a 95% certain law school decision has been made

Barring any huge scholarship offers from a school that put Chad on a wait list, we are pleased to announce to the three of you who read this (you know who you are, and we thank you for that) Chad will be attending UCLA for law school. It has been working out so well that it definitely seems meant to be. From being the first school to respond (always a nice thing) to the roughly 20,000 in scholarships and grants they offered- it has been pretty great. 

So it seems that we will be heading back to Los Angeles for the foreseeable future. We are very torn about it. Chad is really excited for UCLA, it was one of his top choices, and we are excited for the warm weather (one of us significantly more than the other... I'm sure you all can figure out who), being closer to family (some of them) and that in only 3 short years Chad will finally be done with school, but we will miss all the friends and the public transportation (sometimes) from NYC.

Also, Sunday marked 3 months left here in China and it seems a bit surreal. There were moments where it seemed like this day would never come, but it's also crazy to think that in no time we will be back in Los Angeles, with Chad getting ready for school and Michelle job hunting. 

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Hong Kong, I love you

Well here we are again. Back in Hong Kong one more time. We decided for dinner we would do a greatest hits of all the random food we found the first time around. So we got our delicious dumplings and sweet buns and waffle.

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One Night in Bangkok

After we got into Bangkok and finally made it to our hostel we went out to find food. If you watch this video you'll understand why 1. Chad and Brittany got so excited when they saw this and 2. I rolled my eyes A LOT in 24 hours. Also I'm sorry I just destroyed 10 minutes of your life.

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A Farewell Love Letter to Siem Reap

Our last full day in Siem Reap, after all the temple exploration we were finally visiting the most famous ones- saving the best for last. At least we did it right. I rarely think waking up for a sunrise is worth it. I think sunsets are just as pretty and you don't have to wake up at an insanely early hour to see them. However, if you're visiting Angkor Wat it's worth it. It was amazing how many people were there wandering around in the darkness just to see the sun rise over the temple. This is just another time I wish pictures could really capture the beauty we saw.

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Siem Reap- the middle

Our second day being explorers we went to some of the outer temples - so we only got to see about 3 because we spent much of our time driving (tuk tuking) from one place to the next. 

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Siem Reap- The Beginning

Okay, so I really was trying to do Siem Reap in just two entries, but we just saw way too many amazing things and had way too many memorable events happen, so it's just going to have to be three. Trust me there will be no one who hates this more than my editor. He's sick of editing all these posts. Which, I mean is tough because really the first draft is just me spewing words out without a lot of second passes or punctuation or even a real spell check run, so he does a lot of work here. (EDIT: I really don't).

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A very quick tour of Phnom Penh

We were quickly running out of time and in our research of Cambodia we learned that if you have to sacrifice your time somewhere it should be in Phnom Penh and not in Siem Reap so it's with a heavy heart that I tell you we only spent 1 day there. But we packed it with as much as we could. 

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A whirlwind tour of a part of Malaysia

Oh Malaysia we hardly knew thee. The story of how we ended up visiting Malaysia is like this: we were poking around wanting to visit as many places as we could and we found out an airline had a sale going on where flights leaving Kuala Lumpur started at $24 (but with paying to pick a seat- mandatory and everything else they ended up being like $55) so we figured we would trek down and then fly to Cambodia to prevent backtracking.  So we hopped in a mini van and headed down first to Buttersworth/ Georgetown then onward to KL (that's what those of us in the know call Kuala Lumpur). 

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Beautiful Wonderful Blue Beaches

We decided an exurison to Ko Phi Phi was in order next since it's not everyday you get to visit the place where these two gems were filmed. I'm not gonna lie... it wasn't everything we expected and more. It actually disappointed quite a bit...

Except for this! I thought maybe Batman had tracked me down...

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Thailand: Some of the best days of my life

After a pretty hellish trip (2 buses, 2 layovers, one really long hot walk, riding in the back of truck and then another realllllly long hot walk) we got to our hostel in Krabi. Krabi became our base for all the fun trips we took everywhere in south Thailand.

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Bangkok with Brittany and Brent!

So another of my dear friends decided to come join us on our crazy SE Asia adventure, so we got to have 2 friends on the trip.... for like 8 hours. Yay!

So the rest of Bangkok was happy/sad. Happy because Brittany came, but said because Brent left. And because of our trip to the Sriracha Zoo.

Both Brittany and Brent reallllly wanted to pet a tiger while they were in Thailand, so we found a place they could a bit outside Bangkok. It was called Sriracha Zoo, and to get there you had to hire a driver and drive for about an hour and a half.

Although I'm glad Brent and Brittany got to cross something off their bucket list, it was incredibly sad to see animals treated so poorly (and expensive but YOLO or carpe diem or you can't take it with you right?).

We all kept thinking Brent and the driver were holding hands

The first sign this place was sketchy was that this statue greeted us. I actually have no words for it.

Then we went to the “elephant show” for about 10 seconds until I started to cry because they had horrible sharp poker things to 'guide' the elephants.

Another sign this place was bad news was this. You could pay to shoot a BB gun at containers of meat above tigers. And while it was kinda fun to watch them fight a bit over it, I kept wondering what happened to all the missed shot BBs and if anyone ever hurt one of the tigers with them. 

Anyway, after that we went and took pictures feeding baby tigers. They were pretty awesome and cute and I was excited and terrified all at the same time. They didn't name the tigers (wah wah) so I decided mine was named Tony.  

I got to pet the biggest one

Then Brent and Brittany went and got pictures with an adult tiger.  

Shere Khan here was looking to eat somebody - except that he was limping around the saddest concrete enclosure you ever saw.

Brent tried to feed the Crocodiles they had there, but the Crocs just weren't interested in the dangling chicken carcass.  

Chad is really strong

I took a picture of this little guy because I felt bad he was being ignored by everyone else

 Finally we went to the tiger show. It was a mixture of fun and sad. My feelings were very mixed... and honestly more than once I thought a few of them were like “yep had enough I'm gonna eat this guy now”. I was rooting for them to the entire time.

See the tiger not on his perch? He was sending the guy mad shade and acting like "I'll get on that when I'm good and ready" 

After that adventure Brent left us to return to boring old Utah. So because the boys were again outnumbered we went shopping. There is a HUGE weekend market in Bangkok with at least a billion vendors and it was a lot of fun to walk around and see everything. We almost bought a $250 leather weekend bag... but decided it might not be the best investment at this time.

Incidently this was the best Thai Ice Tea we had there

We maybe wandered into another protest sight....

 After all that shopping it was time to head to our overnight train (or as Chad and I liked to call it our Midnight Train to Georgia... even though our doing so probably made Brittany second guess her decision to come. Also, follow that link, you won't regret it.)

Did I mention Brittany came after having knee surgery so she was brace and caned up most the trip?

Don't we look like seasoned backpakers?

 So a fun thing happened while we were at the train station. We kept trying to board our train compartment, but people kept saying no, which was hard to understand since, you know, we don't speak Thai. Then, while we are on the platform the train leaves. Just leaves us and the last few cars stranded at the train station... we start freaking out because our gimpy friend wouldn't be able to run and hop on, but some Thai people on the platform try to charade to us that it's okay and not to worry. About 10 minutes later it comes back and we are able to board. We assume they had to change a car out, but really we have no idea what happened. 

We got sleeper beds and it was pretty great. They are significantly better than China trains. Do you see how big that seat is? It's like twice the size of China train seats. 

This little old lady was sitting across from me and her husband was across from Brittany, we were trying to offer to switch but she didn't want to... I think she thought we would make her climb up to the top bed  if she switched.

Our ladder to the top bunk, which folded down quite lovely like from the ceiling

Our train compartment guy... super nice happy guy

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Bangkok with Brent

We arrived in Bangkok pretty late in the evening due to a delayed flight, and had the joy of going through customs and getting a cab around midnight... which means we probably overpaid for our cab, but we just wanted to get there. When our cab dropped us off at a creepy side road somewhere in the seeming outskirts of the city, we knew we were in for an adventure. He just pointed down a side road into the darkness of nothing and insisted (from what we could understand) that we had arrived.

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Hong Kong Part 2

Our last day in Hong Kong... at least for this leg of the trip. We had an action packed day and a deadline to get to the airport for our flight. Turns out we had plenty of time... I'm a nervous traveler.

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Macau you later k?

Hahaha... that's my attempt at a clever blog title. Anyway, our friend Brent decided he was done with doing good things in the Philippines and came to hang out with us in Hong Kong. So we decided we wanted to go check out the other city in the bay that was once not part of China, so we got a boat to Macau.

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Hong Kong Part 1

I was debating about how I would break up the trip posts... I decided by location (aka each town/city we stopped in) but then I realized some of them would be pretty picture heavy, so I'm just gonna break them up however I feel like... try to keep up :)

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There and back again

As some of you may know one of the reasons we decided to teach in China was to travel all around Asia during breaks. So we decided since we had 5 plus weeks off (turns out it was like 6... so we got to spend some time in good old Weifang) it was time for the great South East Asia tour.

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Travel Bucket List - getting smaller

(writer's note: I didn't have Chad/ my editor read this since he's bogged down with law school applications so if there are some bad grammar issues or horrible comma splices just know that I'm tired and trying my best)

A while ago I created a bit of a mental travel bucket list. I not only put places I would really LOVE to go, but kinda also mentally ordered them as most likely to least likely. Now here I am getting ready to travel to my NUMBER THREE destination. 

We haven't ironed out all the details (hehe..) but our plan so far for our SE Asia adventures is this:

Super dumb LONG journey to Hong Kong via train. We were a bit slow in booking our tickets. Sales open 21 days before the departure date and we were silly enough to wait till the 20th day so we will spend 10 hours on a soft sleeper bed, 10 hours in a train station the middle of no where China then 23 hours on a hard seat. Yay, but then we roll into Hong Kong on the 18th of January so that's pretty cool.

We are in Hong Kong until the 22nd and we fly into Bangkok. We are going to meet up with our friend Brent there and are super excited for that! From there we are planning on visiting the following places:

Phuket, Thailand

Ko Phi Phi, Thailand (google it and tell me you're not jealous. I dare you)

Krabi, Thailand

Penang, Maylasia

Kuala Lumpur, Maylasisa

Phnom Pehn,Cambodia

Siem Reap, Cambodia

If that's too much just look at the map and follow the alphabet, you can't see "B" because it's also "J" but you can follow our route here:

It's going to be whirlwind, but we are super excited and I CANNOT WAIT to escape the cold, dark, sad existence that is living in Weifang China. (Did I mention that we were told that everyone gets really over China/ homesick around month 5 and we are now in month 5? BLAH! It's pretty obvious we are both getting pretty annoyed with the country)

Odds are we won't be blogging because I don't think we are taking our laptop, but keep watching our Instagram and Facebook accounts (we won't be in China so we can use it on the mobile now!) for pictures and stories. Hope you're enjoying your cold existence while we are off in paradise :)

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Our branch either things we are awesome or super weird

(writer's note: I didn't have Chad/ my editor read this since he's bogged down with law school applications so if there are some bad grammar issues or horrible comma splices just know that I'm tired and trying my best)

So as I have mentioned before the way the Mormon church operates here is a little different. Everyone is divided into a branch and foreigners aren't allowed to attend church with Chinese nationals. Since there are so few foreigners (we are the only 2 Mormons in our city) we call into a conference call with other Mormons living in remote areas and we form a branch.

If you live in a bigger city with more Mormons you will probably meet someone as a group, but that's not what we have going on.

So the branch relies HEAVILY on email. We get emails about everything, including the program for Sunday meetings. 

We were asked to speak a couple Sundays ago (our topic was "Keeping Christ in Christmas"... if you know Chad and me well you'll already know how we felt about that one) and when someone speaks they want a picture and a brief bio. 

To be honest, most the people in our ward are pretty old and have pretty impressive bios... we don't. So we were scrambling with what to include (not to mention we were getting harassing emails about getting the bio to them). Here's what we sent and the picture we used... so like I said, our branch either things we are awesome or super weird.

We met in California at a wedding. Michelle was friends with the bride and Chad was crashing it with some of his friends. Chad was in school at the local community college and Michelle was working full time.

We got married in the Los Angeles Temple and then almost immediately moved to New York City for Chad to study Economics at Columbia University. Michelle got her degree in Political Science at Utah State University and, until we moved to China, worked as a Customer Service Manager, first for Disney then for Nestle. 

We are here in China for a year teaching Oral English at a Vocational College in Weifang. Then we will move to wherever Chad has gotten into law school (TBA) for him to study international business law. 

Between the two of us we have 27, soon to be 28 siblings and sibling-in laws (wedding in July) and 22 soon to be 24 nieces and nephews scattered all across the United States. It's hard to keep track of everyone all the time!

We both enjoy traveling, reading, watching movies, rock climbing, candy, oxford commas, and miss our dog, Batman, something fierce. 

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Our Student Louis

(writer's note: I didn't have Chad/ my editor read this since he's bogged down with law school applications so if there are some bad grammar issues or horrible comma splices just know that I'm tired and trying my best)

You may recall that Louis is a boy that we tutor/ is one of our friends here in China. He's about 6 feet tall and speaks English like a champ. His English is better than most of the students we have here. So sometimes we forget he's 13 until he tells us one of his stories. Below you'll find a sample of some of Louis' stories. Most told in reference to a word we are trying to teach him or about his week. All in broken English.

We asked Louis if he had any pets. He told us he had a turtle, but that the turtle escaped. He thinks that it got out, got cold, and began to hibernate someone where in Louis' house and that is why he hasn't been able to find him yet. He told us this in October; last we asked in early December the turtle still has not been found. 

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Louis was trying to tell us about a place he visited in China. It is called Hainan and it's considered China's Hawaii. It's very warm and tropical all year long. He told us that when he went there and came back to school that "all his friends thought he was from Africa because his skin got so dark". 

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We asked him why he picked the name Louis. He told us because his mom had a bag with the name on it and he liked it because it was easy to say and it was short. So essentially he named himself after a Louis Vuitton (maybe knock off). He pronounces it like Lewis as in Lewis and Clark... not like the bag.

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We asked Louis how his week was. He told us about a time his mom got mad at him during the week. He found a toy in his home and he opened it up and started playing with it. He was later told his mother bought it for his cousin. His 6 year old cousin. He thought it was for him. In case you were wondering what toy a 13 year old thought would be for him that was bought for a 6 year old it was a toy car.  

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Louis told us about his history teacher. The teacher rarely checks the homework and one day the teacher went to check and Louis didn't have it. Louis told us that he sits at the back of the class so he leaned OUT the door to his friend in another class and asked him for his copy of the homework and showed that to the teacher. He told us it was all okay though because 1. he loaned that same student his homework for a different class and 2. he and that student are now good friends.

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Louis told us that he rides his bike to school very fast everyday because he likes to stop and get a sweet on his way. One day he said their driver turned into the store right after him, Louis ended up in a different checkout line as his mother, but at the same time. He said she didn't say anything to him, but that he no longer gets pocket money because she doesn't want him buying things that are bad for his health. 

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Louis was talking about being tired in class after we explained what the word exhausted meant. He told us he bought these stickers at a store where they take a picture of your open eyes. He said in one class he put them on his eyes and his teacher did not notice he was asleep during class. But then the stickiness of the stickers made it so his eyes were stuck together and he couldn't open them; so his best friend has to take him to the washroom so he could wash his face.

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Louis told us a story about when he had to tiptoe. We were teaching him what tiptoe meant and he told us this gem. His class had to leave the classroom early one day this week because it needed to be cleaned. He stayed in the class until late with a friend in the dark. Then when his teacher was walking by they both got on the tables and laid on them because they thought maybe then their teacher wouldn't see them. They then tiptoed out the back of the room. The next day he got in trouble. 

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We were trying to teach Louis the work rummage. Chad said to him "what do you do if you need to find something in your backpack?" Louis then picked up his backpack and turned it upside down and dumped it all out in our living room. He did not rummage through it. He told us he never does he just simply finds things by dumping everything out. 

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We were trying to teach him the word buried. When he understood us, he told us about how he read a funny cartoon and buried it outside his home. He said he marked the spot with a stick, but now he can't find it because the stick moved and he doesn't remember where it is. We were never told why he wanted to bury the cartoon in the first place

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You can see why we really enjoy spending a couple hours with him every Saturday. 

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Happy Holidays

Odds are if you are reading this blog you have already got an email from us with these pictures and the infographic we made... (if not you should send us your email) but I wanted to post it all here just in case.

Our Christmas Card:

Our Christmas pictures... we even were able to include Batman!

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