We are in Huzhou

July 30, 2006

Hey!

We just thought that we would write a quick note to say that we have now arrived in our second city, Huzhou, where we will be for the next 3 weeks. The flight from Hong KOng went well (a little turbulent but otherwise ok). We are now with our organization, Amity Foundation, and they are VERY careful with us and they really want to take care of us. This is both fun (when we arrived the first night they had bought us a bag of snacks!) and a little frustrating for us, having been in China for a month and having done quite well on our own, actually. (For example, they said they do not want us leaving this city while we are here! We can hardly understand why. Tomas is going to try to see what the reason is, and then maybe we will be able to go somewhere for this weekend, and maybe not). But otherwise, they are VERY nice. Today we had a morning devotion after breakfast, and then we all went downtown to eat a lunch and then walk around. They have assigned college students to be tutors for us, so our tutor, Robin (a guy, very nice) came with us also. They have arranged for 1 hour of Chinese tutoring from him, per day, per person. (He is the tutor for just the two of us). So that feels great. I hope we will learn a lot in 15 tutoring hours anyway.

Before I forget, we have a real phone for these 3 weeks, if anybody wants to call us at all. The number is +86 0572 2389559 If that doesn't work, try taking away the 0 after the country code, 86. It should go directly to our room. If it doesn't, our room number is 438. We are usually here in the evenings, and a little, around 7 AM.

Otherwise, we will be doing more classes each day, but these will be different subjects, along with learning about the Amity Foundation. I think (I have been reading) that Amity does a whole lot of good things for China, for example, through poverty-alleviation programs, through providing colleges with English teachers, and some medical programs as well. We will learn more as we go along.

I wanted to write to say that we have dial-up internet in our hotel room here actually, so we will be able to keep in touch my mail still. Please write to us! Just hanging out in this hotel room is not that exciting... but hearing from family and friends is...!

Take care and very soon we will write a real letter.

love
Rachel and Tomas