost the entire time. We played some games and chatted. At one point a man walked by with a box of chicks chirping away.

End of the ride when most people had gotten off
and we could spread out :)

Friday, April 4th

We arrived in Zhangjiajie city in the morning and then had to take a 45 minute bus to our hostel. It was an odd little bus that looked more like a van. We paid the fare half way through when we stopped and picked up a lady who collected the money and then got off a few stops later.

We found our hostel and checked and and headed off to our first destination. This involved more buses.

The first place we went was the Zhangjiajie National Forest. When we tried to take a group photo out front, the man assumed we wanted to take a picture with him. While it's definitely a tourist spot, the percentage of foreigners was much smaller here than it has been in other places.

The weather was sunny this day and the mountains were beautiful! We took a short bus ride up to the gondola, and then took that to the top of the mountain (where we found an expensive McDonalds...) From here we hiked around a bit, enjoying the scenery. There were vendors selling tourist stuff all over the place.

Then we took a bus to another location on the mountain. We ended up on the same bus as a Korean tour group this time. When I said thank you in Chinese to one of them they were sure to tell us they were Korean. So I said one of the few Korean words I know and they understood me- I felt very proud :)

We looked at more amazing mountains, went up a pagoda and then decided to hike back down.

This took us about 2 hours and involved way too many stairs. American hiking along a dirt path is much better than uneven, falling apart, old stone stairs. But again, the scenery was beautiful and we took several photo stops. Though there were a weird number of creepy, abandoned buildings along the way...

Nearing the end. We still look pretty good :)

Saturday, April 5th

The next day, feeling sore, we went to Tianmen Mountain park. This park is pretty much all at the top of the mountain. To get there, we took a 30 min. gondola ride all the way up. We met a group of Chinese friends waiting in line and then they kept popping up randomly throughout the day.

We even made it onto their social media :)

There's a walkway built into the side of the mountain that goes all the way around. We walked along this for a while, and at one point it turns into a glass walkway over the cliff.

Chrissy had the great idea to take a picture with our legs hanging over the edge. The Asians thought we were crazy, but we got an awesome photo. But when Abby stood up to switch places, her camera fell out of her pocket and tumbled right off the mountain. It was like a scene out of a movie as we all watched in silence as it fell end over end, hit a ledge and burst into pieces. Abby took it all very well and spent the rest of the trip making dead camera jokes :)

Moments before it happened.

One of the things to see at the top of this mountain is a large Buddhist temple complex. So of course we hiked up to it.

As we made our way down from the temple, Noor tripped over a crack in the walkway and sprained her ankle. Since we were pretty much done with that part of the mountain anyways, we started our way down with her. Since she couldn't really walk on her foot, we took turns helping her the whole way. While lots of people stared at us, no one ever offered to help. We finally made it back to the gondola and of course there was a huge line. At this point thankfully the guards let us all skip the giant line and get in the gondola.

Look at Noor, she's such a trooper :)

Before going all the way down the mountain though we stopped off at the Stairway to Heaven. It's basically 999 stairs up the mountain to a cool archway. But it was awesome! We all yelled 'I love China!' off the top. By this time, it had started to rain a little, and going down was a little scary as half the steps were smaller than my foot and wet. Noor waited for us at the bottom.

The area where it looks like it levels
out? False. The stairs just change.

Made it to the top!

Then we made it back to the gondola to finish going down. This time they only let Noor and two other people skip the line, so the rest of us waited. It took so long though that they put us on a bus to go down instead to make sure we got out before the park closed. But it was still late enough that we missed the last bus back to our hostel and we had to take a taxi.

Sunday, April 6th

While Noor and Lindsey stayed at the hostel, the rest of us went back to Zhangjiajie National Forest because our tickets were good for three days. Our main goal for the day was to see monkeys, and we succeeded. And of course none of us could resist feeding the cute little things :) Video on Facebook.

In addition to the monkeys, the area was beautiful.

At 5:00 we caught our overnight train to go back to Guangzhou. This time we got sleepers, which meant we each had a bunk bed all to ourselves. Heaven! We also had some pretty cool neighbors from Spain that we chatted with for a while. We got home late Monday morning and prepped for going back to school.

Back to Guangzhou

So it's been forever since I updated this.... 

March 22- 23 we took a two day trip to Guangzhou over the weekend. The main reason was because there was a District conference for church on Sunday and we took advantage of the opportunity to do some wedding dress shopping with Abby (since she's pretty much engaged).

So Saturday morning 7 of us took a train into Guangzhou and found our hostel. It was NOT the same one as last time and the couple that ran it were very sweet. The wife even offered Abby some dress-buying advice. 

View from the hostel window. Notice the smog?

Then we headed out to find the stores. 

The reason for shopping in Guangzhou is because there's a street known for having 99 wedding dress stores. We found the right metro stop, but after that the directions were a little vague. After asking several people for directions, someone eventually pulled up a picture of a wedding dress on their phone and we started showing that to people. When we got close, a nice girl walked with us the rest of the way to make sure we got their ok. 

While I'm not sure there were 99 stores, there was in fact a lot of dress stores in a small area. Abby tried on a few different dresses and looked gorgeous.

Interesting fact, most of the stores had thick carpet (borderline shag) and you were supposed to take off your shoes and put on house slippers before going in the store. It was not the best day to decide to wear my Converse high tops...

That night we ate some yummy street noodles and on the way home Chrissy, Lindsey and I came across a cool park that still had a bunch of lanterns up. So we wandered through it, found a place to eat, and took some pictures.

The next day we made our way to the Ramada Hotel where the District conference was held and we met up with the rest of our group and the other ILP teachers who came up by bus. We finally met the Branch presidency in person, along with the District presidency. After the main meeting, they held a young adult fireside at one of the member's home and they provided lunch. We had chili with real cheese, bread with home made jam, and ice cream for dessert. We were all in heaven.

Once all of the meetings were over we all got in the bus (including one of the ILP directors who had come up for mid-semester check ups) and went home.

Night view from the hostel

Sanya: China's Hawaii

So this last weekend we had our first vacation. So exciting! Fair warning: a lot happened and this post is long, so hang in there.

Saturday (March 8th)

Saturday began with a walk through town for Bond. This entailed every single Bond employee/volunteer wearing matching jackets and parading through the streets of Zhongshan. Technically I think it was for the environment, but really it's a publicity stunt for Bond to show off all of the foreign teachers they have at their schools. We walked for about 1 1/2 hours chanting something in Chinese and stopped several times for photo ops. They gave us each a video of the whole experience.

Photo credit to Mckenna

We ended the walk at the restaurant where we ate lunch. The food was a lot like the food from the New Year's party we went to. But the venue was HUGE! There were several hundred people there. While everyone ate, different groups did performances. Yes, that included us. We did a dance to "We Got the Beat" by the Go-Gos. Lucky us, we went first :) Sadly, we didn't win a prize :( Chrissy was one of four people hosting the event, so she wore a fancy dress, read cheesy lines, and didn't have to dance.

All these, and more, were filled with people.

Our lovely hostesses. Chrissy's on the right.

At the school, I teach the senior class (5-7 year olds) and the entire class did a song and dance that night. They were sooo cute :) They all wore make-up, including the boys. They looked adorable wearing blue eye shadow. I also saw one of the kids that was in the winter camp class Larkin and I taught when we first got here. I didn't think he really remembered/like me, but he came over to see me and Larkin several times during the night.

Once lunch was over, we got all of our luggage from the school where we'd left it and headed for the bus station to leave on vacation. The way things worked out we took a 12 hour sleeper bus to Haiko and then another 4 hour bus to Sanya, our final destination.

None of us really knew what to expect of a sleeper bus. Turns out it's the closest thing to a Knight Bus I'll probably ever see. There are three columns of bunk beds down the entire length of the bus. Each bed is probably 3 feet wide and there's a little shelf at the end to store stuff. The rest of your luggage goes under the bus. Oh, and some people sleep on roll-out mats in the aisles. It wasn't the worst experience of my life. I actually got some good sleep in, despite being in the middle top bunk (nothing to stop me falling). My best sleep was actually after we drove the bus onto the bottom of a ferry to cross the sea (Sanya is an island, btw).

It's things like sleeper buses that remind me that Asians have NO personal space bubble. At one point my neighbor used my leg to boost himself up onto his bed. Poor Larkin and Mckenna ended up with a man sleeping in the aisle between them who couldn't keep his limbs to himself. I love that sleeper buses exist in China because they would never happen in America. Even though there were seat belts on the beds, no one really uses them and I'm sure the whole situation would not hold up to American safety codes.

Sunday (March 9th)

Once we arrived in Haiko around 7am, we took a bus to the normal bus station with the help of a nice Chinese lady and bought tickets to Sanya. This bus left around 8am and the driver seemed super slow. They played three different Chinese movies on this bus. The first one appeared to be from the 80s and was called 'The Happy Ghost.' They didn't get better after that.

We finally made it to Sanya and took another city bus to our hostel. The owner actually ended up riding out on his motor bike to help us get there.

Noor in our awesome hostel room

It was the best hostel in the world! The owners (Chris and Linda) are amazing, it was super clean, cheap, and next to the beach. It's also decorated with pictures of all the people from around the world who've stayed there. Chris has super good English, and we found out eventually that he's originally from Singapore. So 6 girls stayed downstairs and the other 6 were upstairs with two roommates. I ended up upstairs and our two roommates were Jeff (American teaching English in Japan) and a Chinese guy we helped name Jet (recovering from a hip injury). They were both very nice and we enjoyed talking to Jet a lot.

After we got settled in, we headed down to the beach. Not the cleanest beach, but it was so much warmer than Zhongshan! And while the water wasn't warm, it wasn't leg-numbing cold :) Abby and some others started playing Volleyball and ended up with several international friends playing with them.

The beach in Sanya is awesome for people watching. Turns out Sanya is China and Russia's Hawaii, so there are tons of foreigners just hanging out in their beach finest. In fact, most signs and menus come in Chinese and Russian. We even had some Chinese street salesmen try to talk to us in Russian :)

So many pretty pictures of the ocean, but I don't
want this blog to go on forever...

Sanya's also got some awesome food. First, you can buy a frozen fruit slushy thing. You pick the fruit, they blend it up with some water and condensed milk and then freeze it. Heaven! You can also buy a coconut to drink out of. Not my favorite, but I couldn't pass up the picture op :)

Fruit slushies!

That night the hostel told us about a restaurant with good Western food so we tried it out. It had the best Western food any of us have had in China. Usually Western food here still has a Chinese taste to it, but this place could have been a Hard Rock Cafe. They even had Mexican food up to par for Chrissy. I got Fish 'n Chips that came with real ketchup!

We went back to the beach for a little while and when heading back, we heard a live band playing American music. We headed over and some girls started dancing and the next thing we knew we were singing and dancing with some Asian guys who were definitely a little tipsy. We stayed for a few songs, and then took off before anything got really weird.

Monday (March 10th)

We slept for a while in the morning and then found some food. It was rather cloudy this day, though still fairly warm. We spent some time on the beach, and most of the girls got a fish pedicure. You put your feet in a fish tank and the fish suck the dead skin off your feet. It was pretty funny to watch their faces :)

After that we walked around and did a little shopping. I was running low on money so we went and found an ATM. But when I tried to use it, the machine ate my card. No joke. I didn't even get money out. Yet another nice Chinese lady called and talked to the bank for me, but they had already closed for the day. So while the other girls did some more shopping, Chrissy and I found a Starbucks with WiFi where I FaceTimed my parents (4am for them). Needless to say, I did less shopping than intended.

Chrissy and I then tried to find the other girls. After trying a few places, we found them back at the Western restaurant eating dinner. Jeff and Jet were there too and we said hi.

Tuesday (March 11th)

Chrissy called the bank for me in the morning and was told they couldn't do anything for us until 5pm. So Chrissy went to the train station to pick up our returning tickets. Turns out it was a good thing she went early because we thought our train was at 8pm, but the tickets were for 6:30. So we packed up our stuff to check out by noon, but the hostel let us store our stuff there until we had to leave. We went to the beach one last time for ~2 hours and of course I got sunburned. Then we went back to the hostel to wait in the shade and they gave us some free popcorn. Then we took some pictures with the hostel owners and they emailed us all their copies.

Finally a photo of the whole group!

Chrissy and I left the other girls heading for the train while the two of us took a taxi to the bank. The workers were very nice and they seemed willing to get my card back for me, EXCEPT regulations said they couldn't open the machine until 5:00 and I couldn't get my card until 6:00. And our train left at 6:30. I FaceTimed my parents again and we decided to just cancel the card and they'd mail me my new one from the bank. So Chrissy found another taxi (took way longer than it should have!) and got to the train station.

You would assume that a train would be better than the weird sleeper bus, right? It's actually debatable. We got the cheapest seats, a.k.a hard seats. While we weren't sitting on wood benches, the seats were upright for the entire 14 hour ride to Guangzhou. At one point the A/C got turned off and it got ridiculously hot. The Muslim lady took off her head scarf.

The socializing was way better on the train. Half the group made friends with their neighbor who they named Simon. They talked to him using a translator app for several hours. The two girls across from me (one named Race) offered us some of their strange Chinese snack which I tried. It was like jerky, but less dried and very spicy! Abby and Emily sat next to a cute Muslim couple who they talked to a little.

They guy across from me was very curious. After the customary pictures, he looked over Chrissy's shoulder to see her notebook and popped across the row to look at Noor's drawing. Part way through the ride we had to show our tickets again, and at that point he grabbed my ticket laughing and showed it to the other people sitting around us. And then he did a similar thing with Noor's passport. I'm not sure what we found so amusing...

But sleeping on the train was way worse than the bus. I think I only dozed for 2-3 hours off and on. There was no comfortable position in those seats.

Wednesday (March 12th)

We got into Guangzhou around 8:30am, found a bathroom, then took the metro to another train station to take the fast train to Zhongshan. Luckily, that was only a 40 min ride and I slept a good part of that. Then we took two buses back to our apartment. We finally got to our apartments around 3pm. I was in bed by 4 and didn't get back up until 7:40 the next morning to get ready for school.

And to answer your question- yes I do spend time teaching English to cute children. I'm just debating whether to post pictures of them or not. I'll let you know what I decide.