on the road again....

we're off! next week is the week-long may break in china. we get the week off school, which is excellent, because we need a break! in two hours we are getting an overnight train to guangzhou. hopefully we can meet up with our friend nicole for a little bit before heading to macau. thursday evening we'll pick up katie lennard and lindsay theo at the airport. they are coming off 8 months traveling in india. we are excited to show them what little we know of the most populous country in the world. it's a good geographic superlative: we'll all have been to the two countries in the world with over 1 billion people.

we will get two days in macau with lindsay and katie. i love macau and i am excited to go back. it is an old portuguese colony, and people still speak portuguese there. we have been studying our mandarin hard, but it won't help at all in macau. the island is peaceful and has great architecture. it feels like europe. a vacation from china while still in china!

on saturday we hop on a 25 hour train to kunming, the capital of yunnan province. we are going to be on the southeastern side of the tibetan plateau. all the travelers we have met say that yunnan is the next best thing to tibet. if you cannot get to tibet, get to yunnan. we are meeting up with two other teachers from wuhan, lindsey jackson and meghan pigott. so we'll travel for a week with two lindsa(e)y's, a katie, a kate, a meghan...and one boy. i hear a rumor of mexican food at one of the hotels in kunming. yum.

yunnan, 云南, by the way, has a beautiful name in chinese. it is the southern cloud province. 云, yun, means cloud and 南, nan, is south. very picturesque.

i am so glad to be done with classes this week! since i am missing thursday and friday i had to make all of those hours up with the students. in three days i have taught what normally takes a week. i have all but one of my classes made up. the students are really excited about the may break, so excited, in fact, they have already left. attendance has been wretched. seven kids out of forty show up. today i taught a class that was observed by the department. i have 6 observers and 4 students. and none of the students brought paper to class (their homework wasn't done either).

so, here we go. we've got to catch the bus to the train station. we'll be posting, i hope, as we travel this week. we'll be back in wuhan late on may 7th. if anyone wants to call katie and lindsay then, try our cell phone, 86-27-6137-8517. we are 12 hours ahead of est.