Is Anyone Else Tired of Typhoons?

Hey Peeps,

What a week. Our vacation started off really well, but the tail end of it has made it hard to put things in perspective. Let me give it a shot anyway.

We arrived back in Zhanjiang early Monday morning. We were supposed to arrive early Saturday morning, but Typhoon Higos had other plans.

We went to the train station late Friday night tired and ready to go back after a week of fun in the sun. But when we got there, we were informed that the typhoon had shut down the ferry service to and from Hainan. There wouldn't be any trains or buses leaving Hainan until Sunday at the earliest. So we were forced to spend two more days in Sanya. Normally two extra days of vacation would be something to celebrate, but as you probably have realized now, nothing is normal in China. In this particular instance, most of us had run out of money by then and it rained both days we were there. So we spent two days inside with nothing to do but eat instant noodles and grumble about the weather.

To top that off, we had all developed pretty nasty colds from staying the first four nights in a "cheap" hotel room that ended up having a serious mold problem. That combined with late nights, poor ventilation, and disragard for normal hygenic standards (somehow all eight of us assumed the other seven would pack soap) led to very vulnerable immune systems. We found some anti-biotics after much research/translation gaffes/pharmacy hunting by David and myself, and hopefully will be back to full strength soon. I was a pretty worthless teacher yesterday, but thankfully I had a movie about Prince William to save my neck (we're studying the monarchy in my "Society & Culture" class).

Thanks Willy!

But like I said before, the vacation was still pretty fun up until the end. All three teachers from Zhongshan came down, and Radhika from Jilin bravely volunteered to be the lone girl in a group of Johnnies. There were eight Maryknoll teachers all together, and we all had a lot of fun. We spent a lot of time at Yalong Bay, which looks like this...

The Chinese call it "The Edge of Heaven" and I would have to agree. Nick and I rented a surfboard one day and were shredding waves all day long, putting guys like this to shame:

Actually, that's not true at all. We had pretty good waves all week, except for the day that we rented the surf board. Go figure. But it was still fun.

And that's about all we did, just sit on the beach all day, play in the waves, eat lots of pineapple, drink lots of coconut milk (straight from the coconut), and soak up some sun. All things considered, it was a good vacation, though right now I probably feel more tired than I did when I left, which kind of defeats the purpose, but oh well. At least I'm more tan. ;-)