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.