A view of the lake at the top of the volcano mountain.

So, now that I can quickly (kind of) upload photos, I’ll include some more from earlier travels in the year!  These are from Changbaishan, the mountain on the border of China and North Korea!

We crossed a “fence” we weren’t supposed to cross and ended up with sweet peaceful bliss!

In the trees were tons of little birdhouses. Don’t know why…

Close up of some bark. Love the color in this one!

That’s me in the red. Got this photo from one of my travel companions. 🙂 This was during our ‘off-the-beaten-path’ time. We successfully avoided 20,000+ people…

So, some plans are finalizing and I’m getting very excited to have a break from life for a while.  Interested in where I’m headed? Well, here you go!

Jan 22 – Fly to Singapore and have some good Schlomerville time with my cousin JoElyn and my cousin Robin and her family! I hope we play some pinochle…

Jan 25 – Take a BOAT to Indonesia with JoElyn and play around the islands for a while. (When I say “play” I use it like Chinese people use the word ‘play’.  Do you have to be a child to ‘play?’ Why, no sirree! Anyone can play. It’s always funny to me when they use this word in English. For some reason it’s less funny in Chinese 🙂 I don’t know why…)

Here’s a map of Indonesia. I think it’s a political map from 1998. I don’t know if anything has changed since then…I assume it’s not like Africa where borders change daily. Singapore is the tip of Malaysia (peninsular Malaysia) and cousin Robin lives in the far eastern part of Indonesia. We won’t make it to her house. 🙁 We will try to make it to a lot of the other places! The westernmost island is Sumatra (lots of volcanic activity here…It “moves the world like no other place on earth”), the next island is Java (home to more volcanoes, temples, coffee plantations, then onto Bali, Lombok, and Nusa Tenggara (home to Komodo Island where the Komodo dragon lives! I hope to see this!)

Feb 3 – JoElyn leaves me for Malaysia. This is a sad day because I will lose one travel companion. It’s also happy because I will gain two more! My brother’s girlfriend (and my good friend) will meet me in Indonesia along with her sister. The three of us will play around the islands/volcanoes/coffee fields (I wonder if we take our name of “java” for coffee from the island of Java? Anyone know?) for a while and then leave Indonesia. I hope to be much darker when I return to China. I’ll try not to fry myself like I did on the shores of Thailand last February.

Feb 13 – Fly from Surabaya, Indonesia to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Unfortunately, we won’t have time to leave the airport and explore the capital city of KL, but I did get to do that last year. Here’s a photo from that awesome adventure. I didn’t really write about my trip last year. If you want, I’ll intersperse information from Thailand as it compares to Indonesia… do you want? Hmm… I’m not really surprised that no one is really reading the blog anymore. I haven’t been a faithful writer this year.

I had one day in Malaysia last year! We spent our day at the towers and at Starbucks. 🙂 It was a pretty great day!

Feb 13 – Fly from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Kunming, China. If you recall from past travels, Kunming is one of my least favorite places in China. I don’t really have a good reason. Maybe it’s because I didn’t get to spend enough time there. It will be the same for this trip. Sorry, Kunming. I’m just not going to give you a chance. I could have learned to love you, but I’m just not that interested.

Feb 14 – Fly from Kunming, China to XiShuangBanNa, China.  XSBN is a place that supposed to be like the Thailand of China. I’ll do some comparing and get back to you. One thing I really want to do there is sleep overnight in a canopy treehouse.  In the Lonely Planet they call them “Swiss Family Robinson” style houses. 🙂 Apparently you can observe elephants bathing below in the early morning hours…I’ll let you know!  I think we’ll do some ‘playing’ around XSBN for a few days!

Feb 17 – Fly from XSBN toLijiang, China. You might remember my trip here from two years ago. There was that song that just kept playing? The Tiger Leaping Gorge? Horseback riding? Well, I’m hiking the Gorge again, and I equally excited about it this time around.  I think it’s true that there are places in China that I have been that I don’t need to go to again. Lijiang is NOT one of those places. Well, Lijiang, maybe, but definitely not the gorge. 🙂

Feb 22 – Fly from Lijiang to Beijing. While in Beijing with my guests, we will do some ‘playing’ around the city.

Looks like a pretty full itinerary. I’ll probably need a vacation from my vacation! Look for pictures in about a month or so…

I tried a few times to update my blog…that was during the “end-of-the-internet-world” in China. Apparently, I’m able to try again so here goes…

Christmas brought the usual activities in Beijing, lots of parties, etc.

The little sister of one of my students. Isn’t she cute? She’s wild and crazy. She and her mother were recently B-ptzed. 🙂

We were able to share the good news once again with many Chinese friends. We also had a fun-filled day of fellowship with our Beijing FOC family, complete with a song-service, Secret Santa gift exchange, pot luck dinner, and white elephant gift exchange.  My cousin arrived in Beijing on that day so we welcomed him and his friend from Hong Kong into our celebrations as well.

During his brief stay in Beijing, we were able to visit the Great Wall. This was my 8th time visiting the mighty stone dragon. Below are a couple photos from that day!

Wintery White Great Wall 🙂

The photographer at work

The happy hikers!

We also got to eat great Chinese food and do a little bargaining! 🙂

New Year’s Eve was fun with our group. We went to a bar in Houhai that played live music and we kind of took over the place. Fun times!

The thing that I’m getting most excited about is my upcoming Spring Festival Vacation!  I will be traveling first to Singapore, then onto Indonesia for a couple weeks and then into Southern China for the last week of my vacation.  I’ll put up more details when I have more to report on!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! God’s blessings to you in 2013!

I enjoyed taking photos out of the window of the train car. And, yes, I did have two straps on… 🙂

The following text was written almost 3 months ago…before my blog was acting funny…and before the Ch-na Gov-r-m-nt decided to have their “meetings” about who their next leader would be…and before Gmail stopped working for me…and before an awful lot of frustration happened. 🙂 Enjoy.

Day 1 – Our train was scheduled for 4:47 am. Our original plan was to stay out all night and then head to the train station. (There’s no public transportation that early so we wanted to avoid taking a taxi.) We ended up not staying out all night and taking a taxi anyway. We met the other 4 travel companions at the train station and we were on our way at 4:47 am. 🙂  Around 2:30, we stopped in a city called Shenyang. It is the capital of Liaoning province in the northeast part of the country. We wandered around the city for a while waiting for our next train at 9:45 pm. During our time in Shenyang we ate and walked and walked some more.

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I’m not actually in the mood to finish my story in a delightful, light-hearted manner.  Of our 5 day trip, 3.5 days were spent on one train or another, sleeping, sitting and sleeping, reading, or playing poker, etc. The other 1.5 days were spent standing in lines and sleeping on a Kang, which is a very large cement bed that is heated from underneath by a fire. It really was a great trip. 🙂

One thing I will tell about is the mass of people waiting in line for tickets. They only sell 22,000 tickets for the mountain. It’s good that we discovered this the night before going up there because we probably wouldn’t have gotten tickets.  I don’t even know how to describe the people standing in line.  Actually, ‘standing in line’ is probably not the best way to phrase it. People in this country don’t know how to stand in line. Try to imagine 10,000+ people in a mob instead of a line, trying to get to the ticket counter to buy tickets. You know when you go to Disneyland and they have the people line up and go around a metal contraption that keeps them in a nice queue so that there is order and all is right with the world? Yeah…that thing. People should probably introduce China to that thing… nuff said.

Also, another thing to mention is that I’m very much afraid of heights. So driving up a mountain full speed around switchbacks in a VAN that accelerates around the corners is not my cup of tea.

The mountain was pretty. The Chinese tourists for some reason don’t stop and enjoy the beauty of nature…they just snap a photo and move on to the next photo spot. A bit sad. Below are some more photos. I’ll try to post again about some highlights from the past three months. 🙂

This photo was very random. I definitely just held up my camera and, without looking, snapped this shot.

Door knocker.

Fruit on a stick…covered in sugar…not very good.