I may as well use my free time to post here....

Let's start with Nathan's birthday which was last Tuesday, shall we?
I taught my class, meaning we watched a movie because I couldn't let them get ahead of the other class then headed off to the train station with Sophie to get my ticket. Sophie waited with me at the station for awhile, then headed back to the campus while I waited for the train. It finally came after an hour of sitting in an overly-crowded room with hundreds of people staring at me. It happened to not only be the long train, but also a non-air conditioned one to boot. I spent a majority of time playing peek-a-boo with the babies sitting near me and listening the buzz of Chinese going on. Nathan was a little bit late to pick me up, which was fine, I made 'friends' with a cab driver who was rather eager to drive me around town. Nathan soon arrived and we caught a cab to the Thai place he wanted to eat at for his birthday lunch. Only... they were closed! We decided to come back for dinner and bring everyone with us instead.
We grabbed a cab and headed back to campus to drop off my bags and round everyone up. Then we (Simon, Pearl, Peter, Nikolai, Nathan, Luna, and I) all headed off to Banana Leaf for some dinner. While we were waiting for a table Nathan happened to run into one of the dancers who worked there that he knew from Beijing. Crazy! I took a picture of them reuniting so Nathan could show all his Beijing friends.

Dinner was delicious and expensive. We sang, danced, laughed, and gorged our way through a wonderful meal. The dance troupe sang 'Happy Birthday' to Nathan and made the two of us get up to dance. That didn't last too long, but it was rather funny.
After dinner we decided to hit up karaoke. Pearl and Peter went back to the campus, leaving the rest of us to party. After scouring the various karaoke joints we finally found one that was in our price range and to our taste. Two hours, many beers, and inevitable sore throats later, we finished up singing and headed back to the campus.

The next few days were uneventful. Nathan had work so I mostly stayed around his apartment watching movies and cleaning.

On Friday we headed back to Jiujiang for the evening as we couldn't get directly to Lushan easily from Nanchang. We slept in a bit on Saturday before packing up and heading out. We had decided that the easiest way to get to the mountain would be to just rent a car to head out there. Luckily for us a taxi was sitting just outside the gate as we headed out, and the driver turned out to be great. He drove us to the mountain and took us directly to a decent, if over-priced, hotel where we could drop off our bags and stay for the night. He also arranged for another cab to take us to the various sites for the rest of the day, and then even took us to a nice restaurant where we could have lunch. We decided that the restaurant was too expensive though, so our new cab driver, a woman, took us to a different place where we could get a moderately priced meal. After eating, we headed off to the sites. The first place our driver took us was a rather short hike where we could see some nice scenery. At one point I was accosted by a group of Chinese girls and 'forced' to take pictures.

When we had finished with this place, we found that our driver had somehow found a highly irritating tour guide for us. They took us to another part of the mountain where we had to buy a ticket for something, but we didn't know what. We soon realized it was for the gondolas and a long suspension bridge Nathan had wanted to see. Luckily the tour guide was too scared to go over the bridge so we soon lost her. There was some confusion as to where we were supposed to go from this point on, so we continued on the path and millions of stairs which lay before us. I was having some unpleasant flashbacks to Huangshan, but there were far fewer stairs. We even ran into a place where they kept monkeys!

The path spit us out with no cab driver, or rather not our cab driver, to be seen. Nathan gave her a call and she told one of the other cabbies to drive us back to where we had originated. He pointed us down another path then scuttled off. Not eager to conquer more stairs, we looked at each other, bewildered, before heading on. There was a nice lake to our right and some fun waterfalls and rivers to climb around along the path. We soon found the area we were meant to meet the driver and she came along to pick us up.

She then took us to Mao's villa, the building where the Lushan Conference was held, and a place where Kai Shek's soldiers had trained. We were soon wiped out and asked her to return us to our hotel.
We had dinner at a restaurant down the street before returning to our room and passing out in front of the tv.

The next morning we had thought there would be a lot to see in Guling, the small town we were staying in, but we were wrong. After walking the streets a few times and having an early lunch, we grabbed our bags and headed back to Jiujiang.
When we arrived in Jiujiang we decided to go Dvd shopping and get some McDonalds. We grabbed Jennifer and Cary and headed downtown. We perused the dvd racks for awhile, then Cary had to get back to campus. We said hasta to him and headed on to McDonalds for a feast of epic proportions. Just kidding, it was some chicken nuggets and fries, I'm not getting fat over here, ya'll.
Hrmm... somewhere in this sequence I left out that Nathan and I played badminton. Well... we did. It was fun. They were doing driving lessons where we were playing, but we didn't let that bother us.
Nathan left in the evening to catch a train back to Nanchang. Jennifer and I went grocery shopping at our local supermarket, then decided they didn't have what we wanted and headed downtown. We had the coolest cab driver in Jiujiang and had fun speaking our mangled Chinese with him. I'm pretty sure he would be the most awesome Chinese teacher ever, and I'm sad I didn't get his number to practice with. Hopefully I'll run into him again sometime.

This week I'm teaching my kids about the wedding industry. Since western style weddings are becoming more common here, I think it's something they would find interesting and beneficial. Plus, you all know how I love to talk about weddings.

Right. I'm out of here. Get well soon Dad and Tess!