We’re Back! Trip Highlights

As many of you know, Tommy and I had a month-long holiday for the Chinese New Year.  Actually, I had a two-month holiday because my school is like, super hardcore about prepping students for exams – woohoo!  Anyways, we spent our time off travelling through East and Southeast Asia, trying to see as many highlights of this amazing continent as we could before returning for the second semester.  In four weeks, we visited 10 cities in 6 different countries!  We feel so blessed to have had such an incredible trip.  Now that we’re back in Sinan, I’ll be working on posts for each of the cities and hopefully sharing at least one per week.  In the meantime, here is a quick run-down of our trip highlights!

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Up Close and Personal Part 2: Food, food, and more food

Chinese food.  Oh man, this topic could fill a textbook.  Because China is such a huge country, there’s no simple way to summarize their food.  Over the past five months in China, we’ve gotten pretty well acquainted with regional food but still have so much to learn!    I’ll dig into what the differences are between Western Chinese food and authentic Chinese food, what we regularly eat in our province, and a bit about food throughout the rest of the country.

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Up Close and Personal Part 1: Housing and Toilets

Since we’ve had some downtime lately, I thought I’d do a little “Living in China” mini-series.  We’ve shared a lot about our travels, but not too much about the day-to-day of teaching in China.  I’ll cover topics people have asked me about in the past and anything new that comes up, so let me know if you have any burning questions!  First up, where we live and what scared me the most about moving to China: ~~toilets~~.

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Christmas in China

Merry Christmas from China!  We’ve been missing our family and friends this holiday season, but we managed to make it a little special anyways.  Other Western holidays haven’t really caught on in China, so we were pleasantly surprised to find that the Christmas cheer has spread here.  Read on to find out what Christmas is like in a small, authentic Chinese town!

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Market madness, Moped meltdown, Major decisions

Yes, it killed me a little not to be able to finish the alliteration! 😂 Anyways, the last couple weeks have been pretty relaxed here.  No extra days off means spending the weekdays teaching and going into ultimate sloth mode on the weekends.  No complaints about that!  This past Saturday we did venture out to the market, which occupies the town’s main streets every 5 days.  We’ve gone to it before but never for very long, so this time we dedicated all morning to checking out every street it spills onto and trying lots of new food.  Hopefully these photos give a little glimpse into the colorful and fast-paced madness of our local street market.  All this time at home also gave us a chance to reflect on what we want to do when our contract ends in January, so be sure to get all the way to the bottom to find out what we decided!

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