Well, we found out that we are boarding yet another plane tomorrow to head to Shenyang. Because the plane will allow only 50 lbs per person, we are having to ship the remained our of junk via train. Hope it gets there OK. I’d sure hate to lose it. I’m personally glad we aren’t taking the 8 hour train ride there. That would have been painful. I much prefer the 1 hour 10 minute version. The tickets(paid for by Richard) only cost 140 RMB. That’s $17 bucks people!! Where in the world can I can tickets that cheap back home. I think something needs to be done about that. Of course, the 140 RMB price comes after the rush of the holidays. Before it would have been several hundred more RMB than that.

Like usual, our plane leaves early – 7:40am. That means that we have to get up at 5:00 and be waiting in the lobby of the school at 6:00 in order to make it the airport by 7:00. Last time we did this, we almost missed our plane because the driver had no idea where to drop us of at. He left us in a parking lot and pointed the direction we should go. Somehow or another we managed. Richard, the guy in charge of us is coming with us. So, if we somehow miss the plane, it won’t be our fault, or our responsibility to buy a new ticket!! And another plus is that he is Chinese, and getting to our destination will be much easier to get to.

As you can see, we are flying directly into our first winter weather storm. The ever trusty weather men and women are forecasting 4 – 6 inches of snow tomorrow. This should make things very interesting to say the least. I haven’t seen snow in a long time, and usually I wouldn’t mind, but you have to remember that we will be dragging our crap all over Shenyang tomorrow trying to get to our apartment. I know how crazy the taxi drivers and other drivers for that matter can drive – so I can only imagine how well they drive in the snow. I just hope that someone turns on the heat in our apartment before we get there. The high is only supposed to be 29 degrees.

Alright, well, this should be my last post until we get settled in Shenyang. Then I can start posting my pictures and talking about everything that has happened recently.

Until then.

This is G signing out.

And then we got bounced like one of those toy rubber balls all over China. You know, the ones that will bounce up and hit the ceiling if you throw it hard enough. Man, someone chucked us good and hard. The picture is of Phil’s money right before we departed Fuyang for good. It was approximately 12,000 RMB(maybe a little more) and I had the same amount. So, if you do the math, that would be 24,000 RMB between us. That should have been more than enough to keep us afloat for our 45 day vacation, but like I’ve mentioned before – things didn’t go quite the way we planned. After our crazy ass journey from North to South and back again, we currently have about 3,000 RMB remaining between the two of us. And some of that is money we recently had exchanged because we feared we wouldn’t make it until our next paycheck. We still don’t know exactly when that will be. If the rumors are correct, we might get paid on the 5th. We’ll need it for sure because I am almost certain we will need to buy things to make our new apartment feel like home. The aparment may come “furnished”, but that doesn’t mean we will have plates, utincles to eat with or pots and pans to cook with. Our bed may not even have sheets. I’d be very excited if any of the above pictures were in USD instead of RMB. Then I could say we really were rich, but in actuality, it is only about $1,538. It is a lot in Chinese standards, as long as you don’t try to live a western lifestyle. Well, this post is making me depressed looking at all the money we burned through in the last month and a half – so I better stop writing about it. I blame our poverty on the planes we had to take and our visit to Hong Kong. It was nice, it was fun, but damn, was it expensive!