Visitors

I had such a great week with Stef and Sarah! Here are some fun highlights:Taking lots of pics with fun statues!Meeting up with some students at my university.Getting our hairwashed, which here includes nearly 15 minutes of wash and scrub, then another 15 minutes of head and shoulder massages, all for a little over a buck!And CUT! Yes, after nearly 2 years I finally got my first haircut in East Asia.You really can't even tell a difference, besides it being shorter. They had to temporarily straighten the afro to check to make sure it was all shaped up. So Stef and I were excited about having super straight hair, until a downpour came out of nowhere about 2 hours after we left the shop, and out came the curls again! :)The beautiful girls with the scary living statue guy!And my favorite, sipping on coffee and having heart to hearts! :)

Freedom

We're done with school! :) Our landlords helped us get started celebrating by taking us out to sing karoke!Some precious friends are visiting for the week. More pics with Stef and Sarah soon!Sally and Lisa came over and brought us some fun gifts!Matching bibs(?) and scarves!Val and Sally, the first of many goodbyes for her.

Study Break :)

Since all of our friends are leaving at different times according to when their finals are done, we decided to celebrate the end of the semester with a little early with a "study break" party. Uno and Phase 10! The girls had a hay day going through some of Val's old clothes! Thanks for remembering us as we and fellow students are taking exams!

Independence Day!

Happy 4th of July!We borrowed a friend's soccer ball grill (notice it's the height of a wal-mart sack) to grill some hotdogs and hamburgers!And got to enjoy some home-cooking! :) Oh and we shared...we didn't eat it all ourselves!

There are so many things to especially be thankful for today! One that has come to my mind throughout this day is...the freedom to hear truth about the Maker from an early age! The truth that leads to everlasting unwavering freedom!

Graduation

The school year is nearly coming to a close! Please remember our friends who are graduating as they look for jobs, and as we get ready to say goodbye to some for the last time.Veria let me play dress up in her graduation gown.The center of our campus...I love the palm trees. :) Oh, and the girls aren't holding umbrellas, they're holding sun-brellas b/c they're terrified of dark skin! How funny, they want white skin and I want dark skin.Our school is famous for engineering, especially related to transportation. So nearly any day you come to campus you can find a group of students out surveying.I laughed out loud when I walked by this guy the other day and read his shirt!

Catching the Spirit

Joy and I got up at the crack of dawn a few days ago because we heard rumors that the Olympic torch would be coming through town. I say rumors b/c everytime I asked my friends when and where the event was gonna be taking place I got different answers. :) So we finally heard from a classmate, who heard from a friend, who happened to catch the 5 o'clock news, a place and a time for when the torch would be passing by. We got up early and headed down to a big park in town that we heard would be the ending place for the relay in our city. We saw people lining the roads all the way until the bus stop right in front of the park, so we knew we'd picked the right spot. But as we made our way through the crowd attempting to get into the park we ran into to these people:They wouldn't exactly just let us by, so we started following a group of people wearing yellow shirts who we noticed were getting into the park one by one. We thought we could perhaps make friends with them and get in without any problems. But just as Joy ducked to go under the police tape, they noticed we didn't really fit in with the crowd, and looked at us like we were crazy for trying to. So we waited patiently for about 4 hours waiting to catch a glimpse of the torch. I couldn't believe how many people were there, young and old alike. This lil girl really liked my hair, she kept grabbing handfuls of it and laughing. So we waited, and waited...and waited some more!

And we finally got to see this:

Lots of cars going by...but NO torch!

Rice Overdose

Locals celebrated Dragon Boat Festival this past weekend...and while we didn't see any fancy boats, we did get our fill of the traditional food made during this festival!The snack is called zong zi, sticky rice wrapped in leaves.There's all different kinds of flavors: pork, egg, bean. But our teacher spiced it up a little by leting us try the plain ole sticky rice kind but dipping it in sugar and some other powdery stuff that tastes like peanut butter! Does she know us or what?We jabbed out chopsticks right through them and started dipping away into the sugar/powdery pnut butter mix. (above) And my classmate turned the zong zi decorations into earings (below).A few of our friends wanted to give us a taste also. Our 2nd time eating zong zi for a meal (above), and 3rd time (below).

And we even ate it a 4th time this weekend for an afternoon snack. But this time I got a little creative and melted butter and cinnamon along with the sugar for dipping. ;)