we took a two day field trip to a nearby miao village this week. on the way there, my soldier (every class gets a soldier to train the kids in military drills) led the kids in singing communist army songs, and they began shouting for me and kevin, the westerners on the bus, to sing american songs. we obliged by alternating Jsus loves me this i know, america the beautiful, and silent nite with their commie tunes.

at the village, there was a big ceremony with lots of performances at nite, there must've been over a thousand people gathered. the school asked us foreign teachers to put something together, so i played a phil keaggy piece on guitar, chris sang a hawaiin song, and then me, chris, kevin, dan, and jd played and sang 1979 and the sweater song for them (we called ourselves the micky mao club). me and jd did the mini dialogues in the sweater song in chinese, we rocked all of them.

a normal day, which happens about half the time, looks like this: teach for and hour and half in the morning. that's it...the rest of the time is free. sometimes there's activities the school has for us, like when they asked us, five minutes after we finished dinner, to play basketball for their teacher's team in a game that was beginning then. they gave us all uniforms and threw us in the game at the 2nd quarter, that was interesting, it was the first reffed game i've played in since those rec leagues in 3rd grade. i had about 10 points, a few assists and rebounds, and 100000 turnovers in about 30 minutes. unfortunately we lost, i blame it on the hole our team got into during the first quarter.

today su-jin, the cook (who's in his young twenties), took me and chris on his motorcycle (3 man sandwich) to this spot in the mountains to go swimming. at first he took us to this stream right off the mountain road, but when we got there it was packed with butt naked 50 year old men, so he took us to another place and dropped us off, where we hiked to this super random mini-waterfall and pool in the middle of the mountains, which soon became populated with naked 22 year old men. it was beautiful, and so was the scenery. seriously though, it was exactly like the one described in balzac and the little chinese seamstress.

it's so hot here, the average temperature is 40 degrees Celsius, which is 104 degrees F. it's too bad the river right outside my apt is dirty, otherwise i'd jump in everyday.

that's it for now, tonite we're heading into town to get massages, 2.50 (american) an hour! stuff is so cheap here, i love it.