So the first picture is us with President Thomas (whom we affectionately refer to as Ron Thom¨) when he and his wife Mary met us in Fuzhou the other night! They arrived at the Shangri La Hotel (super ritzy...all the lounge waitresses were wearing Santa bathrobe outfits with fuzzy boots, which is undoubtedly the mark of a sophisticated establishment). But really, it was really great. There was a reception and we all got to chat in a big circle about how Pac Rim was going, and then we all got baseball hats!

The other two pictures are me with my new Chinese buddies. They really wanted to show me this church but it was late at night, so they got the guard lady to let us in because they said I wanted to compare Chinese churches with American churches (I didn´t have the heart to tell them I´ve never been to church in my life. I guess I HAVE been inside them, thought...). These guys, whose names are Rosemary, Michael, and Panda (he´s in the red) were really great. We talked about a lot of interesting stuff at dinner, like POLITICS!

I started telling them about the election in America, and how it was unprecedented because young people like ourselves turned out in droves to actively campaign and get people to vote. More young people voted in this election than in a really long time, I told them, and I told them about how good it felt to be part of something big. I am not kidding, their eyes were glowing and they were saying things like, ¨Yeah!¨ and ¨How great!¨ and I could tell they were genuinely excited about it, but as soon as I asked ¨Do you ever wish you could participate in an election like that here in China?¨ this sort of glazed, blank expression took over and they didn´t talk right away. It was so awkward!! They were like ¨No, not really...¨ and then Rosemary sort of laughed apologetically (she was the social one) and said, ¨The Chinese government has a lot of stability...we don´t need to change it.¨

Wow! Then yesterday morning I was sitting in on an English discussion class led by Dodie, an American ex-pat teaching English at Hwa Nan, and we got to talking about political protests and that sort of thing. When I asked if it was difficult to go against the norm, this one girl Lynn said ¨Yes. We are all inculcated to be obedient.¨ !!!!!

So you can imagine, this is like a gold mine for me in terms of finding stuff to write about in my research paper about the political attitude of Chinese students. Wowee.

The other photo is Alfred, the ewok-squirrel doggy, and the last one is a cute baby. (This baby was a 7.5 on the cuteness scale- Mongolian babies are 10s).

Tomorrow, VIETNAM!! 80 degrees....i can´t wait...