One of the committes that I am on at school is called Roots and Shoots. Roots and Shoots is an organization developed by Dr. Jane Goodall. It's a service organization that promotes care and concern for animals, environment and people. My school has become a piloting school for implementing an orangic garden through the Roots and Shoots organization. The students have been working very hard planting seeds, creating worm farms, looking at different types of soil and composting.

I had the awesome opportunity to meet Dr. Jane Goodall last Friday. She visited our school to see the progess we are making in our organic garden and to visit the Shanghai Zoo (which is in our backyard). All the classes made display boards to show Dr. Goodall all the wonderful things we've been doing. It was such a fantastic experience. She is an amazing women and truely and inspiration!

Dr. Jane Goodall and Stephen (principal) looking at the organic garden

Dr. Goodall went around and talked with the students about their projects. These are some kindergarteners showing her their seed board.

Please post a comment or just your name if you are checking out all my adventures. I know this site has been passed around a bit and I'm just curious as to who is checking up on me:)

Moon Festival- Mid-Autumn Festival

The moon festival occurs on the 15th of the 8th lunar month. This is a national holiday for the whole 1.3 billion people in China.

The moon festival is one of the most important traditional events for the Chinese. It is a time to celebrate the end of the harvest months and enjoy the wealth that came from it. It is a time for the Chinese people to travel and come together with their families. This is very similar to our Thanksgiving celebrations. Families enjoy big meals together, then at night everyone will go outside to admire the full moon. If a person is not able to be with their family it is understood that they will be watching the moon at the same time, thinking about their family and friends.

I will be thinking about all of you and wishing you all the best as I gaze up at the full moon this week!

Our landlords brought us some traditional moon cakes. There are a number of different flavors of moon cakes you can get. I like to call this one, strange, yucky, green, waxy stuff. It was a very sweet gesture but it is not a favorite for many westerners. I guess you could compare it to the fruit cake people give during Christmas time. Our school made a cheese cake for each of the employees to enjoy in celebration of the festival. I think the writting says Happy Mid-Autumn festival????

For our week off of school I joined two other new teachers at my school Mike & Erin and their cousin Rob (visiting for the week from California) to Huang Shan: Yellow Mountain.

We took an over night train to Tunxi (Huang Shan city) This was a four bed soft sleeper. The train left Shanghai at 10:30pm on Oct. 3rd and we arrived the next morning at 9:00am.
The next morning we took a bus and this lovely taxi thing to an old chinese village called Hongcun. It was a really neat village that was built during the Ming Dynasty.
I just thought this was a beautiful flower. It looked like it was velvet.

We started off the next day with a 1 and 1/2 hour taxi ride to the base of the Yellow Mountain. From here we began our journey from concrete step after concrete step. We climbed for two hours up the stairs with our backpacks. We finally reached a mid point where we took a cable car up to another look out point.

We saw a couple people utilizing this easy way up the Mt. Easy for the passenger not the carriers. I have to admit it did cross my mind to hop on one of these during our six hour hike back down the mountain.

There were a number of men hauling massive amounts of cargo up and down the mountain. I don't know how they do it, I had a hard enough time carrying my own self up and down. (I think someone should have told them there was a cable car on the other side of the mt.) Notice his calf muscles.

This is the hotel we stayed at on top of the Mt. How they managed to build a hotel up there is beyond me. There were a couple other hotels up there to choose from but this one claimed to have the best views for the sunrise.
6:00am sunrise
They had these wonderful big red coats in our closet to wear for the chilly sunrise.

These are some beautiful views of the Mountain. We hiked the 6 hours down the mountain on Friday morning. Hiking down was one of the scariest things I have ever done. Looking down at nothing but narrow concrete stairs is not an image I look forward to seeing again. My knees were shaking non-stop. A couple times I just froze looking down with steep cliffs on either side of me with no railings. With a lot of encouragement from the friends I was with we all made it down safe and sound. Needles to say it is now two days later and my body hates me. Sitting down and standing back up is not an easy feat for me right now. I dread going to work tomorrow and climbing the three sets of stairs to my classroom.