What a day.

Yeah we got a little camera happy. But our eyes look so cool!

Our true colors.

I had a really amazing experience today on this beautiful sabbath day. I finally got to go to church! It's been a few weeks and it's been about a month or more since I've had the opportunity to take the sacrament and renew those sacred covenants. We've just had trouble going because of the distance and other circumstances. Its been kind of frustrating for me  because I've needed to go and just wanted to go so badly. So three of us finally went today and they had the skype stuff all set up. We walked into this apartment and took off our shoes. everyone had brought there own chairs so we probably looked very strange to the chinese all dressed up and walking around with chairs. Up front there was a table with a computer skype connected to the branch pres., a flower center piece and a picture of Jesus. Next to the table was the sacrament covered by white cloth. My heart filled with joy and I was just so excited. Oh man. We sat down and as we waited for others we just sang hymns, one of which was I stand all Amazed. If you remember, we sang that our first week of church. I don't remember the last time I was this overcome with the spirit. I just felt this overwhelming love and peace and comfort and surety. Tears filled my eyes and I basically cried throughout all 4 songs that we sung. It was seriously just so powerful and I can't even express the gratitude in my heart for the gospel and the opportunity I have to be a member of Jesus Christ's true church. I'm just so grateful for music and the spirit that it brings and the way it touches my heart! It's just amazing and it always surprises me how strongly it effects me. I'm so so grateful for the sacrament ordinance and the opportunity I had to partake of it again and renew my covenants! Ahh I can't even tell you how I felt it was so amazing. I'm just so grateful for the gospel I can't even express how much. Seeing the others in my life struggle with their testimonies and trying to figure out what they believe, for one, makes me so grateful to have a knowledge that this is definitely true! And that my life is an infinite number of times happier than I would be without the gospel. It also makes me want to help them so badly to realize that this is what will bring them true joy and I know it with all my heart. I'm so grateful for a loving Heavenly Father who answers our prayers and blesses us continually and whose hand is so prominent in my life. Oh my goodness it was just such a good day and the spirit was so strong. I love this feeling and I want it with me forever. I'm also so grateful for the priesthood and the two worthy priesthood holders in our group! It's such an amazing power. I'm also sooo grateful for my family. Yes family, you guys are the best. I'm so grateful that I have loving parents who I trust with ALL my heart. I'm so grateful that they know the gospel is true and that they'll never doubt it, and that they;ve taught me to do the same! I love you guys and I'm so grateful that we can be together forever. Phew I'm gettin all emotional I should probably take a breather. :)

Anyways, It was a really great day and I hope yours was the same! We also had a super fun weekend in which we celebrated Maddie's birthday! She's the best. Her'es a picture that you can't see. :) remember, feel free to go to photobucket.com and type in Andreabp13 to see them! 

Wo ai Ni China!! or in other words, I love you china! 

New friend with a beautiful voice

All of us and hunter, the gate guard, and Lulu, a teacher

Look at all of us. We have so much fun

singing the song we wrote!

Oh megan.. love her

So much love

Gratitude

You know what I'm grateful for? Well, I'm grateful for a lot of things, but the one on my mind at the moment is people. Just people in our lives. I am so grateful to have people in my life! Maybe that sounds a little crazy, but I just love people. I'm so grateful that you can be thrown together with someone and they can just change your life and inspire you to do things you normally wouldn't! It's really an amazing thing. If I were to be alone all my life with no one around, I feel like I would be a real dud. Maybe not, I don't really have any way of knowing that so never mind. But what got me thinking that is how we started coming up with a song about Xiaolan and our experiences. Well, Maddie and Kambrie wrote the music and the first part, but we're all adding things to it. I thought to myself, 'wow Andrea, you would never just come up with the idea to write a song and play in on the ukulele.' And it hit me that there are so many things I do because of the ideas and influences of other people. I realize saying all this is making me sound like a real dud, but I'm just sayin.. Everyone does things so differently and everyone has their own opinions and ideas and desires. When we're all put together we can come up with some pretty amazing things. It's really inspiring. Anyways my point being, I'm so grateful for people that come into our lives, even for a short time, and inspire us to do great things and to be better people. I'm grateful for everyone in my life and I'm so blessed to know the people I know! I have a pretty darn amazing life and I have some pretty darn amazing people to thank for it. Thanks all you amazing darn people in my life! Couldn't do it without you.

On a more chinese oriented note, China is awesome! :) That about sums it up. I can't express how much I love it here and love the people and love everything I'm doing. Let me just talk about this hair wash and style we got the other day. Hair wash meaning, 15 minute head and neck massage in a relaxing room with music lulling us to sleep. All for about 3 dollars! I'd say that's a pretty darn good deal.
We also have some really cool chinese teachers at our school who have big performances and parties where we make shapes out of food and perform the princess pat to disgrace all of America. They asked us to perform that day and we couldn't think of anything so we beat boxed/sang to the princess pat. It was pretty humiliating.

Our spunky, awesome chinese teachers

You got some hot dogs, chicken feet, snails, bread, coconut milk, watermelon, bananas, egg cakes taro (purple potatoes). Typical chinese meal.

We also find amazing smoothie places and sit there making faces and taking pictures for hours. Sounds pretty strange to the average human, but behold, we are not average humans.
Moral of the story: I have a wonderful life here in Xiaolan, and just in general. We do some pretty amazing things and there are more to come! exactly 3 months left here in china and I'm going to make every bit of it count!

Some more teaching pictures!

teachwa, bafaloom!

One of my favorite phrases as spoken by the chillins, 'Teachwa, bafaloom!' It makes my day every time. Today was interesting. It was really rough in the beginning and the kids were crazy like usual. My lesson was hard to teach because sometimes games are hard to explain to the younger classes. But eventually I got the hang of it and it was really really fun. It's funny how your mindset changes and it just effects everything else. I just felt a lot better and more relaxed and just felt soooo much love for the kids. They're so wonderful and I'm sooooo glad to be here in Xiaolan at our little Ming de kindergarden.
Kambrie and I went with Maddie to NanLang where she taught last semester. We got to see where she lived and some of her kids. It was so fun for her and she was just on cloud 9. It made me think about how amazing it would be to come back! Ahh It's going to kill me saying goodbye to these kids. Their school was really nice and their kids were super smart and well behaved. We kept thinking, wow wouldn't it be nice.. but then we realized that there's no where else we'd rather be and we wouldn't change our school or our kids or our city for ANYTHING else.

Little half German half chinese Kevin

Maddie and her favorites, Tony, Kevin and Peter

I just can't say enough how much I love it here. We also met the head teacher of the three teachers and let's just say it made me really really grateful for Maddie who is THE best head teacher ever and wants us to have fun and does so much so we can enjoy our experience. I'm so blessed and couldn't have hand picked a better group of girls!
As for everything else, we're staying pretty busy with being sick, teaching afternoon classes, teacher meetings and just random fun adventures. the afternoon classes are sooo funny. I only teach monday and wednesday and they don't speak a lick of english. They just stare blankly because they don't understand the repeating concept yet. It will be fun though, and less stressful. We basically just play games with them. Teaching is just the best. This weekend is really busy and it's going to be a blast, which I'm sure you'll hear about soon! :)

Me teaching class. I love these kids

           

A day in the life!

Ok I know I post frequently, but I just have to talk about tonight. Nights like tonight are seriously the best ever. I love China. I've been sick the past couple days which is no fun, but tonight we had a blast anyways. We went to this store that had millions of really cheap toys for our kids. :) It was a hilairous experience and we ride motor taxies everywhere which is a blast, but also deadly. then we went to a parent teacher meeting thing for a minute, then the parents of one of the kids invited us to dinner so we went to this really cool place. They're so sweet. People always invite us to dinner and bring us food and stuff. Yes I'm probably going to be obese when I return. Plus we eat rice every meal. Oh boy. Good thing I got these super cute new nike frees for less than 30 dollars! :) Yes, I'm quite excited about my new purchase.
Anyways, on the way home we were being spontaneous and ridiculous and we danced inside this bank because we saw this random interpretive dance group inside the bank! just dancing away with the bank gates locked! It was strange. Then we decided to stop random people and ask to get pictures with them. We made friends with these awesome 16/17 year old skateboard kids, a super sweet girl with a really cute puppy, and many others. We actually got numbers of some and are going to invite them to maddie's birthday party next week! I love making friends. The chinese people are so sweet. They're just cute and shy and us obnoxious americans probably make them feel really uncomfortable but it's pretty fun meeting new people all the time.  Ahh I just love China. We have so much fun and the people are wonderful.

Our skateboard friend

Our beautiful friend's adorable puppy

our beautiful new friend                                          

Random guy on the streets

Dani and I at dinner

Skateboard buddies

Henry, who we called harry accidentally for the first two weeks, Is one of my favorites. He's so stinkin cute.  This is at dinner with his family

Two of the gate guards. They are so friendly and always say hello when we pass. 

Oh and the other day we went to this mall place and as we walked around outside a couple cute girls in pink uniforms stopped us and asked to do our hair for free. We were kind of skeptical at first, but they promised it was free after a lot of questioning, and were super giddy and giggly as they linked arms with us and walked us all to their salon. So we basically got a free wash ans style at some hair school. They were so sweet. I love china.

My hair dresser guy. so cool

Sweetest girl ever who asked to do our hair

Awww... my heart strings!

Well hey there my dear friends and family!
I just wanted to quickly express my love for my little asian babies! :) I seriously love them so much. Ahhh! I can't even handle it they just tug at my heart strings like crazy. Today was an awesome teaching day and not to brag, but I had a great lesson plan and I did a good job teaching if I do say so myself. :) It's just so fun. Especially when you get them to speak and see that they're having fun and learning and doing what you want. It's a great feeling. Today I had a fishing lesson where I showed a pocture of a fishing pole and had a fishing pole made of pipe cleaner and yarn, and when I show them they all would gasp and say, "ooooo!" with gaping mouths. It was the cutest thing ever. We took turns 'catching each other' "You caught john!" etc. And they all laughed adorably. Then we put peanut butter at the end of a cucumber stick (it was supposed to be celery but they don't eat raw celery here apparently..) and stick it to goldfish on a plate! They were so cute. Anyways, teaching is a blast, most of the time, and I just want to take all the kids home. I love being in China soooo much! We're preparing for this awesome 11 dy trip where we hike all these cool places, and I'm super stoked. I'm also going right now with Rachel over to one of the chinese teachers house to teach her son and play with him for the night then we'll come back tomorrow. Kinda scary... but will hopefully be fun! Tomorrow is a very busy day and we have lots of teaching and meetings and dinners and things! It's so stinkin fun here seriously I'm having a blast. I love you family and thanks for parting with me so I could come. :)
Enjoy some pictures of some of my favorite little babies! AHH I love them so much I can't even handle it.

Teacher appreciation day! It was so cute. The kids gave us all kinda of precious card and gifts. 

The younger class. I adore them.

This is Tony and I making faces at each other. He's the cutest little boy ever.

This is dori with her twin sister brinley behind her. Alone they're pretty good but in class they're horrible, thus my scared face. :) But they're still darn cute.

Tony and I again

Ok Sammy is probably one of my top favorites. She's sooooooo stinkin cute I could just put her right in my pocket. Ahh I love her. 

Kasey is one of my top favorites too. She's probably one of the best behaved students and she's just soooo sweet. I adore the life out of her. 

News from the underground!

Ni hao, people of America, from the land afar! We took a chinese class today and I'm totally gonna be fluent by the time I get home. ;) jk that's a joke the language is ridiculous. I learned some fun stuff though!
Well, let me tell you a tale of our little zoo experience. It was quite a wonderful all day adventure. We got up early, took the sky train to guangzhou south, and went to the zoo! It was really fun. I think what was so fun about it was we always just have a blast. We all get along great and it's just oodles of partying all the time. We went to this animal show thing which was actually really sad. I feel like we treat our animals a lot better in America. They trained these moneys to ride bikes, and this bear to ride a bike and carry a parasol across this tight rope thing which was pretty cool, but they had this thing through his nose and they'd pull it to get him to do stuff! And they'd hit them and never smile and it was just really sad. We were all just really appalled and left after sweet megan left with tears in her eyes. It was sad.

Our reaction to the animal cruelty

On a happier note, it was really funny because they had a lot of wolves and horses and dogs in the zoo like it was a big deal.. Um I have those in my back yard. Anyways, I also held a snake and fed a giraffe! It was pretty awesome.

Look at that beautiful accessory! I wear it well if I do say so myself. 

We are so dang cute. :)

This is a very normal thing. The little kids just have holes in their pants so they can just go wherever whenever.. 

I was soo nervous!

So cute!

I love giraffs! 

Kinda.. :)

Bamboo forest

BEAutiful jaguar. 

Soo cute. He's looking at me!

We came home and were exhausted and drew faces on our chins. Let me explain.. You draw a face on your chin, upside down and cover your face, using your mouth and your mouth, and the drawn eyes and nose on your chin. It's pretty funny and we had a good long laugh about that.
Sunday Rachel and I went to church, which is about a three hour trip, but when we got there they were done which was kinda disappointing. But at least we tried. I guess they decided to start earlier than they told us last week. Anyways, I'm glad we made the effort because it seems more when we have to sacrifice more for it and actually have more of a desire to go. I hope by the end of the semester we all have the desire to go. We'll see how it goes.

Rachel and I on our sunday adventure

Then later that night we talked about families and politics and church and about everything else you can think of. I love these girls. Then we made face masks with this sea weed stuff. It was pretty hilarious. We took about a million pictures which I'll try not to overwhelm you with.

Modeling pose

awkward family photo

Some strange mud creature

My crazy roommates

It was so fun though. We were cracking up. Ooooh good times. Then we talked about boys, and life, and did other girl things. So basically we have girls night like every night and it's so fun. Man, I'm just so grateful to be with these girls, they're all so great and we learn so much from each other. I love being here and I love china.
Oh and friday night we went to have dinner with the mayor. Yeah we're pretty much a big deal. ;) It was a big teacher group thing. It was cool though. My head teacher told us that they asked us to perform so we started freaking out and decided to sing 'the princess pat' that we sing with the kids because it was all we could think of. Then she told us it was a joke. It was pretty funny.

Oh just the usual, chicken heads..

We went back to our second week of teaching today which was different because we had flag ceremony (that we have every monday), and it was teacher appreciation day! And I was the teacher this time! :) I like being the teacher on this day for I was showered with awesome gift and beautiful flowers. Apparently it's a huge deal at our school and the kids performed and everything so we only taught like 2 lessons. It was really fun. They are so stinkin sweet.

This little girl is definitely one of my favorites. Her name is  Lorin and she's so stinkin cute.

Except both of my classes were extremely rowdy today and didn't listen to anything I said and I almost lost it for a minute. It's pretty hard sometimes. But them the part of the day that's usually my worst was my best! yay 'store' improvement! :) And I just had this overwhelming feeling of love for those precious little asian babies of mine. They're so cute and I was so proud of them! They are seriously so fun and I wish with all my heart I could bring them all home to meet you guys. Anyways, it's been a good weekend. I'm always pretty tired, but it's worth it because we do so much! It's just great. And that's all I have to say about that. :)
Enjoy some more pictures! (that you can't see..)

Most awesome taxi ride. Sooo fun. and dangerous.. Don't worry I'm ok dad.  

On the skytrain!

On our awesome motor taxi, in action shot!