I fought the bus and the bus won

There is a river that runs right through Xili. We were taking a walk and came across our new friend the snail.


This is the building I teach in. The building is separated into Senior 1s and 2s. So the classrooms you can see across the way are all Senior 2s and then there are identical ones behind me that are Senior 1s. Also, the campus is very beautiful and has small gardens in between all of the buildings.


This is a tiny row of Dongmen - the shopping district. A couple key buildings and a lot of street vendors create Dongmen where you can find literally anything you want and find nothing at all at the same time. It is PACKED with people at all times. Our favorite ares to go at the moment are the DVD section - it sells illegal DVDs for 6 kuai (less than a dollar) - and any section that sells t-shirts. In China there is a lot of Chinglish shirts - shirts that have English on them but the translation went wrong somewhere creating hilarious sayings for the Americans to laugh at. If you don't know what I'm talking about go to www.engrish.com. So we've been trying to find quality shirts to stock pile before we head back to the states.

So Saturday night we all got together for pizza in one of the Western parts of town. A whole lot more people showed up than we thought were going to and we quickly needed a game plan of where to head after pizza. One guy suggested that we go to this beer garden type area near his school. By day it is a basketball court and by night all these tents get set up with food and beer. Well he was already decently drunk and said he couldn't explain how to get there he just had to go, wander around for awhile, and eventually he would find it. Despite the large uncertainty that this place was possible to find we chose to follow him into the unknown. We arrived in the vicinity and started wandering. The area was side street upon side street of as many shops as possible selling anything you wanted under the sun. Unfortunately by this time it started down pouring and we all got soaked at least up to our knees (for those with umbrellas) from walking around back alley China. As we passed a bar, someone suggested we give up, stop here and find this mystical beer garden another time. So we stopped. Our fearless, drunk, leader would not admit defeat and decided to go wander by himself till he found it so then he could confidently show us the way. I don't know why, but no one tried to stop him and he left. Luckily, fifteen minutes later he returned and said he had success! So we all got up again, went back out into the rain and tromped through the neighborhood on our mission. The trip took a few exciting turns that included a number of dark scary alleys right out of the movies – with the clothes hanging out of all the windows, the cat running in front of us calling into the night, the strange smells and sounds coming from the intersections of each adjacent walkway. And then we came out of the last dark alley and we were there! It was a magical place just as he had described. We spent the rest of the evening under these tents where the owners just absolutely loved us. They brought us a number of free dishes for just showing up. Also everything was extremely cheap – it was 5 kuai (less than a dollar) for a decent sized plate of noodles that fed half the table. So in the end it was a great success – now the question is if we’ll ever be able to find it again.