Saturday, May 1, 2010

Chongming Island & MOM and Aunt Diane lai Shanghai!

So by far, this is the best weekend yet.

I just got back from a 2 day adventure to an island close to Shanghai. It took us (20 people from my small group bible study) 2 hours to travel there on a public bus. We first dropped most of our heavy thing in our hotel and then headed out to a National Park.

This national park was unlike any in the States. This had blow up obstacle courses and blow up hamster wheels in water, mini-rides, grass skiing, go karting, ziplining, and much much more. All of these toys were located in a really beautiful forest and river. Since the park was so big, we all rented bikes for the afternoon.

We ended up barely doing anything but playing this volleyball game one of my friends taught us.

After the maingate to the park closed at 5, we could still walk around inside. We spent another hour and 1/2 walking through the beautiful trails in the wilderness and playing Mafia on a bridge. It was a great bonding experience with so many people who didn't know each other.

Then our on-call driver picked us up! (we made friends with this guy who had a van that fit us all in it! We would just call him and he would take us places...if we paid of course.) We went back to our hotel, went to dinner, and the group split as some went back to Shanghai.

The rest of the night was spent near the water in the moonlight singing worship songs to my friend's amazing guitar skills. It was wonderful.

We were all exhausted by the day but decided to continue our night when we got back to our hotel. (6 girls in 2 rooms and 8 guys in 2 rooms). We played mafia again for 2 hours until 1am!! Our group really liked this game...you see true personalities come out :)

"Momma Lindsay" as they referred to me as woke every room up at 7:45am because no one was up at the time we had planned on! haha.

We went to our elaborate breakfast feast in the hotel and played mafia yet again in the lobby for an hour while we waited for our guy to pick us up.

Most of the day was spent at a wetland where there were crabs EVERYWHERE!!! People, as in the Chinese people, would jump off the platforms and pick up crabs to play with! They would collect them in boxes and bottles. To me and the rest of the people I was with definitely thought this was strange and CHINESE-Y.

Of course, with such a crazy group of 14 of us, we would walk around for 20min then stop to play other 'camp game'. Some were drawing attention to us but we didn't care. We already stood out.

So this VERY local island (we didn't see any foreigners) was a great escape from the big city and congestion.

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My mom and aunt are in the air right now!!! They are flying here and will be staying for 10 days. The first two days will just be 'Lindsay Tour Guide' days around Shanghai and then on Thursday we are flying to a beautiful city called Guilin and Yangshou. Here there aren't many skyscrapers because it's mostly nature and water. This is supposed to be one of the prettiest places in China :) We're staying until Saturday or Sunday!!

I'm so excited that my mom and Aunt Diane have the chance to visit. A lot of the reason why they can come is because of Christy and Dale Larson. They offered my mom and aunt to stay at their apartment, right downtown in the middle of everything. Housing and hotels are not cheap in Shanghai, especially right now that the EXPO just opened 1 day ago!

More to come on our family time together in CHINA! :)

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