...........it's been awhile.............

So I have realized that I'm not very good at keeping up with regular communication-type things-as evidenced by the fact that I haven't updated this blog in about 3 weeks. I was trying to think of how to distill my life over the past month into a succinct blog post-which really wouldn't be that difficult because everything has become quite routine of late. I think my biggest adventure was the volleyball tournament couple of weeks ago, and I will now relate that epic journey.

The sports seasons here really only last about a quarter during the school year, and after a couple of months of practices (and a few games if you can find some Chinese teams willing to play), all of the schools meet in one of the cities for a two day tournament. Usually, we fly to the cities, but this year the tickets were so expensive that we had to find alternate means of transportation. So, with 45 middle school/ high school students in tow, we boarded an overnight train to Beijing on a Wednesday evening. We arrived in Beijing at 6:30 in the morning, where we boarded a bus to take us to another train station where we boarded a "fast" train to our final destination. The "fast" train took about 5 hours and we finally arrived..........22 hours after we left our original location.

The tournament itself was really fun. The high school girls team actually won the entire tournament. I'm certain it was due to my excellent assistant coaching skills:) Actually, I just took the stats-the head coach did all of the hard work. So, the tournament ended on Saturday, and we started our exodus back home on early Sunday morning. We took the "fast" train back to Beijing and then we split the group into two busses. The middle schoolers went on to the airport while the high schoolers went to a shopping/eating area in Beijing because we had 5 hours to kill before our plane left. However, we received a call from the middle school group, and they informed us that flights out of Beijing had been cancelled all day due to weather. The high school group got to the airport, and we assumed that our plane would also be delayed. However, the board didn't indicate a delay so we checked in and went to security. Sadly, it took us so long to get through security that we had to sprint to get to the plane because they were sitting and waiting for us.

As I was running through the airport (the first time I've ever had to do that by the way), I really wanted to stop and see the reaction of the Chinese people who were probably really amused by the huge group foreigners that were sprinting through the airport. Well if nothing else, we're certainly good for a show:)

And so, our plane took off on time while the poor middle school students were still waiting at the airport for their plane. Thankfully, they were able to leave about 20 minutes after we took off so we arrived at the airport around the same time-which was around 11:30....a mere 16 hours from the time we left that morning.