Xi'an May 2002
    Update
   Church
   Terracotta soldiers
   The Nestorian tablet

I flew from Hohhot to Xi'an on Saturday, July 13 to visit with Abby and Sarah, Virginia Baptist college students who are spending the summer in Xi'an, leading oral English classes of junior high and senior high students for the YMCA. They are doing a great job and are learning a lot about Chinese culture, at the same time. There are two classes of students and they switch off halfway through the morning so that each of them only has to prepare a lesson for an hour and a half, and so that all students have both Abby and Sarah as a teacher. Their classes are very active, employing games and songs to encourage the students to use English. Each class has a Chinese teacher to help with any translation problems, and two or three young people often take them sightseeing. They will finish their program on August 8 and fly to Beijing on August 9 for walking on the Great Wall and for other sightseeing.

The first photo above shows them in church on a Sunday evening. You can learn more about the church under "Xi'an, Church." We discovered that in the evening service there are a lot of young adults and young people. That seems to be true in many places in China.

The first evening I was there, we went to a restaurant that served pizza. They eat most of their meals in the YMCA restaurant. A few times they have been taken to other restaurants, and sometimes they just have to break down and have KFC.

The restaurant photos above were taken when the director of Xi'an YMCA took us to lunch at a place that serves the traditional Chinese dumpling known as jiaozi in many, many forms, such as that of a chicken or turtle or flower.