Hainan

Well folks, I'm in Hainan China now! It's HOT! And humid and very
tropical...and very very very Chinese. :) It's one of the more
underdeveloped areas of China, especially when compared to Beijing and
Shanghai. We're staying in the Hainan medical school's dormitories on
the 7th floor with no elevator. :) Good exercise. Ha. The people
who were here before us, Brandon and Melinda (they're married and
pretty darn awesome) showed us around town a bit on their scooters and
then they headed off to Guangzhou, Thailand, and the Taiwan. So now
it's just Jerry and I fending for ourselves, hahaha. Everyone expects
us to be able to read Chinese...and neither of us really can, I'm
getting a little bit better (with A LOT of help from the Lord) day by
day, but in all reality, I'm still pretty illiterate. Oh, and our
internet kicks me off every 15 seconds because apparently I have
"proxy software" whatever that is! If any of you guys reading this
knows what it is, please please please let me know how to fix it!

We went to the beach today and took the bus. The beach here is well,
not really clean. The southern part of Hainan province is a lot more
like Hawaii, but here in Haikou it's more polluted. Cigarette butts,
Styrofoam, and other junk all over the place! But, Jerry and I did
find a lot of neat things. We walked down the entire beach area and
where there were less people, we found the remains of some huge fish
that got washed up shore, a newly dead squid that has a shell (I
didn't realize that some squids had shells!), jelly fish, some
mammalian skull, and lots of little sea shells. I am officially now
royally BURNT, no need to worry though, I will be tan within the week
(don't be jealous). Oh, and our best adventure yet..we got lost on
the way back. We had to transfer buses, and we had NO CLUE where the
station was, and the public buses normally display the stations (we
just match characters) but this one was BROKEN!!! And so the ticket
lady was yelling out the station names. Luck would have it, she had
an awful Mandarin accent (most people speak the local dialect of
Hainanese) and so we didn't understand her and missed our stop. Don't
worry, another sweet lady with an awful accent told us where to go,
she also did a lot of pointing in addition to talking. :)

Strangely enough, there are Pakistani students here, they're here on a
6 year contract (oh, ask me about this later! It's quite the story!)
and so we'll see them wandering around and they speak English. On our
way back, we saw a bunch of them with cricket bats! I almost stopped
on of them and asked them where they were going to go and play! How
fun would it have been to go and watch them play cricket eh? Oh, and
Amanda will be glad to hear that some guy named Jeff opened up a
burger joint/lounge place where all the foreigners hang out and Jeff
is from Australia. I think we're going to go and visit it...I need a
burger. I can't read the menus here, so, we've been eating a lot of
junk food from the stores! Don't worry though, we don't eat enough of
it to do anything bad to us...we hope! You don't really get hungry
when it's so hot outside! Anyways, this is getting super long. Miss
you all!

Suzi the Starving Springvillian (clever huh?)