More pictures!

Catching up on pictures!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2002755&l=642f5&id=1181220088

苏州 - Suzhou

Our group took our third and final program trip together and visited the city of Suzhou. Like most of the cities we visit in China, Suzhou is a very ancient city. It was once a capital of the Spring and Autumn Period, where the King Helu humbling named the city the Great City of Helu. The city is most famous for its gardens and landscaping. Walking through the center of town, we crossed many beautiful canals and little picturesque streets. We stayed at a very nice hostel that was right along a pedestrian street that followed a canal. It gave the city a kind of cozy feeling for me, even though it rained on our last day there. The highlights of the trip included a visit to the Suzhou Museum and the Humble Administrator's Garden. Both are best shown through pictures, so you can look through my facebook album at your leisure.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2002713&l=59b38&id=1181220088

Happy Thanksgiving!

The semester is coming to its inevitable end! Craziness! Like all semesters, time has picked up speed since the first few weeks. A lot has been going on, but unfortunately this blogging site never loads very well because of the slow internet. Because of this, I'm quite behind in things that I want to share. To make up for this, I will give a quick update of some of my recent activities.

Thanksgiving was just a while ago and rolled around without much of a fuss. It's kind of strange to go to class on days like Thanksgiving, but at the same time, no one was making a big deal about it. (Except the Americans, who had to complain a little bit about going to class.) I can feel the same thing happening with Christmas. Even though I'm sure the holiday season is in full swing in the States, including baking, music, lights, and of course shopping, there's nothing much happening here to hint that Christmas is approaching. It's not even very cold. It dipped below freezing a few nights ago, but otherwise we are having pretty mild weather. I don't expect to see Hangzhou covered in snow. They did have a very heavy snowfall last January, and I'm sure the city was gorgeous covered in snow. The city is very pretty now too. The crisp cool weather goes nicely with the changing colors of the leaves. When I look out our hallway windows, I can see a still very green hill in the background, with auburn red leaves right next to our building. Very pretty. I'll have to go down to West Lake soon to see how the leaves are changing there as well.

Assemble the dumplings!

Back to the topic of Thanksgiving. We celebrated Thanksgiving last Friday night by getting together with all the students on our program, our program director, and his son who did most of the great cooking. For dinner we ate some nicely prepared duck and lots of jiaozi or dumplings. We all worked for our dinner by helping to assemble the dumplings. Since we made lots of dumplings, we got to eat lots of dumplings! We also had some fruit, sugar cane, and chocolate to snack on. Even if it didn't feel like Thanksgiving, we had a very fun, cozy night together!

Our handiwork