three magic words: you've got mail

SO. Here we are, in China, having lasted 2 months on the package my dearest mother sent me full of American sustenance. And I conveniently remembered that many people, before we left the states, offered to send us a package. Now, instead of being overtly rude and asking anyone for a package, I will instead just make it publicly known in a hinting sort of way that we would love to receive a package from anyone. You can't even imagine the immense amount of joy that fills my heart when I get a call from the international office at school and they say those three magic words, "you've got mail." In case you are so inclined to send a wonderful parcel of pleasure to your expat friends, here are some suggestions of things we would love to receive:

- microwave popcorn/kettle corn
- candy...any kind of candy that can't melt...chocolate melts in the mail
- granola bars
- ground cinnamon
- crisco sticks
- lysol/clorox wipes
- yankee votive candles
- 'just add water' baking mixes...muffins, biscuits, brownies, etc
- pentel R.S.V.P. ballpoint pens
- any 'souvenir' kind of thing from your home state...like a postcard or whatever. our students love it when we give them things like that as gifts.
- quaker instant oatmeal...apple cinnamon and maple brown sugar are our favorites!
- tiny, wonderful, delicious cans of diet dr pepper (if anyone sends this, seal it in a ziploc bag first, just in case.)
- chicken helper...the fettucine alfredo one, but just send the flavor packet, not the noodles or the box...it's all about saving weight.
- cream of tartar (it's like a spice, it would be with the cinnamon and stuff at the grocery store) 
- this may seem like a strange suggestion, but velveeta. we can't get any cheese here, so velveeta is practically a delicacy.

If you are reading this blog, that means you also most likely have our address already as we gave it out to a lot of people.  I'm not so keen on posting our address on the internet, so if you do want our address, just send either of us an email.

**Zack would like to add index cards to the list.

Neither would we mind a nice box of kraft macaroni and cheese.

三峽河巡航 - Three Gorges river cruise

Last week we had the whole week off from school for Chinese National Day...the Chinese are really patriotic.  Five of our [American] friends visited from another city for the whole week.  It was awesome.  We showed them our city for a few days, and we also spend a few days going on a river "cruise" through the Three Gorges.  Thinking back, I wish I could have taken a picture of our rooms to post here...oh well, hindsight.  Anyway, we had two rooms for eight people each with two bunkbeds with mattresses as pillowy soft as concrete.  But, pictures are worth a thousand words or something, so here we go.............

This is Zack and our friend David with a bunch of Chinese guys who randomly came up to talk to us to practice their English in the central square of our city.

We love taking pictures of the ridiculous English phrases in our town, and this is one of the most obviously strange.

This is a coffee shop in our town which so obviously ripped off its logo from Starbucks.

Walking down a lot of stairs to board our boat.

These little girls were really excited to practice their English with us on the boat.

I like taking pictures of bridges.

A big bridge near the Three Gorges Dam

We spent a lot of time playing cards on the boat

David and Katie high-fiving

Some people fishing with an awesome enormous net in the Three Gorges

I took this picture to show how big the gorges are...that little dot at the bottom of the gorge is a big cruise boat.

Craig and Jessica, two friends from the other city

There were a lot of caves along the three gorges and this one had stairs leading up to it...which we are very curious about.

This is some famous landmark along the Three Gorges on the Yangtze River

Zack is really proud of this picture.  The landmark is on the back of the 10 yuan bill.

Us in front of the landmark thingy

Again, I like taking pictures of bridges

Cute little kids who were really excited to scream at us (especially the little boy with the split pants) as we walked by.

A Buddhist temple...the gold bin thingy is where you put the incense you burn.

Before we came to China, we thought every building looked like this...unfortunately, we were wrong.

Another bridge...

This is a pond at the monastery of the White Emporer.  According to legend, a man was standing in front of this pool when a magical white smoke rose from the pond and became a dragon, so the man proclaimed himself the White Dragon Emporer...or something.

Bones of monks (I think) inside a display case.  A lot of people stuffed money inside for some reason we don't understand.

This is an example of the enormous amount of stairs we were forced to climb on our cruise.  We tried to make an accurate guess about how many stairs we climbed in the three days and we came up with between 1000 and 1500.  Exhaustion.

Standing by some cool weird trees

David, Nate, Jessica, Jessica, me, and Katie...Craig and Zack are mysteriously missing

This is to show how foggy it is in our part of the country...crazy foggy humid.

The Chinese flag on the back of the boat.

So, that was our trip.  I'm sure everyone is sick of looking at so many pictures, so that will be that for today.