Ni hao!

What are we supposed to do for a 15 hour plane ride? Try to sleep? Get woken up flight attendants every 2 hours? Watch crazy japanese movies, then realize your laptop is about to die? Debate game theory over simple card games? Try to order a glass of apple juice in mandarin? 

Once we arrived we got a tour of the neighborhood around the school, and there are plenty of things to do and see. We saw a green tea flavored doughnut, and a green tea flavored cake (in Starbucks, which looks identical to the ones back home). The Starbucks coffee mugs are many times as expensive as hairdryers. There is a huge stationary store, with an entire wall filled with tons of different kinds of pens. There is a huge coffee mug in the stationary store that says "this is not a coffee mug."

Mistranslated English runs rampant. Googluck. If you love something, you like it. Hers choice.

Delicious foods: Seaweed soup, chunks of duck, celery and pork, some extremely bony, possibly eel-resembling mystery fish. Steamed buns, a.k.a. baozi (we just found the baozi stand that the kids last year loved, and it's truly amazing! A dollar for 5 of the most delicious little buns you can imagine), noodles at the noodle shop (which is equally as excellent, equally as cheap. Pictures coming soon.), and meats, prepared all sorts of ways.

We just sat in on an English class, which was a very interesting experience. Using vocab about sentence structure that we've never heard before. Partial and complete inversions? There are occasional grammatical mistake in the official text itself. The teacher spelled "Gone" with a "Q," which none of us really had the heart to point out. 

The whole school does eye exercises twice a day, which is a pretty surreal experience. The loudspeaker suddenly starts playing music and counting up to 8 in mandarin over and over again. A huge portion of the students wear glasses because of all the reading and working they're doing. 

Ms. Briggs is apparently better at ping-pong than the average student. We're beginning to suspect she's a hustler. 

We'd like to send pictures along, but the internet here is pretty shoddy. We might set up a flickr account or some such thing, so hold tight.