Every weekend, weather permitting, the willing (and able) participants are loaded into the van and cars and taken on a ‘field trip’. I kind of feel like I’m back in school on these. So our first field trip was to a village from the Dong Dynasty. For those of you unfamiliar with Chinese pronounciation (almost all of you I think) it is pronounced TONG. News to me, good thing we have interpreters!
Anyways, this was a spot about 40 minutes out of Huaihua beside a small lake. The village was made entirely of wood and had the cool architechtural style that we associate with China.


The girls enjoyed running along the long hallways and climbing the stairs to the upper levels. Emily thought the big iron wok looked like a giant’s soup bowl. I’d love to see the fire they light in that!

We were served a meal which consisted of no less than 10 different dishes. Seated at our table were 3 children and a Muslim couple so there was way too much for us to eat at one sitting. We were able to take a fair bit of it back with us since we really enjoyed it!
After our meal there was a cultural dance performance which was quite interesting. We couldn’t understand a word that the announcer was saying (there were many Chinese visitors as well), but that’s ok.