Lost in Translation

Of course there were tons of things translated into English with great intentions of helping out the tourists.
If anything, it provided a bit of confusion and a lot of entertainment.

Hope you have as much fun reading these things from signs, menus, and whatnot as we did!

Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City

Here we are in one of the most identifiable spots in Beijing, right between Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City under the HUGE portrait of Chairman Mao. China actually has his body preserved and on display in a mausoleum in the center of Tiananmen Square. Does it get any stranger than that? We stood in line for about an hour as they ushered thousands of Chinese people who came to give an offering and their respects to his body through the mausoleum.


The Forbidden City was where all the Royal People lived and did business.

Looks just like the movies about Chinese Emerors, huh?








The throne room! Yellow is the color of power and influence and red is the collor of good luck, actually we found out that almost everything in China means "good luck", " lots of luck", or " get some lucky".





Mostly we found out that the most exciting thing about The Forbidden City was its name, but this room was interesting. We learned that back in the day all the pretty ladies would use bronze mirrors like this one to get the perfect look. We couldn't quit figure out how they got thier reflections very clearly.

The Great Wall of China!

We found a "tour" thing that dropped us off at one point on the Great Wall and picked us up 10 Km down.





















We started at a point called "Jinshanling". It was built during the Ming Dynasty, and it's about 3 hours outside of Beijing. We walked/stair-climbed 30 some watch towers down to the "Simatai" section.
It was for sure not made for hiking! The Wall goes up and down ALL of the highest points on the mountains.





















Here is a fine example of what might be the world's most random "Great Wall" video. We were hiking with a couple of our teacher friends from Thailand. The novelty of where we were had worn off a little.

Back to Bangkok

Hi Everyone! Guess what we found out once we were in China...The Chinese government blocks out websites like blogspot, facebook, and YouTube. So, we're a little behind on the blog after 2 very exciting, very packed weeks in China.
Here's a couple highlight pics and we'll be putting up tons more in the next few days.

"Sports Days" at Lertlah

Yup, this is exactly how we felt when we saw what "Sports Days" means in Thailand.

All the schools in Thailand have Sports Week. Despite what the title eludes to, this does not mean that all the students put on their sneakers and get sweaty. No, no, no. Sports days clearly means that the girls put on as much shinny frill and lace as possible and perform dances/cheers.

All the school is divided up into different colored "teams". Stu was on the red team. The part that really confused us was that the "teams" cheered for their color of cheer leaders to win the dance/cheer contests.




These are the representatives of the purple team.
















This is Miss Haylie and a few of her students on the purple team. Faithful fans of their cheerleading representatives.

MBMSI

That means "Mennonite Brethren Missions Service International"...we think. It also means that we know missionaries in Thailand! A couple of weeks ago 2 friends form here and us went to visit (help out if we could) some missionaries you might recognize from "Team 2000". They have a few church plants and an orphanage for children with AIDS about an hour and a half from Bangkok.

This is the worship band at the Saturday evening service they held. It has most of the older boys from the orphanage and some other members of the church playing traditional Thai instruments. Very fun to hear!
They even played some worship songs that we recognized translated into Thai.

We had the BEST timing in the world and showed up for a baptism service. All of the seven Thais that were baptized gave their personal testimonies of how they decided to follow Jesus in spite of very intense "social pressures" and rejection from family and friends. It was an amazing thing to witness.



We asked what we could do to help out for the weekend, and they said we should take the kids from the orphanage on an outing. So we rented this Sawng Taew and went to the zoo with 17 kids!





The elephants, like always, were a big hit! Apparently tourist aren't the only people that LOVE hanging out with pachyderms.

Little Munchkins

Sorry it's been so long since our last blog...It's the end of the first term, and we've been up to our necks in marking, assessing, giving exams, and making tiny, little check marks in tiny, little boxes on report cards. So we thought we should let you see a little of what/who we're so busy assessing!





















This is from "Miss Haylie's" circle time in the morning with one of her 2 Kindergarten classes. One of the most important lessons to learn about teaching in Thailand is the power of the sticker in a 5-year-old's life!



This is the class conquering some of the essential phrases to learning a second language. Such as"My favorite animal is..." :)