We recently took the train to Sichuan province to visit a friend over the weekend.
Our friend is a high school English teacher, so we got to be special guests in her classes.
Josh is great at being teacher-y. :)
One of the students asked Josh to explain the astronomy research he did back in Colorado. hehe
If you look closely, you can see Earth and the Interstellar Medium.
Unfortunately, his arm is blocking a great rendition of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The next class got a map of the U.S. and Colorado.
Then they asked me to explain how to make apple pie. :)
That night, one of the students came over and hung out.
Josh made pulled noodles!
In MY opinion he's rocking the Chinese cooking. But he says he still has a long ways to go.
Another night, we made pancakes with yeast.
Interesting discovery... since Sichuan doesn't eat much bread or noodles (it's a rice place), there wasn't baking soda in any of the stores! But the pancakes were delicious. :)
I think I was slicing fruit? Josh was the chef.
Favorite. :)
One of the specialities of that area is dried meat.
The free samples were pretty good, but we opted for tea to take home to our teachers. Bringing local specialties from home to your host and back home to your friends is an essential part of traveling in China!
Sichuan has beautiful hills and mountains, and every one is supposed to get out and explore the famous places when you travel. We were feeling really lazy, but ended up being glad we went out to hike in the city's most famous mountain park.
The trees were all in bloom!
Underneath the sculpture says roughly, "Fish, Water, Lord, Official."
The story goes that these two wise officials were such good friends, they were inseparable, like Fish and Water.
We learned Sichuan people are known for knowing how to enjoy life. There were places all over the city and all through the mountain park to sit outside, drink tea, and play games. So we joined in. :)
The tower at the top of the mountain.
We'd hung out drinking tea so long, we barely made it to top, took a
picture of the view, and ran down again before they closed up for the
evening.
Here's the view from another overlook.
This is a relatively small city. :)
