First stop: Nanning

The biggest holiday in China is the Chinese New Year, and after that comes the Spring Festival. It's all kinda lumped together. But from now until the middle of February all of the students go home. As I have said before, we live in a district which was established especially for Universities. There are 14 or 15 Universities in our area and that's all there is! Universities and shops which are open mainly for the students and teachers. This is how they keep their businesses afloat. So... when the students go home, so do the shop keepers. Everything closes down. We left today because of this. I went across the street last night to get some last minute items before leaving today, and the shop keeper told me that they would be closing in 4 days. I asked when they would be open again, and she said February 15th. There is a major supermarket which will stay open, but that's about it. When the students go home, so do the shopkeepers! It is literally a ghost town! Some schools ask their foreign teachers to leave because the school closes, and so does the building the foreign teachers live in. Some of our friends teach at a near by school. Their supervisors asked them to leave the Xiasha area because of this, and if they didn't want to because of money, the school would pay for them to stay in a hotel downtown. That doesn't happen in every school, but there are some that do that!

Anyway...

We flew out today and we have arrived in Nanning! This is a southern city which is close to Vietnam. We will bus down to Vietnam on Tuesday. It's a bit colder here than it was last year at the same time, but we're all content! Me, Stan, and Kevin are making our way down to Vietnam again. We got to do this trip last year and are excited to get to do it again. Something different about this years trip, though is that when we were saying good bye to our Chinese friends, we were really sad and didn't want to go. We didn't really have that feeling last year. We hadn't formed really strong friendships yet. We will be happy to return back to Xiasha and hang out with our friends! Pray for our safe travels! Luckily for Kevin, the flying portion of our trip is over, until we go back to Xiasha. He doesn't like flying very much, so now that that's over we can all have a blast! He's done a blog about his fear of flying, so I don't feel bad for saying it. haha!!

Well, that's all I have! I just wanted to give you all a little update of our plans! Thanks for reading! I love you all!