Following roads...

Tired! I had a great day that began waking from a small amount of sleep that was caused by Johns new discovery of video skype chats. See if you had gotten the video camera when I said I would have slept last night and the new fascination w/ seeing each other would have passed by now;-) haha. 

Anyway I met Hellena's nephew at the school gate today and we took a taxi to pick

 up

 Hellena and her son who is 6, and who has proven to me that 6 year old boys are the same all over the world: adorable, full of energy, and love showing off kung fu moves in the middle of a crowded sidewalk for a photo op. Dang dang (her son) speaks amazing english and I am almost certain once he grows up his english will be better than his chinese. So we all went down to this temple in town and I took some pictures...of course.. I brought Andy with me, and though it turned out to be around 80 degrees today I s

till slipped him into so

me photos, his china adventure continues. The temple was a Daoist (taoist) temple worshiping the God of the Underworld. The

chinese say that this "God" took all the evil spirits on the earth and banished them to hel

l and he keeps them there. While there I saw some women praying for this friend of theirs who had an illness. I took a video them while DangDang pretended to pray to the statues, I'm pretty much in love with this child. Then we looked through some antique shops where people followed me around which tends to happen in places like this. I met this really charismatic shop owner while I was walking around practicing my chinese. He helped me bargain with him which I found ironic but I did it all in chinese with no help from Jackie, ok I take that back I had a small amount of help but pretty much I was on my own. I bought this beautiful

 antique patch made out of silk. I'm going to stitch it onto something, probably a bag not sure. I'm pretty sure I could have gotten it for much cheaper but the guy was so funny I 

felt bad bargaining with him at all. 

Then I looked for a special gift for someone, to no avail, I'm about to give up on this hunt. Maybe I'm being to picky. After that we went to lunch, mmmm lamb, cucumber, Jao zhi, and noodles of course. I splurged and had a Coke with this meal, I was running on empty today. 

Then we walked to the ancient government gate where I took more pics with Andy AND found music shop with a huge PEAVEY sign out front and I took a picture for plea of course. I miss you boys. 

Then we walked to a park, I played on some exercise equipment with dangdang and then we ventured to what I would like to call the saddest zoo ever! We passed a Mosque  on our way, Chang Zhi has a huge muslim population a

pparently. More pictures taken here. 

The zoo was free and was actually a large park that was beautiful, it had a small amusement park of carnival rides to one side and the zoo animals to the other. Ok lets just talk about how depressing it was to see the black bear in a concrete well with no shade and with a tiny baby pool to cool off in. No food, nothing to play with and people throwing chips at it to feed it. Yeah...not cool. Then there were the monkeys and the camel I can't even talk about. Lions who had a habitat about the size of three lions side by side. S-A-D.  

Hellena and Jackie almost freaked when I told them I had seen wild black bears, a wild wolf and wild deer. Crazy wild deer! 

Then we went to the carnival side and I rode this ride with Dangdang and then we watched him play for a while. Then home. This was a great day. Jackie was really funny, and Hellena was so kind, her english is wonderful so it's great having people to spend time with. 

Jackie asked me about my faith and in the process of that was confused about the differences between Christianity and Catholicism. (dont worry Em I explained to him the one true faith KIDDING!) So that led to a deeper conversations about religions, it was very interesting. 

Those of you praying for me I ask that you pray that I listen to the spirit more, and let him guide me to where God wants me to be.