joy!! friends come to china

yay! it is friday! it has been a long week, for no other reason than it has been beautiful and the kids have been dying to get out of class and play outside. the kids are rowdy but everyone is in a great mood. i always smile at people when i walk home from class, and today for the first time, i got everyone to smile back at me! we have a lot of elderly people in our neighborhood, and sometimes they are shy of foreigners. i got two older women to giggle today when i grinned at them, and an old man tipped his hat. have you every noticed, traveling, that the people of some countries smile back at you more than others? when i went to india, everyone was really smiley. i would grin at people and they would always smile back. especially high school aged girls waiting for the bus in their school uniforms. in china, we get far fewer smiles in the city. where we lived last year, we got a lot of stares because we are foreigners, but no one ever smiled back. walking home from work last year, i caught an elderly man on a bicycle off guard. he was so busy staring at me he fell off his bike. luckily, he wasn't hurt, but this kind of thing happens a lot. i was flying a kite last monday, and duff said i almost caused a traffic accident because people were staring. i wasn't even in the street, but got, and held, the attention of two bicyclists, and a motorcyclist. yikes.

and great news: katie and her friend lindsay and coming to china!! they have been traveling in india since last september. they both have blogs that are absolutely amazing. i keep up with their adventures as much as i can. they also have an amazing photo page, well worth a look. if any of you have a chance this weekend, visit their blogs and leave a comment with all the great reasons they should come to china. i know they both love comments. duff and i are terribly excited to have visitors. katie and lindsay will fly into macau from bangkok, and then we will go to yunnan, in southwestern china, for the may break. we have a week. i am looking for flights from guangzhou to kunming. yunnan is supposed to be amazing, with a lot of ethnic minority groups. everyone i have talked with who has visited yunnan says it is the best place they went in china.

katie's blog has been linked for months: whereiskatie.blogspot.com. everything sounds so exciting and exotic the way katie tells it. it will give you the itch to travel. lindsay's blog (indiaorindiana.blogspot.com) is so well written and insightful. an amazing read. their blogs compliment each other well, it is wonderful to read them both to get a good grasp of their experiences. they have just returned to india from a few weeks in sri lanka. i am excited to talk with them about their experience. they mentioned that they hadn't heard much about the civil war. duff and i were only there for a week, but we heard a lot. the tsunami and the war were the two biggest topics of conversation. our second night in ambalangoda, in our guest house, we were chatting with the owners and the tv was on in the background. the news report switched to to footage of explosions in the north. the owners talked passionately night after night about the conflict. i am going that have to address this in a different post, we spoke a lot about the politics, and the feelings of the people, the involvement of the u.s. navy, and the effect of the tsunami on the conflict. we were in an area with lots of billboards and signs with warnings to the tigers. and we were really far away from the north, where the fighting is.

in other news, my friends ariel and eli are off on an amazing trip to europe. you can follow their progress at eliwaite.blogspot.com. ariel's mother and youngest brother, dylan, have been living in edinburgh, scotland for the year. dylan is going to the waldorf school, i believe, and getting scary good at the fiddle, so i hear. i can't wait to hear him play when they get back to seattle. ariel and eli will travel in ireland and scotland, and then tour eastern europe.

oh, and a tree update: they are all dead, or at least really pathetic looking. they have been pruned to death by the workers. i hope they recover. the chinese tend to mess with their trees a lot. they are always wrapping them in ropes, painting the bottoms white, and transplanting them. some of the big trees only have a dozen leaves left, and they were really lush.

we are going to have salty cauliflower and fish-flavored egg plant for lunch.