888 !Getting Lucky! 888

We moved out of Zhuhai on Thursday and into a beautiful wonderland resort that was about 1,000 times better than the Sea View. It had all of these wonderful koi ponds and walkways in it:
It rained a lot but it was still gorgeous:

The hotel was a whole set of lakes and goofy resort things you could pay for. It came complete with a driving range AND a shooting range. The Chinese seem to think that every American owns a gun, but they're the ones with shooting ranges at their hotels.

Here's an inexplicably huge statue at the hotel. It was totally obscured by other buildings, so you would barely even know it's there, even though it must've been 60 feet tall. There was a cool shrine in front of it, and it was flanked by carvings of other wide-hipped goddesses.


Judging by the following picture, you'd think all of the food at the hotel was jellied octopus, but actually it was very tasty.
There was a really cool park that we played around in. Here's a characteristic photo of Andy in the park:
And me in the park, dressed as a loyal Communist:
Cool hippo (?) statue in the park:
And we documented some of the lovely flower arrangements for our green-thumbed mothers:
Andy adopted a friendly little butterfly he found waiting outside of our hotel room. He named him "Renaldo," and they were inseparable.
Here's a bit of administrative business... We all had to get a physical examination to show that we're healthy enough to teach English in China (basically that you don't have AIDS and you're not blind). The group coordinators seemed confident in the system they'd worked out for 110 people to visit 7 medical stations each in two hours, but the proposed system quickly broke down. Here's a photo of the resulting chaos, 100 Americans bringing a Chinese hospital to its knees:
And here we are at the police department, registering to live in Yantian, the eastern district of Shenzhen. I'm pretty sure Andy wasn't supposed to take a picture inside the police dept., but no one noticed. The guy at the end of the table with the red-collared shirt is Louis, our contact teacher (guy who helps us out) at our school.
We already moved in to our school, which seems fantastic. It's only a block from the sea (you can see Hong Kong right across the water!), maybe a 15-minute bus ride from the beach, and right by a bunch of gigantic, lovely mountains. It's not really in the "big city" part of Shenzhen, but it's only a half hour bus ride away from downtown. We have to start teaching on Wednesday. Soon we'll take pictures of our place and post them.