Saturday, April 21, 2012

Fulbright Update.

"Dear Miss Baer,

Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected for a US Student Fulbright award for 2012-2013 to Mongolia. Shortly you will receive a letter from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board with further details of the award."


I am an official Fulbright Scholar!! I will be leaving in September of 2012 to go to Mongolia!! OMG

I've been dreaming about this since my sophomore year of college. So this is a really big moment for me and for my family. So excited.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

One week holiday

Surprisingly I got another week off work (thanks Chinese Exams!) so I flew to Tokyo till Friday.
:)

Sunday, April 8, 2012

China Traveling

Overlooking Huashan Mountain

These were the only Terracotta Warriors that I saw...
:(
My picture of a picture. What I was expecting was this.
But what I actually saw was maybe 20 warriors.

Pagoda Forest to respect the dead Monks.
Lisa Baer at the Shaolin Temple!
Finally on the bus to get to Huashan Mountain!
We had a 2.5 hour wait just for the bus.
Xi'An city wall is behind us.
Chris and me waiting in the line to go to Huashan Mountain
Chris and I went clothing shopping in Zhengzhou
But got distracted by a cute puppy.
Date night at my favorite restaurant with my favorite man!
Alright, so Chris and I had an amazing time traveling around China.

We started off in Xi'An and saw the Terracotta Warriors one day and then hiked up Huashan Mountain the next day. At night we went to the Muslim Quarter and got some delicious dinner. The Terracotta Warriors were really disappointing and the mountain was pretty packed (this is China - it's busy everywhere) but we had a great time.

We dubbed Xi'An to be the "waiting place" and we had a couple "days of lines" because we seriously had to wait hours to do basic things- like getting on a bus to go to the Terracotta Warriors took nearly 2 hours. It was crazy.

After Xi'An, we went to see the Shaolin Temple in Dengfeng. We were given tickets from one of my student's parents- they paid for a very nice dinner for us, a Martial Arts show at night, they would have paid for a hotel room (we said no, but thank you) and they also paid for us to go to the Shaolin Temple, see the Pagoda Forest, aaaand hike up Song Mountain. Wow!

Between travels we went shopping in Zhengzhou (my city), got massages, went on some dates, checked out some night markets, had lunch and dinner with some of my friends here, and really enjoyed each other's company.