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. ;)

Girls Just Wanna Have FUN!

We had our friends over last weekend for an all-out girls night!The girls were so excited to come over, b/c they said they'd only seen about slumber parties in the movies. So we kicked of the night with pizza and cupcakes!Then went into spa mode!Painting our nails!Foot scrubs!Games!And facemasks!

Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;

but a woman who fears her Maker is to be praised.

Look what I found!

A few days ago I was running all around the city trying to help a friend. We came across this huge market that caught my eye b/c there were huge pool floats hanging outside (that's a rarity here). So we stopped in just to have look, and some shoes hanging up on the wall drew my attention that way. As I looked over the cheap flip-flops hanging there, I had a big surprise. Right in the smack dab middle of the shoes were a pair of FLORIDA GATOR flip-flops! (Okay this is even more rare b/c collegiate sports gear just doesn't exist here, and there was nothing else collegiate in this little store). So I ripped them off the wall, put them on, walked down the entire hallway of the market and back again, and couldn't believe they were a PERFECT fit! (and good quality) The even bigger shocker came when I asked the price- I felt like I was stealing when he only made me pay around 2 bucks for them!

Duh, duh, duh, duh-duh-duh... Go GATORS!

Weekend Wanderings

This past weekend the weather was really nice, so we went for a climb up to this pagoda with some friends.

It was a little overcast but the view was pretty spectacular along the way.So many stairs!And this precious punkin' was a special blessing when we reached the top!Cat and I.Our district of the city.Luke helped us climb up onto the roof of a building, and I managed to get up and back down again safely in flip-flops. :)Finally heading back down the mountain!We finished out the day with our landlord eating Hot Pot, picnic style, on the side of a mountain.

Photo Shoot :)

Our teacher decided it would be a great idea to get all the female foreign students and our teachers together for a photo shoot! So our first assignment was to dress in modern clothes:and our second was to dress in traditional Asian clothes:These are the traditional clothes of 2 different countries in Asia. Our classmates switched clothes with our teachers in this pic:Our beloved teacher:Then Joy, our classmate, and I went around campus and had a lil photo shoot of our own, mainly b/c this was one of the only times I've worn a skirt in EA ;)