Hangzhou to Shanghai in the blink of an eye.

(Chris)

We (The Sarcastic Four & Dawn) are now in Shanghai for the weekend! I’m sure Colin, Lizzy or Ryan has talked about Dawn in one of their blog posts. She’s a senior at Hangzhou High School and she has come with us to Shanghai. She is one of the best people you will ever meet! We are so excited that she is here with us.

“What is ‘Pancake’?”

(Lizzy)

We've all moved into our new host families, and I personally have been quite surprised by the differences between my two families. While my first family consisted of a daughter and her parents, I now have a host sister, mother, father, grandmother and cousin. Both parents work all day and often at night as well (though the father works at home), so the grandmother acts as the primary caretaker. She stays home all day, and only leaves to walk the cousin to kindergarten in the morning and go food shopping in the afternoon. She does all of the cooking and cleaning and has lived with the family since my host sister, Yi, was born. I am told that a live-in grandparent is very common among Yi’s classmates, as they often move in to help take care of kids when they’re small and never move out.

Snoopy, Guitars, and Lipstick

(Colin)

In my previous blog post, I started with an attempt to make it shorter than before.  As doing so did nothing, I shall make no such attempts in this post.  I shall simply let the words flow out of me, and whatever length this particular post chooses to be, it shall be.  Here it goes.

Last week was our last week with our first host families.  In celebration, ryan’s host family took us all out to eat at a restaurant known for a dish called “Beggar’s Chicken”, in which a chicken is encased in mud clay then tossed into an oven.