Family time and fun activities!

Okay so I've been so busy this weekend! I'm so glad my sister Sarahann was able to stop by Hangzhou and meet up with me! My host family is so sweet and were so excited to see her too! She had dinner with us a couple times and I was just able to walk around the lake with her and catch up while traveling around the city a little!!! Now I cant wait to see her again!

I also had a lot of fun with my host sister and mother this weekend. On Sunday was my host sister's waipo's (grandmother on mothers side) birthday so we went to her house (she lives nearby) and my host sister and I made Jiao zi's! Her waipo prepared a lot of food for her birthday lunch, and my host sisters aunt and uncle came also. We had very long noodles as the main dish because long noodles symbolize longevity in China.  I mean, seriously, these things like had no end to them. It was a struggle trying to get them into my bowl!

 

later that day I went with my host mom and sister and her friend to see Transformers 4! its really big in china, and theres posters and signs and advertisements everywhere! I hear the other Chinese kids talk about it a lot. like half the movie was set in China so maybe that's why its so big here. the audience was sooo excited to see the movie set in China, lol, it was funny to see them all exclaim and laugh at it.

The movie theater was really nice though. the lobby is more like a waiting area because you cant enter into the hallways and cinema rooms until 10 minutes before the showing. the ticket booths are like electronic stands like a redbox machine. and theres a huge screen on the wall showing a bunch of trailers for movies. I enjoyed it a lot!

 

On Monday we started our second week at school. We got our test scores back from the weekly Friday test and found out that this is a lot harder than everyone thought it was... haha i'll just put it that way. We did Chinese dancing as our cultural activity which was a lot of fun! But we weren't very good at it, even after an hour and a half of practice.

Today we learned some basic martial arts. its definitely A LOT more difficult than it seems.

 

I went to Wu-Shan Square after school with some of my other classmates. We hiked up part of the mountain there and explored the square that had tons and tons of stores and specialty shops and souvenir stalls. It was beautiful and the buildings looked more traditional.