Other Odds and Ins

HIS Sports teams are having a good year. We hosted the ACAMIS Volleyball Tournament the last weekend in Oct. The boys finished fifth but the girls won the championship, going 6-0. Both the boys and girls started off the basketball season with a bang winning our very own HIS Basketball Invitational. The girls went 4-0, crushing the competition along the way to title, while the boys dropped their first game by three points before winning 4 in a row to capture the crown.
The girls have a ten game winning streak, dating back to last year.


We finally got some pictures hung up on our wall, and some more plants in our apartment. Nina's belly continues to grow. It looks like we will try to have the baby in Shanghai; we like the hospital up there better then the one in Hangzhou.

Things continue to go well, we are both very busy. I'm finishing up my classes in the next couple of weeks, Nina is getting ready to take a weekend intensive class in December. Basketball takes up lots of weekends and evenings.

We are looking forward to Christmas break; we'll travel to Hong Kong for one week and then on to Sanya (the Chinese version of Hawaii) for a week.

Pictures from Xi'an

We traveled to Xi'an Nov 6-8. This is the city were the Terra Cotta Warriors are. It was the capital of the first emperor of China, about 2000 years ago. He forced 700,000 workers to build his tomb and make the warriors for over 38 years; he believed what ever he was buried with would be his in the afterlife. When he died over 3000 concubines were buried with him. The villagers were so mad, they started a huge fire, burned his palace and smashed all the warriors. His actual tomb as yet to be opened; supposedly it is booby-trapped and the rivers in the map of china are made out of mercury.

The Warriors were rediscovered in the 1970's. Many have since been put back together but most are still buried.

We also visited a village that had people living there 6000 years ago. That one was pretty interesting.

Xi'an is the beginning of the silk road so there is a large Muslim population. We spent Saturday evening walking around the Muslim street eating lamb and bread.
Sunday we visited Big Goose Pagoda where we saw these people doing Tia Chi with swords.