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"You know what I find strange? I haven't met any only children, everyone has siblings here. My friend that speaks really good English has 3 sisters, so her family had 4 girls... hard to believe after hearing all that stuff about "one-child" and hating girls.

I got to go play badminton today, which was fun, it was a giant room with a bunch of badminton courts and you just went there and played and then paid for the time you spend when you left. "Uncle" brought another teenage female relative and me and her played against him. He was wearing a pink shirt... When we were done it was dark and I was expecting to go out into the cool night air, but ended up in the warm night air. I'm not used to it yet, but it's really nice not even having to wear a coat at night in the dead of winter.

When we were at a restaurant for dinner some people leaned towards our table and were asking the girl I was with about me, she said they told her I was beautiful. It will be weird to go home and not be in the spotlight anymore. I really like it here... I guess I think of it as home now, I can recognize some shops and have a morning routine with the family (the kids come home for an hour and a half for lunch) I have my own set of chopsticks and my own "spot" at the table, and in a way a family. We can't talk but I really like them, and they take care of me well, but being around the parents with food around is like being around Tim, they keep trying to get me to eat more all the time, pointing at stuff and shoving things at me.

I love the weather here, and the people, and the look of the city, but the one thing I will not miss at all in this place is the food. Once I leave here I would be happy if I never ate authentic Chinese food again. You've never smelled nasty until you've smelled a Chinese fridge, it's worse than sewage.

The computer I use is in the master bedroom. It's a western keyboard. The way it works is you choose a language setting and with Chinese they type it out by sound and it gives possible characters and then they press a number correlating to the character they want, it's sort of neat because that way I can see how it's pronounced as they type (I got another relative to use the google translator with me). Chinese is written the same for Cantonese and Mandarin, so that's not a worry.

Another cousin took me for a bike ride, that was pretty cool, riding a bike in the middle of a busy street just like a real Chinese, and it wasn't even scary. I started out using "Aunty"s bike, but it was really hard to pedal. I was thinking "God, the Chinese must have incredible leg muscles!" and after I couldn't physically move it anymore and the other girl traded bikes with me, but when she tried riding it she started laughing because that isn't how normal bikes there are and we stopped at a mechanics to make it easier to ride."






"I feel like I'm ready to be done with my vacation and come home, but I'm less than a third of the way through it. Before I got to China I didn't know I would have people waiting for me so I was thinking "What am I doing even coming here?" but now I feel that way about Japan... It takes 3 hours to get from the airport to the place I am staying at in Japan. My friend there doesn't get off work for 9 hours after I get to Japan but they want me to meet them at one of the stations on the way to their house so it seems like I'll be stuck sitting around for hours in a place where everyone will be staring at me... maybe I'll get desensitized to public humiliation.

I have too much stuff to fit in just one suitcase, and I don't want to have to drag two with me as I go on trains and stuff in Japan so once Min gets here to translate I might ship some stuff home so I have less to worry about. I'm really sad... They don't have calling cards here so I bought a Chinese SIM card so I could call you but it didn't work in my phone because it's an AT&T phone and told me I had the wrong network.

I got shoved off onto another family for a few days, which was both good and bad. Good because I was with a 22 year old girl, so I could finally go into the Pajama and bra shops and I knew my way around better so I went to an arcade and played the Chinese version of DDR and also ended up playing a different game ever more... one where you were trying to survive a zombie attack. It also sucked, because I hated that girl. I didn't like being with her, she really frustrated me. I didn't like her family either. They drove a few hours out of the city because they wanted to look at a display a fancy hotel had set up of the houses it was selling nearby. Right next door was a "Homeland Amusement Park" which was basically a full-sized model of traditional Chinese buildings and information boards about how they lived in ancient times, but of course we couldn't go there, because to them that wasn't nearly as entertaining as a hotel lobby, so I got to endure hours of car sickness for a look at a hotel, fascinating. I did get to go to an old village though, so I have some pictures of old stuff.

Afterwards I got to eat dinner with them. Now let me ask you this: If I asked you if you liked something and you said no, and I even asked a few more times just to make sure, then took you to a restaurant that only served that thing you said you didn't like you would think I was being cruel, right? I hate that family.

The next day I got to go to a wedding. A wedding that lasted from when I woke up to when I fell asleep, a wedding of people I had never met, with everyone saying things I couldn't understand and terrible food. And... I sort of got married. I was watching the rituals and stuff and one of them was walking up stairs tied together. The girl I was with said "They're tied together." I said "Yeah, I can see." And then she stuck her foot next to mine and started pointing at it and I said "I meant it, I can see" and she said "You're interested in it?" and then her uncle jumped in saying "You should try!" and asked for a volunteer. Of course the ugliest fattest Asian races over to stand next to me and my protests mean nothing to the uncle. Next I am literally tied to this terrible looking guy with all of his friends watching and laughing and her uncle trying to push me up the stairs tied to him, making me act out one part of a Chinese wedding ceremony. I hate that family. I love the family I live with though, we just don't understand each other."





"There's a commercial here that I've had some strange reactions to. The first time I saw it I was like "Aww... fluffy tailed deer... oh god, is that them on those plates! That's terrible!" the second time I saw it I was like "The poor deer! Oh wait... ducks? Maybe this is a commercial about animals that got cut into on accident before (that happens a lot with the commercials here) ... Oh no! The duck's cooked head! It's just an extended version!" poor little cooked animals..."





"It warmed up for Christmas so it was really nice here. I went strawberry picking and ate sugar cane and got to see uncle's house in the countryside (3 stories tall with 12 bedrooms!) We went to the big city and I got to eat a banana & ice cream crepe."