Wow! What a weekend

Hello Friends and Family,

Sorry it has been a couple of days since our last post. We are still alive and still in China. On Friday, we were taken into town and had dumplings with four Chinese and a Japanese man, then taken to buy a cell phone. I think Mr. River was getting tired of us not being a home to answer our phone, so we bought a 300 RMB cell phone in China and now we can call anyone in China and they can call us. It came in very handy this weekend when we decided last minute to go on vacation to Beihai! The city of Beihai is on the Gulf of Tonkin, about 2.5 hours by bus. We hopped on a bus on Friday night and found a hotel we saw online. The taxi driver kept taking us to different hotels, trying to convince us we should stay there instead, but eventually he took us to our hotel. We had a great time together. It was good for our confidence to get out on our own and venture into China without any help. We had to do a lot of pointing and gesturing and we used our travel books and English-Chinese book. But we stayed at the Silver Beach all day, walking the boardwalk, swimming in the water and drinking coconut milk. We were covered by an umbrella and a hat for the whole day, except for one hour of swimming, but that was enough to burn our faces and shoulders. It is very hard to find sun tan lotion in China! We will post the pictures from our trip on our travel blog and you can go to that by clicking on the 'Traveling China' link to the right of this post. It seems that we are having problems posting pictures so we will get those up soon. We will also update the 'Fun Foods of the Far East' blog and you can see the meal we had this morning. Eventually, I will try and put pictures of the two birds I have identified in China so far so that all our blogs will be updated. We had a great time relaxing together and preparing for the week. We found out on Friday that we will start teaching tomorrow (Monday) so we have been preparing for that as well. We will each teach 18 45 minute classes a week. We got our schedule tonight. I (Ryan) don't have any classes on Friday! Kealy has one in the morning and she might see if she can switch it to Thursday and then we would have a three day weekend all semester long. The semester lasts 21 weeks with a 5 week break in between semesters. Sometime I will post our schedule but we each teach about 4-6 hours a day. They take a 2.5 hour lunch break and we each have one evening class a week and a English corner/club on Thursday nights. We will let you know how teaching goes tomorrow, we will probably start out with basic introductions and days of the week. If you have any suggestions on topics or teaching methods we should use, we would love to hear your ideas. You can e-mail us anytime, we check it constantly. Tomorrow we are having dinner with Kathy, the daughter of the president at the college here, who was a graduate student at WOU where we met her and arranged our teaching here in China. We are looking forward to seeing you again. Hope you all enjoy your Sunday, it was a good day here; palm trees, sandy beachs and my beautiful 'lao po' (wife) with me! Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,
Ryan and Kealy Thorson

P.S. We found a movie store across the street in the market from the school that has new movies in English! We have already watched Fantastic Four and are watching Die Hard 4 tonight!!!