Nanjing Memorial

     These are pictures from the Nanjing Memorial. I will warn you they are graphic. It depicts what happened when Japan invaded Nanjing China. At least 300,000 people were killed, many brutally raped. This was the first place I visited in China last summer. You may have seen them on Facebook but here they are if you have not. Some I captioned to explain more about the picture.

This picture and the next few are statues and sayings describing the attack.

Big cross with the dates of the attack.

300,000 in different languages.

Bell urging people not to forget

Depiction of the battle

Recreation of a discovered grave site. These are real bones

Recreation of one of the rapes

Stories of people that helped.

New Photos

I finally uploaded all of my pictures to Picasa. Now I can post them without running out of storage space on my blog. They will be out of order but if I remember when I took them I will try and give you an idea of when it was.

The past few months

     Sorry for not writing on here for such a long time. Life got busy, and I started slacking in this area. 

     I will try and catch anyone up that is reading this as to what has happened in the last few months. First off I met a great girl and we have been dating the last few months. She is a great girl, great cook, and treats me well. We seem to have figured out the culture and language gap well. Thankfully she speaks English, and the more time we are together the better it gets. I have managed to learn a few words of Mandarin, but have far to go. 

     I am no longer working for the school I came here to teach for. I gave it my best but I was not able to make them happy. Despite me best efforts to teach how they wanted and follow their suggestions, I parted ways at the end of the semester (January 20th). I found a new job at a Western run English teaching Kindergarten. I only trained a week before the holiday break but I am liking the program a lot more. More structure, one way to do everything and it seemed to be the best fit for me. More updates to come when I start full time. Along with a new job came a new place to live. The last place was school rented so I had to search for a place to move to. Thankfully my Mandarin speaking girlfriend was able to help me look at places. This was not what I would define as "fun". After many dirty, run down, and occupied places I found a great place, only to not be able to pay what the landlord wanted up front. I went with plan b instead and a better to deal with landlord. As a bonus, the owners have a car and helped move everything over to the new place. 

     While my time here has been mainly in Nanjing, I did take a trip with the girlfriend to a neighboring city. It was done as a surprise for her (she knew we were going but not where). I took many pictures and will post them soon. 

    As I write this fireworks have been going off for about the last 5 hours. It is the last day of the year of the Dragon and tomorrow starts the year of the Snake. Seeing as how the Chinese invented gunpowder they celebrate with a few days of fireworks. Big noises and the color red scare away the evil spirits, the rate they are going I think every one of them in Nanjing has been scared off twice. 

I will try to be better on updating people, as I know a lot of you do not have Facebook. In a few days I travel to another province to meet up with my girlfriend at her parents place. She went home for Spring Festival (AKA Chinese New Year). I was going to travel with her but was not able to due to her parents request (Chinese thing I guess she explained it a little to me.)

Check back soon for some more pictures. I uploaded to many when I came and filled my storage. I have to upload them first to a different site then I can post here. 

Thanks for all you love and support. Miss you all and hope to see you soon.

Sorry for the lack of updates on here and the blog. I was sans computer for a week and my VPN does not always connect. Just finished the first semester. Have a busy month coming up. Spelling Bee, Evaluations, and Open house are all soon.

Funny student update

My students think I look like a monkey,

Nanjing City Wall

Hiked on and around the Nanjing City wall. Pictures coming soon.