Guest Post: From the Guest Room

I'm mK and this is my husband Dustin! I write over at the blog, From the Guest Room where I love to talk about life, fashion, crafting and most definitely the guests who travel in and through out my life. However, I LOVE to be a guest as well, and China welcomed us in on a little adventure not long ago. My husband and I met in missions, so both travel and volunteering are near and dear to us. So we, along with our two friends Ross and Valerie, decided to take an entire summer to live in Wuhan, China.

Wuhan is a giant city, though still not one of the biggest, in China that is just west of Shanghai. We flew into Beijing and took an overnight train ride about 12 hours south to our city for the summer. Wuhan is super hot and muggy and also quite smoggy. I decided not to edit any of my photos so that you could see the actual colors of the sky. On one single night of the summer, a wind blew the smog Eastward leaving a moment of clear night skies. We all were so excited that we took the elevator to the 20-something floor of our sky-rise apartment complex to get an amazing view of the city. We ended up seeing one star! It was awesome.

Our main reason of traveling to China, however, was not to see if we could spot a star amidst all the grey. We went to volunteer at Mr. Mai's Coffeehouse and Foreign Language Club. It's an adorable coffee shop owned by two Americans from the south. Chinese businessmen, children and students alike are welcomed to come sip on coffee and practice their English with volunteer foreigners. So, in short, we sat around all summer drinking coffee, playing games and talking to these beautiful Chinese people. (And I made a little coffee while I was at it!)

Because we sat around chatting all day, we made a lot of friends who all wanted to take us around and show us their culture - especially since we were teaching them so much about our language! We tried hot pot meals, we visited the clothing markets, we went to museums and landmarks, we sang Karaoke, we ate out, we were invited to a tea-tasting and more. Valerie and I had so much fun at the tea tasting, trying teas that were priced at up to $1,000 a pound. (They were generous to us!!) We made them laugh a bit with our goofy tasting style!

We had been given a treasure of doing China the local way, but we were not about to end our adventure without a little tourism! We hopped back on a train and headed to Beijing where we hiked to the Great Wall, bargained back and forth for pearls at the Pearl Market, walked through the Temple of Heaven and more. It was a trip of a lifetime. We do hope our adventures lead us back there someday! Or, leads you there because, 我强烈建议去武汉 ! ♥, mK