Well, as the titled says, i'm back in China visiting my fiance. I got here Sept 23. I spent my first few days in Shanghai staying with some friends from past trips. Most of my friends got jobs in shanghai, some in shenzhen, and some in beijing. Unfortunately, i won't be heading up to beijing this time.

After shanghai, we went to luoyang. that's where her family lives. the train ride was about 17 hours long, but we had a sleeper car, so it wasn't so bad. in the sleep car, there is like an aisle on one side with tables and folding chairs that come out from the wall. on the opposite side of that is cubbies withs bunk beds. there are 2 sets of 3 stacked beds in each cubbie. it was fun.

i met her parents and 3 of her sisters in luoyang. her oldest sister lives in the city. her older sister lives about 2 hours away and is married. her youngest still lives at home with her parents. So i stayed with them for almost a week. they live out in a rural property with a tiny bit of farmland. there's nothing quite like living with the natives. i really enjoyed it. i got to separate corn from the cob, pick cotton, plant stuff, and more. her father taught me how to drive their motor scooter. so selina and i used it to go to town. it's about 30 minutes drive from their house.

Thankfully her family likes me. they aren't especially happy that i'm american, of course, but at least her father accepts us. I really like them too. i'll miss my new little sister. hehe.

We left luoyang to go to shenzhen. the week-long, nation-wide holiday was up and she needed to get back to work. after a 45 minute taxi ride, a 24 train ride, and a 1 hour fast train ride, we finally arrived and took a short bus to the hotel. my apartment wasn't ready until the next day, which was another 45 min bus ride away. did i mention china is huge?

I've been able to see a few more of my friends here which is really cool, and selina's younger sister lives here. i get to see selina after her work every day. we walk around town, have dinner and usually watch a little tv or a movie. everything is going well. we are starting our paperwork now. my attorney tells me it will take 8-12 months to get the visa for her. we'll live in the states for about a year, then who knows. maybe we'll be back here

I hope it stays alive this time. I got it 3 days ago. I finally had time to play it yesterday. I played about 3 hours of Lost Odyssey. My cousin and i are playing some GTA today. PLEASE PLEASE Don't die!

Well, my 360 got back form XBox support last week. FINALLY! I was pretty happy. While they had it, they replaced the fan and disc drive. The fan used to wake the dead, so that was definitely a welcome addition. I'm not sure why they replaced my drive though. Every once in 20 times, it didn't open right away, maybe that's it.

Well, I went out and bought GTA4 and Dark Sector to brush up on some games, but after about 3 days the drive stopped reading. it's really loud and won't read games or dvd's. So, I called Micro support again. They're sending me another box. Maybe some day this year i'll be able to play my xbox again.

I was once a proud owner of a fully functional Xbox 360. i loved it. I hated it. Mostly I condemned it for being irritating on minor issues, but it kept giving me it's love with great moments watching tv downloads and playing some good Live Arcade games. Overall, I'd say the box gave out more love than i put back into it. And maybe that's why....maybe that's why it had to end like this. This once proud 360 owner has now been bent over Microsoft's knee and "humbled". Only now do i appreciate using custom soundtracks, mostly decent arcade games, a convient download service for videos and demos and content, and 120GB of space to do as i please. Humility thy name is "red ring of death"....and i hate you.

Why wasn't i warned? It's pretty bad.

And I can only get $20 trade in credit. I can understand that. It's a piece of crap game with low resale.

day3 with rock band. about 10 hours of play time.

my 3 cousins and i played it. i switched off singing with one of my cousins, and the two others played bass and guitar. the guy playing on guitar used the explorer (with cord) while the bassist used the les paul (cordless). the les paul had about .5 sec delay. we tried every calibration preset. i finally got my internet back up today and downloaded the patch. now the lag is much more bearable, but it's still noticeable. sometimes the game won't even register some notes. especially if i went from a 2 note cord to a single note. it happens to all of us, really weird.

i hate the multiplayer world tour. you have to keep playing the same songs over and over and over and over again. my voice was to starting to fail by the time i had only played about 8 different songs - but that was in about 4 hours play time. ya it's that repetitive.

i played some single player for a few hours today. the tour is a lot better. it's the normal guitar hero style. the slight lag is irritating, but at least it isn't game breaking for me anymore. the guitar is much easier than guitar hero, so don't expect to be thoroughly challenged with it. that was a little disappointing, but i suspected they might tone it down to make it more accessible as a party game, so it wasn't necessarily a surprise.

i only like a few songs, but that's ok. i bought it to have fun with friends. i knew a lot of the songs sucked before i bought it. i just hope better songs come out soon and maybe a patch that fixes the game so we can have some fun. if they can roll out some better updates, my friends may decide to play again. as of now, the band is dead. they all said it sucks. :(

good things! the character customization is cool and i like the way they handle energy better (star power). if you are using energy, you can still pick it up while playing and it adds it to your pool. that's pretty much all my good notes for now.

Sorry I haven't kept in touch with everyone. Here's an update on anything worth noting in the past year:

My brother had a baby! ya i'm pretty happy. I'm finally an uncle. After about a week, he wasn't even ugly; kinda cute actually. I got to drive up to colorado to visit them for a week. He's really sweet. His name is Jordan.

Well, I went back to china this summer. This time i wasn't so much motivated by the teaching aspect though (but I still enjoyed that!). This trip I was more focused on seeing my girlfriend for the first time in a year. So, great news for me! I proposed to her the night before I left. I'll presume, your patting me on the back right now. thanks! She's planning a trip to come see me during her winter break in january. Then I'll visit next summer to meet her parents and hang out with her. ya ya. I hear your questions. Yes she's is chinese. yes she's extremely cute. hehe

He's an "up-and-coming" Polynesian artist from Samoa. His artist name is Sam*Son for Samoan Son. I'm told this is a roughcut of what will be his first music video, so don't expect to see it on MTV or whatever soon. He's one of my brother's friends so that's how I've heard of him, but I think he's really good.

Sam*Son - Polynesian Woman


You can check out his myspace (i hate myspace) right here: Sam*Son Live
He has a couple other songs on his myspace.

I made it to China last weekend, and today was my first day of teaching. It was pretty interesting. I'll try to get pics up later. I'll be here for a month so I have plenty of time.

Well. I'll be out for over a week. Tomorrow I leave for Nicaragua. Why you say? Because. Stop asking questions! What do you want from me? You think I'm paranoid? I'm not paranoid!....

Sorry, I won't let him out again. There's a small mountain outside the town of Somotillo in which the people have no church to convene in. I'm not sure where they meet now, but they are incredibly poor, so we are going to help them build a church. ^_^

The medical team went about a week or so ago. They said it's the sickest village they've ever visited, and they said something about "this one time in 2000..." so they've been doing it awhile. They said everyone in the village has something, at least parasites. There was a 90 something year old guy and he said they were the first doctors he had ever seen. Many had completely rotten sets of teeth. These people saw their first North Americans last week. They have no plumbing, electricity, etc etc. Some other people visited from Colorado or something and got a lot of the church built, so hopefully we can finish up the church early and help build/repair these people's homes.

I'll see you all when I get back! I'll post some pics of the trip in my UCB when I get back too.

Yep! That's right. Even though it was offically 30 degrees and super incredibly windy, we paintballed last saturday. It was pretty fun if you discount the frozen CO2 and everybody chopping balls left and right. Thankfully my gun supports Nitrogen without an extra regulator, so I asked to borrow a tank after a while which pretty much fixed my problems (I had left mine at home. doh!). It was really fun. The place we go doesn't have any refs, so we pretty much do whatever we feel like doing. I won't bore anyone with the details, but it was really fun. :D
If you want details of our past games, check out my PB stats:



And check out the pics of my gun. I painted parts of it sand, so it will blend in with the acres and acres of dead grass :P