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!