I cleared out my bank today. I had to carry over $4000 around before I could get back to my room and hide it away. Luckily I safely made it and got the money back to America and in my bank.


I love being crafty! I sent out an email to some friends asking for things that they learned while in China for instance "Never ask what kind of meat you are eating...you don't want to know". For a going away present I decorated little jars and filled them will all the different things that our grouped learned in our year together. That way we could all look back and remember the crazy place we call China.


The end of the world came and went. It was predicted that at 6pm the evening of May 21st the world was to end. I wanted to have an "End of the World" party and we decided what was better than having a water balloon fight on our final day?? That day Jenni, Gen, Marie and I's friend from Changsha, Jun, was visiting Shenzhen with a friend so they ended up joining us. His friend's name was Xin which sounds like Sheen so we ended up calling him Charlie all day....I don't think he liked us very much. Jenni, Marie and I joined with them for lunch and then Charlie ended up choosing to leave us. Marie also had to go home. So Marie, Jun and I headed to the park and met Andrew to have a waterballoon fight! The onlooking Chinese people thought we were hilarious. Afterward we played frisbee which they also found entertaining (Chinese don't play frisbee). Two ended up joining us to their delight. This picture was taken of one of the children onlookers who believed he had the force. Jenni and I were playing super hero with him but he was always the winner. Next step was to meet up with Cliff and Lisa, and we lost Andrew, and we all headed to the mall for dinner. We were a bit early so we played The Great Dal Mutti outside McDonalds (you've got to have some card playing before the end of the world!). Our dinner didn't end up being that special but at 6pm luckily no one disappeared and the world is still alive. Thank goodness, we were worried.


Last day of Chinese class!! Our last day only had five students, but that wasn't too bad of a turn out...Later was the end of the year celebration with CTLC. It started off with an all you can eat dinner at an Italian restaurant. It was really good! And it was nice to see so many CTLCers all at once...though mostly we stuck with our main crowds. Next stop was a really nice hotel where we had rented out one of the rooms. Sadly the hotel was very stingy with us bringing in our own alcohol and their alcohol was extremely expensive. So we all left there and headed to Coco Park where a lot of the foreign bars and clubs are located. A CTLCer we don't talk to much ended up jumping into our taxi on the way over. He was a little drunk and serenaded us as well as talked to us about his druggie lifestyle. It was pretty entertaining. Our Coco park extravaganza was a bit dramatic. There were a lot of drunk people. The funniest (when looking back at it) part was that someone got stuck in the bathroom for about twenty minutes. It took us three employees, multiple possible solutions, and a lot of yelling through a door to get the drunk individual inside to finally figure out how to unlock the bathroom.


Melissa, one of the second year English teachers, invited me and a few of the other teachers over to her house for a Chinese dinner. We had bitter bamboo (which was ok...), green beans, breaded potatoes and meat. Overall it was a really good dinner. Later I met up with some friends because Genevieve had a whole bunch of friends visiting from America so we were showing them around Windows.


All year I've been talking about hosting a poker tournament and it finally happened! China doesn't really have poker chips so we used Uno cards instead. There were nine participants and Trevor got first place. Everyone had a good time and we're already planning more for next year.


The English departments took Fuat and I out for a goodbye lunch at our favorite buffet. The event started with our contact teacher and a representative from the principal's office giving speeches in our honor and then we each received a book of Chinese paper cuttings. It was a beautiful gift. Later that night Jenni and I got dinner with some people at Windows and then went on a hunt for the green lazer! Every night a green lazer travels across Nanshan and it has been a great mystery for me and some of the teachers at my school as to where it is coming from. Jenni and I took a bus towards it and then had a good half hour walk through unknown territory just trying to find it. We finally arrived at HANS LAZER (a lazer making company). Maybe a little anti-climatic but I was still proud we found it.


My school informed me that they were taking away my last week of teaching. The school had rearranged all the schedules because the students were all starting to take a swimming class for the summer so instead of giving me a whole new schedule for a week they just canceled my class. Most would be happy at this but I was really sad because it meant that I wasn't going to get to say goodbye to my classes. Since I was obviously distraught about all this the other English teachers all gave me 10-15 minutes with each of my Senior 1 classes so that I could get a chance to finish the semester. I handed out awards for all the students who got 150%, gave them some contact information and took a class picture with each group. This is one of my favorite classes, Class 3.


Two things about the bus: sleeping people and the amazing working women. Sleeping on the bus is an art. Especially the part where you need to make sure you wake up before your stop. As for the women, as I said, they are amazing. Some buses have electronic card swipes to collect fairs but all the others have a woman hired to 1. collect money from each person who gets on the bus 2. to announce each stop before it comes 3. to call out to the bus driver if someone wants to get off and 4. to make sure no one rides the bus for longer than they paid for. This would typically be not that hard of a job, but most Chinese buses are packed with at least 40 people so it gets difficult. Most of these ladies days are spent pushing their way through hoards of people trying to insure that they get all the money owed to the bus as possible.


Adventure weekend day two! Jenni and I decided we wanted to have a bbq so I found a park in Louhu that rented family sized bbq pits. Cliff, Andrew, Marie, Lisa, Jenni and I went out and made our own food. We did vegetables, corn, potatoes, hot dogs and marshmellows!! Afterward some of us headed back to Jenni's and watched Gnomeo and Juliet (not the greatest). But we had fun anyway.