Hi from China.  My family and I are getting ready to come home soon.  We will return to Idaho on January 29, 2013.  See you soon!

New Post, Finally

In China it is hard to blog because the government shuts down some websites.  It has been quite a while since we were able to get on here to post.  Since our last post, we have visited the cold Northeast part of China in a city called Changchun.  We went there for a conference of Fulbright teachers.  I enjoyed playing with Maggie Smith, who is the daughter of a Fulbright teacher.  Yesterday we returned from Taiwan.  I liked it.  It was a busy place.  My dad was a missionary in Taiwan thirty years ago, so we went to visit some of the places he lived.  We will be returning to the U.S. in about three weeks.  I can't wait to get home so that I can see our pets, see my family, play with my friends, go sledding, and eat some hot dogs.  Please make some comments on the blog to let me know how you are doing.  I can't wait to see you all. 

Here is a banana tree with a banana flower and green bananas growing above it.

Here I am in front of a cool garbage can!  We went to Northeast China and it was really cold.  Here it was almost 15 degrees below zero.  I got to play with my friend Maggie, who lives in this city.  In South China they can grow bananas at this time of year, but in North China it is as cold as Idaho in the winter.

This is the Longshan Temple in Taipei.  We visited it at night.  People were worshiping by burning incense.  I didn't like the smell.

Here is the LDS temple in Taipei.  Jenna and I stayed in the church while my Mom and Dad went through the temple. 

We fed some pigeons at a place called the Chaing Kai Shek Memorial.  It was a really big place with lots of birds.  I had a bird eat out of my hand.   

I'm rowing a boat on the lake at Taichung Park in Taiwan.  My dad was a missionary in this city 32 years ago.

In Taiwan, we went to a Buddhist temple in a town near the ocean.  It had a lot of statues.  It had a lot of colors, too. 

Here is a street in Taiwan at night.  There are a lot of signs.

Jenna is in a bookstore.  We thought this shirt was funny.  It has "Chinglish" which is funny translations of Chinese into English.   

We are singing at a Christmas party at our apartment where the students came to see how Americans have parties.  We had Jello, and most of the students had never tasted it before.   Almost all of them liked it.   We sang English and Chinese songs.  Our apartment was very crowded.    

The parents of this little girl have a photographer taking pictures of her.  I thought she was cute.

These are dried snakes in a market that we visited.  There is a cat sleeping next to them.

These are buckets of scorpions.  The scorpions are alive and crawling all over each other.  People buy bags of scorpions to take home.  We don't know why, but think it is for traditional Chinese medicine.  I wouldn't want to put my hand in there.  AHHH!!!.

These are fried grasshoppers that we ordered at a restaurant.  I ate two of them, but I took off the legs of one and the head of the other.  They didn't taste like much.  They were just really crunchy.  The restaurant brought them by airplane from another part of China.

Jenna is going to eat a grasshopper.  We were all nervous about eating them, but they weren't too bad. 

We are eating a very expensive breakfast.  The food was pretty good.  It had a really nice view.  We were on the 29th floor of the highest building in Zhaoqing, a city near Guangzhou.  I was happy there was an elevator. 

 When we started feeding these fish, they started splashing and swimming on each other.  I like the black ones. 

This is me standing in front of a big door.  I am trying to look like the guy on the door. 

These are pretty colored scarves in the market at YangShuo, on our trip to Guilin. 

I am Santa Claus.  Merry Christmas.

I got to shoot an arrow at a park.  It was hard to shoot it. 

My family and I went to Guilin, about 300 miles from Guangzhou.  It had a lot of neat mountains.  Here we are near a cool river. 

Here I am at a Branch party, trying to bite a donut off of a string.  I couldn't use my hands. It was tasty and sugary!  I even got two.

We went on a boat up this river.  This picture shows the mountains and boats.  I liked it when we went through a cave while on the boat.  The mountains in this picture remind me of fingers and a thumb.

This is another hill in a place called Yangshuo. 

I am sitting in a chair carved out of wood.  It was not comfortable at all. 

Another picture of the hills.  It was raining.

These are pagodas in the middle of a river in Guilin.   They are really pretty.  

Hello!  The censors in China have been working overtime since the Chinese government just changed, so access to Tia's blog has been blocked much of the time.  We managed to get on today.

From Tia:We had a friend from Rexburg visit us.  Duane Adamson works with my dad.  He stayed in my room.  We took him to the Chen Family Temple.  And we went to Guilin for two days.  We rode a boat on the river and looked at the amazing mountains.  They had cool shapes and were really steep.  I got a beautiful purse there. 

I thought that this flower was pretty.

This is a market near our home.  They sell a lot of fruit here.  I like to buy pomegranates, star fruit, mangoes, and watermelon.  When my dad was taking this picture, his contact lens fell out.  Some Chinese people helped him find it. 

Here I am feeding a giraffe at the zoo.  They have really long necks.  Their tongues are long and bluish pink. 

When we picked up this package at the post office, we found that a rat had chewed a hole in it.  It liked the box of jello. 

This is an old-style Chinese pillow.  It is made out of pottery.  I don't think that I could sleep with pillow that is so hard.

We went to an election party at a hotel in Guangzhou.  Since the Chinese people don't vote, many of them asked questions about the election.  Most of the people there were happy that the President won. 

For Halloween, we carved a watermelon, a dragon fruit, and a pumpkin.  They were scary!  Mine is the watermelon. 

This is the LDS temple in Hong Kong. Jenna did baptisms for the dead here. 

Here is Jenna and her friend Naomi on the Hong Kong ferry. 

This is a busy street in Hong Kong.  We were on a long escalator when my dad took this picture. 

In Shanxi, we had breakfasts at our hotel.  Here are some of the foods we ate.  I think the butterfly was pretty.  I liked the bacon best (there isn't any bacon in this picture. 

This is where we looked at the statues of Buddha.  Can you see that there are three?  One is hiding in a cave--you can see its head.  Jenna and I are standing in front of the hidden Buddha. 

This is the orphanage where I lived for the first two years of my life.  The person with Jenna and me is the orphanage director.  They put up a sign to welcome me back.

This is the room where I stayed.  One of these cribs was mine.  I think it is the one in the corner.  Mom is saying hello to this little guy. He smiled at her.

This was where I was found when I was only five days old.  It is near the street at the front of the orphanage. 

These are people's prayers at a Taoist temple that we visited.  They hang them in a tree.

I am in a cave.  We went to a place where there were many caves with statues of Buddha in them.  It was amazing.  Some were really big and some were really small. 

This me and my family at the Hanging Temple in Shanxi.  Why it is called the Hanging Temple is because it is built on a cliff.  Hundreds of years ago, Buddhist Monks came here to be alone and pray.  The stairs were very little and it was easy to fall down them.  I didn't fall down, though.  See the pumpkins on the roof.  They are made of clay.

Here is another picture of the Hanging Temple. 

We went to a place where they made ceramics--ceramics means pots and stuff like that.  This guy is making a pot. 

My sister and I are doing kung fu.  Jenna kicks almost as high as the red guy. 

This is a ceramic rooster.  I bought it because I was born in the Chinese year of the rooster. 

We are having dinner with some of my dad's students--Wang, Aviva, Mailin, Apple, and Lin.  We are having noodles that they make right there in the store.  When they make the noodles, a guy takes some dough and stretches it out several times until he has enough noodles.  We figured it out that when he stretches it seven times (doubling each time), it makes 64 noodles.  I like Chinese noodles.   

This is the city of Guangzhou and the Pearl River.  We live in this picture, though you can't see our house because the big buildings are in the way.