This is me at the Olympics with some Chinese Friends I met.

Here I am holding the Chinese flag. All and I had my tiny American Flag. The Chinese loved this because it represented untiy between to nations.

The olympics were probably the highlight of my trip to China because I had the oppertunity to see the Chinese people at their best, proudest, and happiest!!!

Deaf Chinese Dancers are Incredible

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfNPyxJyRbs

I was unable to embed the Youtube video directly, or any Youtube video for that matter which is very annoying but I had to show this to everyone. Please click on this link.

The video shows this dance troupe dancing a "thousand hand" dance. They are very talented just to be dancing like this but heres the kicker....... every single one of these dancers is DEAF!!!

China Smack; Getting inside the minds of the Netizens

http://www.chinasmack.com/

ChinaSmack.com is a great website for getting a glimpse at the inside minds of what they call "netizens" These are the citizens of the internet.

Its very interesting because they report stories that mainstream chinese news would not. This is a great website to learn about the culture and mindset of the modern day Chinese youth and mentality.

This website is kind of set up like a blog. What the admin does is take posts from other internet forums and translate them into english so you can see the reaction of the Chinese people the certain news stories. It can sometimes be offensive and sometimes it hosts disturbing material but is none the less interesting.

This is a picture with a few of my co workers and one of my very good friends. The blonde on the left is named Petra. She was from the check republic and lived in the same dorm as me. She became one of my best friends. The other girls were co-workers with me at Linguaphone. This is a school that teaches English to Chinese. The man in the photo was my boss Alan. He was a pretty good guy. His English was almost better than mine!

I thought this was a gorgeous photo taken by my friend Brett right from the middle of the square in Jinan. This square Chen Chuang Guan Chuang is right near the business district as you can see by the beautiful skyline. There is a huge mall right underneath the water that you see. This is a very interesting city

In this video you can see the grand finale of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. This is a view from outside the Birds Nest, because I didnt have 10,000 kuai to buy a ticket. Even still it was amazing being where I was. I was allowed to go right up to the birds nest I think because i was a westerner with a Chinese Flag and it made a great photo for news crews

The Chinese Experience by a Laowai

This is my family at the Great Wall of China.

My family came to visit me after I had left Beijing and had been living in Jinan for 4 or 5 months.

I returned to Beijing to visit them and we went to see the Ming tombs as well as The Great wall... obviously.

In this Photo from left to right is; My aunt, Wo de mama (mom), wo de didi (younger brother), ME, wo de baba (dad)

In the background is a billboard for the olympics it says "One World One Dream"