Two Fabulous Days

 I just had two fabulous days back to back, which I figured is blogworthy.

It all began when I was starting to write my Christmas newsletter (on Halloween, no less) in the office and found myself on the edge of tears (because I'm not really ready to start thinking about Christmas away from home). At that perfect time, some of our Chinese co-teachers waltzed in and somehow, in the span of fifteen minutes, the office had transformed into a Halloween dress up dance party. 

The rest of the day was spent doing Halloween lessons with the kiddos, who were more than THRILLED to be singing songs, wearing masks, and getting stickers. 

There is nothing--NOTHING--cuter than watching a classroom of Chinese children go "BOOOO!"

I also got some fun responses to my costume:

"Are you a boy?"

"You have a long nose!"

"You are SCARY."

"You are cool!"

"WAAAAHHH!!!!????"

Thank you, random sparkly clothes from the dress-up bag. 

I also tried to make pumpkin cookies. Keyword: tried. 

Never trust Pinterest when it says you can do this with two ingredients.

The day after Halloween was the beginning of our four-day break and it was time to get away.
In the words of Madea:
"HALLELUYER!"

We started that morning off bright and early waiting for the 831 bus that would take us the big bus station. After a little while we got bored, walked the end of the road, and got a taxi instead.
(this is what we end up doing most of the time. I love getting in the extra exercise! Sorry. I'll put the sarcasm back in it's box).
This landed us at the bus station just in time for the 9:25 bus to the ancient city of Pingyao. 

Chinese buses are known to smell like chicken-feet-breath, make you sneeze, and cause someone to vomit about two hours into the ride. This one was not too unpleasant, though. At least I'm not the one who vomited.

We did make it there alive and managed to find a motorcycle-rickshaw driver/tour guide who stuck with us for the rest of the day. 

And then we reached it: the ancient city of Pingyao. You know the typical pictures that come to mind when you think of China? Well, China doesn't really look like that anymore, but Pingyao does. 

Our first stop was to some sort of temple with creepy statues. Unlike in America, we were allowed to touch and climb on things. That was exciting. 

 

 

After lunch we stopped by a park and climbed on more pretty things. 

 

 

I'm not sure what our guide thought of us at that point, but he was kind and took us shopping. 

We didn't buy anything, but I felt like I was in an old Jackie Chan movie. 

 

 

He took us to a few other places with expensive tickets, so we cut our visit short and got out of the city...by climbing under the wall.

He was nice and met us on the other side to take us to what we thought was the bus station. When he stopped by a bus on the side of the road and babbled at us to get out, we realized that we weren't going to the bus station. And of course, like the brave souls we are, we got on the bus. 

Maybe THIS is taking us to the bus station we thought. 

After a few minutes of driving, we finally asked where we were going. 

He was taking us ALL the way back to Taiyuan. 

And we had the bus ALL to ourselves. 

HALLELUYER.