Out on our own!

Well Jim and I decided to get out on our own and try out our Chinese. I made little cards (business card sized) and wrote the Chinese (yes, I wrote the characters!), the PinYing, and the English for some common phrases that we would need, such as: xishoujian zai nar(where is the washroom?) huochezhan(railway station), and chuzuche (taxi).

Friday morning we headed downtown. We made it to the RT Mart and took a taxi out to the Comb Lane (Changzhou is known for making combs). That went so well we found our way back to Nandijie and did some window shopping. We decided to eat at McDonalds. While I was ordering the burgers, three little beggar boys came to Jim for money. I think he gave them each a quai apiece (1 yuan). When I came back with the food he was telling me about it and I looked out and saw the three of them along with three others ranging in age from about 4 to about 12. In a little bit the little guy came back in and held out his hand to me for money. I told Jim I wouldn't give him money, but took him to the counter and ordered six burgers and six cokes. When they set the drinks up on the counter I pointed to him and motioned for him to go get his brothers and sister. He took off to find them. When they came back in, the worker tried to run them off but I told her it was okay. When she realized I had bought them food she said "Xie Xie" (Thank you) to me. At least that day I knew they had something to eat.

Anyway, the next day we decided to try our hand at going to Suzhou (known for its silk). We went to the train station and jostled through all the crowd and ordered train tickets, but the next train with seats was 3 hours later so we decided to walk around town. We ended up at a China mobile store and I bought a cell phone (OSU ORANGE in color!!). Whe we were ready to board the train, it was a double decker and we were down in the bottom among all the people with huge bags of produce, packages, babies, etc. People were packed in like sardines. :-)

We finally arrived in Suzhou and went ahead and bought return tickets and made sure we were on one of the T trains with soft seats! We bought some Christmas gifts and caught the train back home and were back in our apartment by 7:30 pm. That adventure went so well we decided to try to mail a couple of packages. So on Sunday afternoon we ventured over to China Post and actually mailed two packages to my mom and my son. We didn't have packaging big enough for the girls but are working on them...sure hope my family gets the things we are sending. All in all, it was quite a satisfying weekend. That helped offset the frustration I had on Thursday when the computer department rendered my laptop useless. They were supposed to reset my password to access the internet, but managed to change all my executable files including my program files to another file extension. I still am feeling pretty helpless right now since I can't open any of my files or print anything. If all else fails I will stay up until midnight and call the IT guys at OSU and yell "HELP!" Oh well, we will see... following are some random pics.

Here are some of the students at school during our flag day celebration.This is an area between our apartment and MegaMart. All of the soil has been dug and the trees and plants placed one by one by hand.

This is a fountain that we saw at the 3 Gorges Dam. Well, enough rambling for now. Hopefully my laptop will be back operational within the next few days and I can access my pictures again.

Ziajian