New Friends

One of the wonderful people we met at the school was a girl named Jenny. She would come help us during the day, and take us out at night to find places and shopping. She was so cute! Just been married for a year. She is 28 years old.

Jenny

Susan and I have been regularly dancing with many women outside of our hotel at night. Last night we went to say good-bye and to give them some sweat-suits that the school gave us, that wouldn't even have fit Yao Ming! We don't know why they gave them to us, but maybe they didn't know how large they were. We have two favorite women that we dance with, and tried to give it to them, but with limited English for them, and limited Chinese for us they didn't want to take them. I found some young women walking by that spoke English and translated that we wanted them to have them cause they took up too much room in our suitcases, and were too big. One of the women wanted us to come to her house so we could give her our email, so off we went! She lives about 5 minutes from our hotel in a very quiet neighborhood. One of the women's name was Ling Ping, and the other, Su An.

We went to Ling Ping's home, and Su An came too. Ling Ping's husband was there in his "underwear" or maybe they were shorts, but was very gracious to receive us. Imagine bringing home strangers from a foreign land that you met out exercising! Wonder what Rich would say about that?

Anyway! They pulled out watermelon, lotus seeds, peaches, and began to make coffee, which we told them we couldn't drink. We stayed for about 30 minutes and talked, as best we could, with the computer translating some words. Both Ling and her husband were engineers. They are 68 years old, and just so darling! I'm for sure going to email her and come and visit her again if I come back here!

The apartment was very small, with a dining room/ living room area, 2 bedrooms a small small bathroom with the sink outside the bathroom, and a very small kitchen.

When we left she gave us lotus seeds and a beautiful silk scarf.

The next morning we had 2 more sweat suits and some cookies donated from other teachers so we walked back over with Annie, another teacher, and dropped them off. We watched some videos she had on her computer about lotus plants, the Great Wall, and Xian, since she knew we were heading there today.

We left for Shanghai this morning and had lunch before heading to the airport. We are sitting at the airport waiting to board our flight to Xian!

Ling Ping and I