Townsville Grammar says Ni-hao from China!

Hi everyone, Ni-hao from China!

We are continuing to have an amazing experience, we are currently sitting in a stinky little Internet room in the Fishpond village. We are at the third day of the project and haven't had any Internet up until now so we thought we had better give you an update on all our adventures!
When we last blogged we had just arrived in Beijing. We thoroughly enjoyed the remainder of our time sightseeing. We had an amazing time visiting the Temple of Heaven, the Lama Temple, the Forbidden City, navigating our way through the subway (fighting all the locals for spots on the train) and watching the amazing acrobats. The Chinese people are very kind and friendly but have absolutely no sense of personal space, but I guess that comes with living with 18 million other people. They are also amazingly flexible and strong, with grandmas in the Temple of Heaven standing casually with one foot above their head. The temple of Heaven was a common highlight with its beautiful surrounding gardens, where the locals like to hang out and show off all their skills such as musical instruments, whip cracking, acrobatics and other tricks. Vanessa wowed the locals with her whip cracking abilities while the rest of us just looked stupid. Food in Beijing was interesting but yummy, the English translations for the titles of each dish thoroughly entertained the group with examples being "fry balls with no result", "dish of sesame oil connected through one's female relatives" and "fresh bacterial manure of incensed barrel intestines".

After sightseeing in Beijing we took the 3 hour bus trip to Fishpond village. Here we began our long and difficult trek on the great wall of China. We trekked a grand total of 30 kilometers over three days and even though some of us felt like curling up into a ball and dying, we all made it to the top safe and sound....just (Calum fell off the wall but luckily escaped with only a few scratches). We have had a few people sick but everyone is soldiering on with four of our six bookshelves nearly completed (hopefully they will be able to hold some books too). Even though the carpenters guiding us don't speak any English, it is very obvious what they are thinking when we finish a bookshelf (very proud of ourselves) and they just laugh and have to undo half of it and rebuild it themselves. Several of the group got to spend a morning teaching the local children English, somehow they all got conned into drawing pictures of koalas and kangaroos and signing their names on everyones books. The food here is wonderful, better then anywhere else we've eaten so far.

Yesterday we played some sport with the kids and they were all scared of Steve and have taken to calling him 'MONSTER!' We played badminton and basketball and a game we have named poitoi (similar to hackey sack but far more painful). We are on our final 2 days of project and have 2 days of trekking before catching the overnight train to Xian.

Zai Jian！