A brief lesson in Thai culture

Snow in the desert

Because of strange flight arrangements and connections (we'll spare you the details ) we had a 29 hour layover in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The richest city in the world. Basically we walked around and saw what a city with too much money can do.

This is an indoor ski hill. It was even validated by a real live Santa.


This is the Burj Dubai. At roughly a half a mile high, it's the tallest building in the world. (Mark you would really appreciate this :) )
Even though you can't tell, the buildings next to it are actually huge also!














Here's Mr. Koslowsky in front of what would fit into a picture of the Burj.
Despite Stuart's insistence that we really should be allowed to go to the top, the security guards thought it was best to refuse us entrance at all.













And here's Haylie's most favored stop in Dubai. A basket full of $500 worth of
CHOCOLATE.

Merry Christmas!

We hope you all had a Merry Christmas! We had a great day. Here's how it started.



We opened some pretty interesting presents from our Thai students. Stu will be sunbathing with this towel very soon!










Haylie's sporting her beautiful new scarf!









Later in the evening, we took our Christmas spirit to the streets of Bangkok and introduced caroling to Thailand.

Asia's Got Talent

Part of going to China is going to a tea house. That's just how it is. We decided to have our tea house experience in Beijing. The entrance ticket includes what some might think of as tasty little treats, a montage of traditional Chinese performances, including but not limited to singing, dancing, magic tricks, kung fu, opera, acrobatics, and, of course, all the fresh tea you can down.
Words fall short of any explanation of the spectacle that we witnessed. We will let you be the judge of the talent level found in the Far East.

The Yellow Mountains

We spent the second part of our 2 weeks in Southern China bumming around the Yellow Mountains. This is the boat ride down the Li River.





















We hiked up "Moon Hill" just outside of a town called Yanshuo.
The moon shape in the mountain is all that remains of a limestone cave.







This is the view from the top of the moon :) Seems like the Yellow Mountains are misty all the time, so the picture doesn't really capture how far off they go into the distance.






We went on a self-directed tour of the farm lands in the area, and this was the local wild life/ very friendly bit of China we met on the way.

Beijing Night Market

We've really enjoyed all of the readily available meat-on-a-stick in Thailand, but China is much more open minded to what "meat-on-a-stick" is ...









For the most part Haylie was able to keep Stu away from trying too much of the local cuisine ( at the threat of no kisses for a week for every food he ate that was deemed "disgusting" ).
There was a momentary slip up where, despite strong opposition, he somehow found lamb testicles to eat.








We found an actual delicacy! Venison :) Very spendy, but a good reminder of growing up in Montana :)









Strangely, this was one of the few places we found with an excellent translation to English.

Terracotta Warriors

You might recognize these from "Mummy III" :) It's the terracotta warriors from the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang. He was thirteen when he got on the throne and started building his tomb with all the clay men. He specifically said that no two soldiers were to be made alike. This is also the guy that had the Great Wall made.


You wouldn't think it, but they're actually really friendly!














There's about 3,000 army men with some chariots, cavalry, archers, and everything all lined up in battle formation to guard his tomb.







Some farmer found the army about 35 years ago when he was digging for a well. And guess what! The farmer guy was there the day we went to see them. We could "shake his hand to get some lucky." :)








All the warriors were holding weapons that still had poison on them when they were discovered, but some overzealous archeologists took off with them right away. So all of the army guys have their hands holding onto imaginary spears and swords.