Cooking Cooking Cooking Yum!

And I started to cook.... i haven't cooked much but when ever I'm not living at home i cook more. so i have been cooking for Nick and I to night i made the yummiest vegetarian spaghetti dinner.

Linguine and fucilli whole wheat noodles with a 4 cheese sauce with tofu and onions mixed in with Parmesan cheese on top. emmm And of course whats a meal with out Qie Zi (eggplant)

Lets see how many times we can do a full circle around L.A.

It all started when we hopped in the car with no directions and decided we were going to China town but had no idea where it was ..... but it all works out when China's involved remember? we missed our exit which was our first mistake but oh ya there's no mistakes. well we ended up in Beverly Hills and went to a sweet art show (no mistake) pretty fancy we saw tons of Rolls Royce, Bentley's, Ferrari's, locus's, and the normal cars were BMW's and Mercedes. but i know my Mazda 626 blew them all away pretty sexy car if you ask me!
After we went to the art show we went to find my cousin Jason Brennen's work he works at starbucks so we went on an adventure finding him. which turns our he wasn't to far from where we were which was great! It was really good to see Jason its been about three years so we caught up with our lives over his break.
then the real adventure began! when we first got in we past the L.A. Temple oh how pretty. and some how we drove and hour finding the city and we ended up back at the Temple .... we did a complete circle around L.A. and the whole day i used up a half tank of gas ouch! but it was all worth it we found a lot of cool spots and our trip around L.A.
One of the funny spots we found was the Tar Pits. The Tar pits are in a bunch of movies like; Volcano, My girl 2, and TV shows; The Flintstones,and the Simpson's. They have found lots of fossils and mammoth and animal skeletons in the Tar. The oldest thing found in the tar pits were 38,000 years old. I wanted to touch it the entire time it was so cool it was like thick goo and it was bubbling pretty neat.

Back in China .... or are we? Nick and i were so excited for China Town. and when we got they it felt like we were in china for a second the billboards were in Chinese all the stores with the random trinkets and SWARM OF ASIAN! they even had the little turtle ( should have got one :( ) well nick and I went in to a store because they had these little plastic air soft guns which everyone that was in china with us knows he loves those. its a possibility i may have a scar on the back of one of my legs from one of are many air soft gun wars in our dorms in China (j/k). well anyways so we walk into the store and i see these Chinese lamps that i really want to get so we thought we would impress this guys with our Chinese skills ..... he was not impressed! we were all excited telling him we went to China to teach English. We were thinking he was going to be like all the Chinese people in china and be like oh your Chinese is amazing (even though its terrible) but he was pretty bold and told us our Chinese sucked .. ouch!!

Qie Zi wheres the qie zi? We founds the qie zi!!! woot our favorite food while we were in China was Eggplant we went from restaurant to restaurant looking for qie zi. Finally we found some Chinese people happy to speak Chinese with us. they were soooo cute we got to order our food in Chinese and converse with them while eating qie zi it was wonderful!

MIchael is a model !

Michael is Graduating!! so we decided to take some senior photos i was thinking we would go to some cool place and take some pictures with graffiti, or an old sweet car but Michael wasn't so hot on that idea so we took some pictures around the house and it was quick and fun.

Our new way around long beach WOW LOOT! Saturday Morning we decided to take a bike ride down to get something to eat so we went and got a yummy pizza. After we bumped into a Green Festival. we learned about the peace corps, solar engergy, yoga, and listened to live music while we drank freshly sqeezed lemonade. After that we headed to the beach and drove all the way down then turned inward to head to nicks school to play tennis. on the way home from tennis we stopped at a second hand store then got a little lost. by the time we got home we had biked 20 miles! what a great day

Schools Out For the Summer!

Mom and Dad Drove to California with me, we went to long beach to pick up Nick and went camping for the weekend. We had so much fun; swimming, BBQing, eating seafood, and playing polish polka (the card game golf)
Save Me!!! Nick and I went swimming at Huntington Beach the weather was amazing but the water was freezing! Burrrr
Cacti Butt! My parents Nick and I went to The Mission in San Juan Capistrano. I couldn't believe how gorgeous it was there great place for pictures! well i made the mistake of laying on a bench under a big Cactus ...BAD IDEA! i had little cacti needles in my butt and all over my dress so i tried to get them out with my hands and they started to stick in my hands. i took off the dress and changed in hope that i would get rid of all the needles but even the next day i was getting them in my hands and stuff. this is a picture of me bending over while my mom is taking the tweezers to my butt. OUCH

Daddy always with the camera.
Sexy Mamacita
Its been one day and hes already biting me
The mission
This was in Laguna beach There was this big black guy who was taking care of all these abandoned birds it was really neat! so he put them on our heads and they kissed while we did ... i was really afraid the bird was going to poop on me.

Mom Came over and met me Hefei she spent two weeks in China!! We went first up to Beijing, then back to Hefei to drive to Shanghai with the group where we said good bye. We then went down to Hong Kong and on the way over i had taken two benidril because of a bad sinus infection so when we got there we had to Carry all of our stuff from my four months stay, and what mom had and what ever he had bought in Beijing. Well let me tell you i was completely incoherent and now i really can only vaguely remember what happened but i remember it was really rough getting our luggage to our hostel which we really didn't even know where it was. but when we got to our hostel we were thinking of getting back on the plan and flying to Sanya because we were so scared. Mom barricaded the door with all of our luggage and i was out like a light.
Hong Kong was so amazing especially the 80 degree weather being in Hefei during the winter is sooooo cold because they don't use heaters so its impossible to get warm. so it was really nice to put on some shorts at tour Hong Kong.
Mom and My Purchases through out the trip in Beijing, Hong Kong, Hefei, and Shanghai
Disney Land Hong Kong
Huge ceramic horse Guanghua gave us (Chelsie was the only one that got hers home) I left mine at the hostel in hong kong as a tip for the cleaning lady :)



Potato Chips on a stick on a small island in Hong Kong

Big Buddha (Hong Kong)
Good Bye to the teachers Jwen, Judy, and Bei Bei
saying our goodbyes (tyler)
Saying goodbye to Jerry ... that's how he does the peace sign.
Sick on the Great Wall
Sacred Way
Tiennamen Square
Snack Street Beijing

He who has not climbed the great wall is not a true man - Mao Zedong

Great Wall of China - Check

I guess you could say I'm finally a man....according to Mao.

Our Trip to Beijing was amazing! We did basically as much as physically possible. My feet were even bruised by the time i got done with the trip.

Amy, Nick, and I waited in Dale and Aj's room with much anticipation for them to arrive. When they finally did arrive we jumped out ---------Soon after we thought we would break them in hard and start them out with a traditional hole in the wall Chinese restraint ...

Aj attempting "The Chopsticks" it may not look like he was succeeding but in fact he managed to eat like this- you go Aj!

Shopping, shopping, and more shopping!!!

If you know me you'll know I'm all about getting a bargain, and you will also know if i happen to get a great deal i cant help but buy A LOT! well i got a bargain which means i bought a ton! Having Dale, and Aj( Nick, and Amy's parents) was a blast! It was so refreshing

The Pearl Market... Where Much of my money now is.

Free foot massage... mandatory tip. That's OK it was worth ever penny of my $2.75!

The Summer Palace, 17 arches.

Forbidden city

Beijing has some of the neatest architecture.. i was taking back by all the buildings and how amazing the architecture is! this is the Birds Nest and the water cube, and behind that is a building that is supposed to be a dragon. I guess Beijing does have 17 million people so I'm sure they are pretty darn good at making huge buildings by now... makes sense

Yes That is a scorpion... and yes it was Delicious! Scorpion, Tarantula's, and Pecking duck are some of Beijing's delicacies.

The Temple of Heaven.

And then there was the Great Wall

Our group decided that we should hike the "not for the faint hearted" part of the wall as the lonely planet puts it. We woke up at 5 am and got back to the hostel around 7ish. there was hardly any body there, only a handful or tourist and lots of local farmers. Simitai (where we went) is an older part of the wall its from the Ming Dynasty. I'm really glad we didn't go to Baldaling, the restored part of the wall .... i mean i could have got a yummy Star Bucks on the wall but come one does anybody go to the great wall to get Star Bucks? Simitai was much more my kinda place!

This Is Michelle ( Amy and Emily's Friend) getting a Chinese massage... she had perfect circular hickeys all over her back the rest of the vacation it was hilarious!