The McCarthys: December 2004

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

The english here is usually extremely poor. Some people call it "engrish". We'll try to post more of it so you can get a good laugh. This looks like cream of wheat.
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You can ride the bus for about a nickel or get a taxi to take you anywhere in the city for less than a dollar (usually).
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Us in the old part of town.
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Fruit for sale at a typical market.
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One of our new hobbies, buying DVD's. Most are about $1.00. As long as the movie is out on DVD in the U.S. this will most likely be a good copy. However, if it's still in theatres (The Incredibles for example) then the quality is poor because it was probably filmed in a movie theatre. Sometimes DVD covers have the wrong actors on them. They also accidentally put bad reviews on the back sometimes. The Passion movie that we bought is rated PG-13 for language and a drug reference. Ha!
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We don't really know who these people are, but they were all chanting stuff while they marched down the street. Maybe a school of some type.
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We got really excited when we saw this Christmas tree in front of a store in the old part of town.
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Some stores in the old part of town.
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Belief super market. A great place to get some western groceries.
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Crystal and I eating noodles. This particular place brings out a bowl of boiling broth and you put all of your noodles and veggies right in and it cooks. Something like this costs around .50 cents.
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This is one of our favorite restaurants. They serve western food. Last time we were there we had pizza, lasagna, coke and chocolate cake.
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Women dancing in the old part of town
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Wednesday, December 22, 2004

This is East Asian BBQ, they have some weird stuff like lungs, brains, squid, and dragon fly larva but, they have good stuff too. We usually get the pork on skewers, Justin had mutton and he even had the dragon fly larva he said they were good and they tasted like pork rinds. They are fried and he said they were hollow in the middle. Crystal did not eat any!!!! They also have tons of veggies that are great. They have this one veggie that is kind of like a potato it’s a lotus root, it’s really good. The put all of these things on a grill and cook them over an open flame. The table we sit around is lower to the ground than US tables but it has a fire in the middle where you can re-warm you food or make sure that it’s done. This is one of our favorite places to eat, it’s great and the fire in the middle keeps us warm. There are not any public buildings that we know of that are heated. Many of the homes are not heated and in the regular student dorms they only have electricity for a few hours a day. We as international students have it good; we have electricity all day long and have bought heaters.

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Crystal up on the trail up Elephant Hill.
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This picture was taken from up on Elephant Hill (or the large hill) in the left corner you can see part of our campus. It was a beautiful view. You can also see part of the city and a huge water reservoir.

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In the background you can see Elephant Hill, it’s kind of shaped like the head and back of an elephant. Our camps lies at the base of this hill. On Saturday December 18th we hiked up this hill.

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This picture was taken from inside our city, you can see the large snow capped mountain in the background. We have heard that you can ski up there; they have a gondola ride that takes you to the glacier where they have a park.

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This shot is taken from the "big" hill, you can see part of the city and in the bottom left hand corner in part of our campus.
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This picture was taken at the top of the large hill in the little gazebo that is at the top, you can see a little of the city in the background. (12/18)
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We went out for a day of hiking, we hiked up the large hill (in TX we would call it a mountian) it took us about 1 hout to get to the top and 1 our to get down. It was a rough trip, the altitude is a killer.
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