Dawn's Blog

Goodness, it has been a long time since I blogged. I've been busy lately and there hasn't been a whole lot to blog about. Last week was our halloween party/talent show. I was a penguin. A couple of my friends here rewrote the words to Miley Cyrus' song "Party in the USA" so that it reflected our experiences coming to China, and we sang that.

I'm actually becoming quite the musical performer here. I have also joined the Christmas choir (I was informed that I should sing soprano) and our first practice is this week. Also, I have recently volunteered to teach the students how to square dance. I plan on this being awesome. Who knew my square dancing skills would actually be useful? And to top it all off, I spent a lot of time today thinking of and singing songs with the word "mountain" in them, which brings me to my next story.

Last night I decided last minute to go with some people today to go hiking around a mountain. It was a good decision. It was a beautiful, warm day. I knew that China had some beautiful land, but I hadn't seen that yet. We had a nicely diverse group - five Americans and four Chinese. We did some hiking, did some climbing stairs, had a picnic lunch, did some people watching, did some more hiking, took a lot of pictures, hit a dead end and had to hike back the way we came, fell asleep as soon as we got back in the van, and had Korean barbecue on the way home.

While we were hiking, we heard a man singing some traditional chinese music, I mean really belting it. So we asked our Chinese friends what he was singing, and apparently it was a traditional mountain song. So this got me to thinking about our "mountain" songs, which brings me back to what I was saying before (please see poll to vote on your favorite mountain song!)






At one point during our hike we heard some small dogs barking and looked up and there were three poodles barking at a woman's feet. She was wearing exteremely furry boots which apparently looked like animals to the poodles.  It might have been one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Every time this poor woman started to walk away from them, the dogs would run and bark at her boots, and the dogs' owner couldn't do anything to stop them.