Weekend in Handan

Hi Everybody, I haven’t posted in a while so I have a lot to catch you up on:

I’ll start with my weekend in Handan. HanDan is a smaller city south of Shijiazhuang. As always it was awesome to travel on the Chinese railroad system, this trip only took about an hour. In HanDan I met all of my host parent’s family. I guess that both host parents lived there for their whole life and moved to Shijiazhuang like three years ago. So i met my uncles, and aunts, cousins, grandparents, and family friends. We have male cousins about the age of YiFeng (13 yrs) who are twins. Twin boys are considered extremely lucky here, and plus they were just really cool. One of them was big into magic. That seems to be pretty popular amongst the younger crowd. In Handan we visited some parks. One was surrounding this extremely old bridge. There are stories about man learning to walk at this bridge. I didn’t understand everything but that’s the general idea. Another park was surrounding this castle built by the Zhao emperor. This is not your traditional European castle so wipe that image from your mind. This one was smaller, but still cool. Also in this park was a zoo. And sorry no Panda bears :( On Sunday, I celebrated the holy day of Easter right, and found a Chinese church. It’s hard to say what denomination it was because I couldn’t understand a thing. But denominations are manmade divisions anyways, so i believe its better to tear sown those walls and live as purely Christians, not Methodists or Catholics, or Lutherans. But anyways, it was awesome to attend a church on Easter Sunday, I didn’t get the Easter vibe at that church like I do at others, maybe it was because I couldn’t understand. The church was absolutely packed! And this was a pretty big church. The pews were packed and people were sitting in the aisles. It was awesome to witness. I recognized some of the songs but couldn’t sing along. Also, outside the church, they had an outreach program where the fed hundreds of people. I was able to make a donation to the church. A small amount of Money by the US standards, goes along way for many Chinese people. Anyways it was super cool to be there and I got some videos and pictures i can show you when I return home.

After returning to Shijiazhuang, we returned to our daily routines. We played another round of AFS Olympics. Since my teams lost last round in Soccer. We were able to choose the next event played. We choose Ultimate Frisbee. This was a game that was new to both the Chinese and the Europeans. But still we pulled out a convincing win and the Olympics stands at 2 Gold Medals for the good guys and 1 for the bad. There is a group of French students at the school right now. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to spend a ton of time with them but still it’s been cool to talk with them. Soon some German teachers and principals are coming and will sit in our class. We must be on our best behavior or else... Ekkk! Other than that not much is new. We are going to Beijing a week from tomorrow. and we are still working on going to Shanghai in a month for the Expo. But, that’s it for now. Hope this post finds you and yours well in the states. Enjoy your Spring Breaks! (In China students get the weekends off sometimes and they call that break) Love and Peace!