Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

I love 3 day weekends!

On Saturday, I slept in then spent most of the day cleaning up my apartment and relaxing. Then Saturday night, Lindsay and I decided to check out Future Ark which is basically the beginnings of a huge development project in Guiyang. It is about a 20 minute walk from our apartment. We see signs for it all the time. It is pretty sweet at night! There are these cool buildings right on the river and colorfully lit bridges, oh and a giant inflatable yellow duck! I mean huge. Right in the river.

Anyways, we walked around a bit but there really wasn't a lot to do. A handful of restaurants and just a lot of buildings under construction. There were some cool fountains that went along to music that we watched for awhile. I can tell it will be a pretty sweet place once it is finished. Chris and Evan were planning on coming with us but they were having trouble finding a taxi from their school which is farther away, so we told them to meet us there if they figured it out. They finally showed up so we went to check out the restaurants. I guess they close everything up pretty early though because all that was really left open was an Italian ice cream stand. Ice cream for dinner! It was good to catch up with the boys though and see how things were going at their school.

Mesmerizing fountains

Giant yellow duck!

Sunday we had our call-in church then me and Lindsay spent awhile planning our lessons for the week. With a few Netflix breaks in between ;) Then we decided we'd just head over to the school cafeteria for dinner. It was so weird. Hardly anyone was there but there was some food! Anyway, Sunday was pretty chill.

Today, Sylvia and her sister planned a whole day out for us! Sylvia's sister, Jay, is also an English teacher at a different school in Guiyang so we were able to talk to her in English. They picked us up at 10 and we took a bus to Jiaxiu Tower which is near the city center. It was pretty cool! It is built right on the river. We saw some cool art and stuff while we were there. Jay told us she was an artist and could paint. She said she would paint us a picture of horses sometime because those are her favorite. She was pretty cool, and really funny. And she loves animals so we got along!

Entrance

Accidentally both wearing gray..

Sylvia is left, Jay is center and Lindsay right

Sitting in some ornate dragon chairs..

 After the tower, we went out to lunch at a dumpling restaurant. I feel like whenever people take us out they end up ordering way to much food! We got some pork dumplings and few other dishes and all shared them. It was all pretty good but some of the dishes were suuuper spicy! I don't know how people eat this stuff all the time. And they don't usually drink water with their meals, just hot tea. Like that's going to help... Luckily I brought water and we also ordered some really yummy pear juice. Overall it was a nice meal.

After lunch we went to a movie theater to see showtimes. Sylvia told us the 3 American movies playing which were The Expendables 3, How To Train Your Dragon 2, or Rise Of The Planet of the Apes 2. It's funny though because they translated "How To Train Your Dragon 2" to "Dragon Master 2." We wanted to watch that, but it wasn't playing until that evening so we decided on Planet of the Apes. We had a couple hours though so we walked around the mall. They had quite a few American brands like H&M and Calvin Klein. It was still pretty expensive though so we didn't end up buying anything.

We ended up having to take short bus ride to a different movie theater because the theater was full in that one. It was pretty packed because of the holiday. So yeah, the movie was interesting. It was in English with Chinese subtitles which is fine right? Well, in the movies when the apes are communicating in ape language, there are subtitles so you know what they're saying. But those were in Chinese... So we didn't quite catch everything that was going on, not to mention none of us had seen the first one. Haha oh well, it was still fun!

As we were walking out of the movie theater, a salesman guy started talking to us (well to Sylvia and her sister) but they refused whatever he said and kept walking. It was weird though because it started following us and trying to talk to me and Lindsay. We weren't sure why this guy was interested in us. We kept going and he left us alone and Sylvia told us that he works in hair salon and was particularly insistent because he wanted to work on Caucasian hair. Oh, the life of a white person in China! I don't know if I will ever really get used to being a foreigner!

Anyway, we took a taxi back home (first time in a taxi) and I don't know how anyone can drive here! They just do whatever they want and somehow don't get into accidents. But you could tell the driver knew what he was doing and I guess that is because he's had a lot of practice driving here. When we got back we thanked Sylvia and Jay for everything and went to collapse. We were both tired out so we just kicked back and watched more netflix.

Well, I've got my 7 classes tomorrow. Yay. I feel more prepared though so hopefully all will go well this week!