Trip to JiNan
This weekend Christy and I went to JiNan with our chinese langauge teacher and her husband. We began our trip at 7am on Saturday morning. We took a long distance bus for about 4 hours to a place called JiNan.
First stop- Underground cave (dxdxg.com)
The first thing Christy and I bought was pineapple on a stick. (This would be our main source of nutrition on the trip, as our stomachs did not seem to care for some of the chinese dishes that were served) We put on our beautiful tour hats... (When you go with a tour group you are given matching hats and the tour guide carries a flag of the same color)... we kept the hats on long enough for the picture! Then we headed to the caves. The caves were lit with different colored spot lights, christmas lights, and rope lights...it made for a colorful time! About halfway through the cave we were given the option of taking a boat ride (kind of like an amusement park ride) or walking. We decided to go with the boat ride! After our cave exploration, we headed to our hotel for a rest!

At dinner we met up again with 2 ladies and their children who we had had lunch with earlier in the day. One of the ladies has a daughter with special needs and has been feeling very discouraged. She has had a lot of emotional pain in her life. Our group talked for quite awhile... mostly Ruth since we have limited chinese. Ruth shared with her about Him in chinese. The one lady shared how she had gone to fellowship before but nothing changed so she decided that she would try to fix it by herself. We shared with her about the pain we had experienced in our lives and how He gives us hope. We then sang G is so god in english and in chinese (they asked us to sing and this was the only song besides happy birthday that we knew in English and Chinese) and then we spoke to Him. Christy and I were so exhausted at the end of the conversation! It was so tiring to only hear chinese for 2 hours!

two friends we met on our trip

Next stop- pa shan (climb mountain!)
We got up early on Sunday and headed to breakfast. Neither of us were feeling very well so we passed on eating most of the food and ate only bread. We then boarded the bus and headed to the mountain. The day was beautiful... our main problem was that we didn't know ahead of time that we were going to be climbing a mountain so we only had jeans packed! Not really hiking material! Climbing a mountain in China is much different than climbing a mountain back home. Instead of a dirt trail, you have hundreds... felt like thousands of stairs! You climb stairs up the mountain!!! I was so exhausted! I felt like I was on a stairmaster for 3 hours! We bought more pineapple on the way up!
After climbing up, we decided to take transportation down. We thought we were buying tickets to ride the cable car down, but ended up going down in a shuttle bus. We then boarded our tour bus and headed to the restuarant. Again, Christy and I ate some Chinese food, and then we went exploring the streets for someone who might sell chocolate! We were unable to find any chocolate, but we did find more pineapple on a stick! We ate our pineapple and rejoined our tour group. We were supposed to be home by 6 pm... BUT... halfway home our bus broke down!!! We had to sit on the bus for 3 hours before another bus arrived to take us home! We didn't arrive back to our apartment until 11:30 pm!
All in all it was a great weekend! full of chinese language and culture. We are hoping to meet up with our friends sometime soon... please be lifting them up!