Greetings from Minsk World!

We'd like to show you around of our little part of Shenzhen, which is called Yantian. Pictures of Minsk World, the resident amusement park/abandoned Soviet battle ship, shall be forthcoming. Here's the huge, imposing, but impressive government building which is our main landmark:
And a warped panaroma of the big town square:
If you look to the right of the big government building, you can see a huge TV screen on the adjacent building. This is where the locals congregate in the evening to watch the news, sports, and what have you. It is a pretty huge screen, but I (Kitty) find it kind of depressing to think of how many people plan to gather in the town square and watch TV for their nightly entertainment. When you think about it, though, it's certainly not more depressing than watching TV alone at home...
(ANDYUPDATE: This is what most depresses me here, they have this totally sweet kickass square, with a gigantic TV, which should be perfectly set up for programming their brothers in the ways of communism, but instead of a giant big brother propaganda head, they just show news and TV shows. Cmon China!)

A few pictures of our school... Here are the kids going to class while the same manic classical music plays every day. It's driving us slightly crazy trying to figure out what the song is that plays like 10 times daily.
Here's one of Andy's classes:
He's teaching Health and Science to the 5th & 6th graders. They have a Chinese person teaching them English for some reason. I get the 1st and 2nd graders, since "men teach science, but women teach the young children." That's non-negotiable. Anyway, they're all pretty cute kids.

There's some inspirational (?) posters up around the school. I think it's pretty natural that the school wants the kids to be little world conquerors like Napoleon, but Andy points out that things didn't really end up so good for ol' Bonaparte. (ANDYUPDATE: Also napoleon apparently rode an invisible bicycle)
Here's some English posters around the school. I especially like the "God save me!" toward the end of the first one:
(ANDYUPDATE: I like how almost every sentence ends with an exclamation point! They have students read these bizarre dialogues over the loudspeakers almost every day. So sometimes we get to wake up to weird shouting, exclamation point, dialogues between 2 kids over the loud speakers reminding us that exercise can lose weight and that they are fond of the shuttle cock.)
And here's another school in the area. Presumably, this is where they teach the mutant children to speak English.
And to wrap it up, some pictures of the local fauna at the market. Andy and I use these tubs full of animals as a cut-rate zoo, but it's pretty depressing to think that so many of them will be dead within 24 hours. They even had tortoises for sale! Don't tell Vanya.
(ANDYUPDATE: I noticed these when i went with a friend to the convience store next to it to get drinks. What first caught my eye was the center bucket, which was FILLED with beetles! crawling over each other in such a way as to produce a very soothing visual display. I kept staring because it was like a massage for your eyeballs. There are snakes, turtles, live prawns, live frogs in bags, angry crabs that a lady comes by to mist with a little sprayer, and one place had a huge live alligator! BTW- yes these are all for eating!)