Hey :) Stuff that's happened ever since we got back from camp.. We got back Monday around 11pm so Tuesday was a sleep-in, total relaxation day. Don't think I did anything worth mentioning that day; then again I probably forgot cause i was half asleep all day :p Wednesday first day of school after the holiday; Well, I got to school and the first thing that came to mind was: I could really use a break :p, We all got checked for Swine Flu ( sadly no one had a fever). I had a normal day; Art, ow looked at some universities. Little note for the parents: I'm thinking about London..:) And had my tutoring class with Sang Mi at 3...who's been home during the holiday (with her older sister, but she goes out all day) cause her dad didn't want to waste money on a ticket to Korea for her.. makes me feel so sad :(.. Thursday was pretty normal too.. No Chinese class though, cause it was raport card time, .. but I had practised my chinese with Sally in the morning so didn't really mind...Sang Mi was sick, so i went to check on her (Her place is 5min from school)..and uhm we went for dinner at a friend's house, which was really nice :) Friday I was really looking forward to the weekend! :p At 12 Amy, Jenny, Helen, Luis, some other girls and I went to the Renaissance Hotel to go over our ushering (voluntary, i may add) job for the piano concert on Saturday. Miss Lea, teacher at TIS (Teda International School) was giving a free piano concert for the community. I was stationed at the entry door...(the buzziest door, of course, my luck). I had to greet the people: Hello, Nihao, Welcome ( while giving a sincere smile (uhum)). and to keep the people out during the concert (got to work on my already very strong arm muscles...yes, i failed miserably at keeping them out :p) We got back to school and I went to see the grade 9-12 show at 2pm, hosted by grade 12.. So I thought the grade 12 show, where they portraited the different nationalities - fe: here are some russian students passed out in the hallway or the Mac Donalds eating Aussies... - was funny; (this turned out to be a mistake, ..Apparantly it was NOT funny that they were showing us the 'negative' side of each culture..They had a unity message in the end, but it was not funny, that's probably why everyone was laughing... anyways, After Sang Mi I walked home and chilled around the house...Oh and I saw the new Star Trek movie (Does Star Trek and Charlotte in one sentence sound strange to you? I know! but I actually liked it, what 'd you know :p). Saturday was a nice and busy day; literally nice cause the weather was good and nice because i had fun.. Went shopping with Eloisa in the morning in Tang gu. Shopping in Teda isn't like shopping on the Meir though.. You have to know where to go.. and the words quality and cheap do not really go together here..So I ended up buying one shirt/dress, at least I found something :p But I did find out about Eloisa's experience in Nicaragua, she has worked with missionary doctors as a translator in the poor villages and fully understood me when i was talking about camp and the lack of bathrooms and showers .. She even had roaches going on an everything! After the shopping spree I went to the cloth market with auntie Nora and met up with auntie Janet, her parents and the boys, ...For those of you who don't know: the cloth market is the place where you can pick out any fabric you want and have clothes made at a really cheap price.. For example If I would see a dress i like in a magazine, i could bring the picture with me, get measured and have it made ;) Pretty cool eh? After a few hours we went back home and had a late lunch...I heard this phone ringing, this magical sound gave me the awesome idea to call Helen and ask her to come with me to go and get a sim card! So guess what ?! I am now the very proud owner of a China Sim Card! yaay! At 6.45 we went to the Renaissance for the Piano concert. It was so funny (actually it wasn't for miss Lea) cause in the room right next to the concert hall, there was an octoberfest going on: The German inspired beer drinking humpa humpa fest ! :) Of course this made me even more excited about the piano (uhum).. But I have to say I had fun greeting the people at the door, Man, there was this girl who came up to me: ' hey, my friend really likes you (probably hadn't seen a foreigner before) so could you like maybe give him your number. I smiled politely and declined.. I had to stand..stand..yes stand for two hours during the concert...what a service ;) But after intermission I found a little distraction in texting some people (finally!), sadly Auntie Nora saw me texting and so she made her point very clear after the concert :( We got home around 9.30pm about the same time when Uncle B and Nisa got home from their Beijing Volleyball game... Stayed up a little, went to bed and woke up (still curtainless) at 7.30am this morning...Probably going out for lunch in an hour.. Till we meet again;
Hi everyone Here is the long awaited camp blog! So Wednesday we first had a normal day of school (a full day, remember?). I actually went home after lunch though to finish packing (hadn't even started to be honest) and clean up a little...At around 4 the family got home, finished their packing, had dinner together and then we waited for the others to arrive : Tyler, Amelia, Nathan, Helen, Luis...Teda youth basically...We got into the van and hit the road. When we got to Beijing we first stopped at jenny Lou's (shop) to get some lunch for the next day (while Nisa and I sneaked into the DVD store and bought grey's season 5). We went on to stay at this beautiful apartment with very nice people who had insanely comfortable beds btw :p) We got up at 5 am! and left at 6, picking up Milly on the way, she was so funny. She came down in her skirt and flipflops : Milly, Did you know we're going to hike up a mountain today? :p. Arrived at the airport and met up with the rest of our group (total of about 40 ppl), got on the plane and took off :p right on time, the plane left 5 min after we got on :p. I had the window seat next to Helen and Jasmine, which was a lot of fun :) The plane food wasn't all that...Some sort of liquid rice for breakfast..not my thing, very Chinese. Luckily there was a nice piece of bread with bean filling on the side Ow and an egg, which at first sight looked like a chocolate egg so i got all excited but it turned out to be an actual (black) egg, you were supposed to mix it with the rice or something, Helen loved it, so i gave her mine :p. We got to Wenzhou, got my luggage and realized the bag was to heavy to carry up a mountain for several hours, so I tactically scanned the room to look for less heavy bags and carefully chose my target. It worked, I traded bags with Sean, the rugby player who told me he liked to carry heavy bags ( something to do with muscles :)) Mission accomplished :p. Then we were divided into teams. Gooo team honor!! I had a really fun group: Kevin, Shidan, Kazuma, Nisa, Saba, Sean, Helen and myself :) I heard a 30 min bus trip was the next step...right, make it a 2 an a half hours bumpy (and I mean BuMpY) bus ride in a hot, packed with people bus :). Actually it was pretty fun. We had two guitars, lots of voices and a camp spirit (naive people, we had no idea :p). After this ride the bus couldn't take us any further up so we had to start hiking up. There was a shuttle but the catch is, the shuttle could only take up 10 people at a time. I took the last one and had been hiking for about 2 hours, and this wasn't even the actual hike! When we finally got at the actual hike path it was slowly going dark, windy, misty...this being the last part of the 'journey' we all started hiking up. It was exhausting, you wouldn't believe it and our guide didn't want to tell us how much further ( probably to not discourage us). After a good hour we finally arrived at the top of the mountain. It was dark and we were in the middle of an icy cloud. Uncle B and Auntie Nora were already planning to get us down the next day! The monastery was so mystical. You had this smoke surrounding you when you entered the gate, candles, inscents,...The rooms were very simple. A small double bed, a matrass about 2 cm thick, moisty blankets, no heating...but no one complained ( out loud :p). We all got settled and had dinner together. A vegan meal consisting of rice, mushrooms, tofu, vegetables (that were cultivated in the garden). It wasn't bad at all ( but after having the same thing for lunch and dinner 4 days in a row, ..). There were no bathrooms just a hole in the ground, no running water (a natural well), no showers, and to boil the water you had to use wood fires :) Back to basics i would say! Still since we were all together no one really complained. That night we had a devotional at 8, some free time and went to bed. Forget the much needed 8 hours of sleep a night. The monks got up at around 3 am for prayers, introduced by the lovely sound of a Gong.. At around 5.30 am they were all wide awake and so were we...The first day we had (brought by us) bread for breakfast :p Breakfast was followed by the morning devotional and then we got into our study groups. About 10 people of the same age group (15-18) and three team leaders: Babak, Kalan, Omid... We went outside and sat on this awesome rock, surrounded by the most amazing scenery and studied, discussed together. One of the topics I found interesting was the one about spiritual struggle,..That night we had a Quiz night, questions by uncle Bart, it was so funny. Our group was second last but Uncle Bart had put in two 'Belgian' questions in the final round, thanks to myself ( no need for modesty) we were the only group to get the questions right and we ended up in second place =) We had fun :) The next day i got up looked in the mirror ( the only mirror in the monastery btw) and saw this sun burned face staring back at me, I wasn't expecting a sunburn in october :p So I put on my factor 50 and we went back out on the rock... :) Ow and the best camp moment for me was when I got up with the animators really early that morning to go out and say some inspiring words while watching the sunrise.. It was an amazing moment. We had another study day and that night was Bonfire night. It was pretty cool, we had the marshmallows, stories, songs, ..and went to bed for our final night on the mountain. The last day we got homemade cereal for breakfast it was sooo good! Oh i forgot to tell you about the cleanest room contest uncle bart had going on. Who ever had the cleanest room got dried beef as a price, so the boys went all out spelling I LOve Bart with their dirty socks (dirty being the key word, cause that's why they didn't win :p) ( since i was rooming with Milly (animator) we couldn't win, which had its advantages, no point in cleaning the room...just kidding). So After breakfast we all got ready to go back down. After a few hours and a bus ride we arrived at this place called the nine pools. Nine natural pools on the side of a mountain. The clearest water i've ever seen. It was beautiful and not yet discovered by tourists so we were the only ones there. We hiked all the way up to the ninth pool ( of course) so everyone (after passing uncle Bart's swim test) jumped right in! (freeezzzing) but really fun, standing under the waterfall, jumping off the rocks ;) We stayed up there for a few hours and then got in the bus that would take us back to wenzhou, where we spent our last night at a 4 star hotel. Oh My God! warm rooms, soft beds, a bathroom, a shower :) It really made us appreciate all of it! We went out for Japanese that night, well some of us, since you could choose between Mc Donalds and Japanese :p I got my roommate Amelia and we went to check out the disco, we just checked it out cause it felt more like a love palace if ya know what i mean..haha, we went back to out room and talked for hours. I slept like a baby that night :) We got up at 7, went down for a hotel breakfast =) ! Apparently chinese people have sort of what you would have for dinner, for breakfast.. but they also had a western corner, which i took full advantage of :) Then I had a sing along to you i pod hour with Milly which was so much fun :p Our group, the Tianjin/ Teda group had an earlier flight and so we said goodbye to everyone at noon and went to the airport. Went to Beijing, picked up Auntie Janet's parents, squeezed into the Jac and drove home. Got back around 11pm and slept in the next morning =) I had a great time at camp. It was a lesson in detachment and a time to reflect, something we should all do from time to time.
