Recently, it snowed here in Jinshitan, making it feel even more like we had actually been tricked into boarding a plane ride to Prince George instead of China. Same smell of industry, similar shades of gray and brown, dead foliage, plastic bottle decorated streets and now even the snow!
In any case, we decided to be brave, and head out into the icy weather (wind chill made it minus 14 C) and make a sojourn down to the beach. Paul had been complaining about living just minutes away from the ocean without having yet gone to see it, and so had promised himself -loudly, and publicly- to make it to the beach before the weekend was over. Somehow he managed to convince Kristen to come with him on this trek despite the weather and off they went into the snow.
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| Here's Paul doing his best impersonation of Hello Kitty |
Most of the other teachers were sensible enough to stay home, but many of the Chinese citizens were not so lucky. On the way to the beach, Paul and Kris dodged trucks full of municipal workers who would get off periodically to shovel a side road by hand, or clean up what the snow plow had missed. They even got to watch a pizza delivery man struggle through three or four inches of snow on his scooter, balancing his pizzas on his lap, while his hair was crusting with snow.
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| Sampans along the shore at the Jinshitan fishing village |
Anyways, we made it down to the beach and got our first view of the Yellow sea. It was really beautiful, and actually kind of mystical with all the fog and snow and wind around, but we definitely are hoping that we will soon be able to make a stroll to the beach without having to bundle up like hedgehogs getting ready to hibernate.
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| Despite our best efforts, we were unable to restrain Kristen's cheeks from bursting forth from her protective scarf wrapping every few minutes... |
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