Visited Zhu's hometown for moon festival!

Wow I got to go and visit my friend Zhu's hometown with my other friend Sarah this weekend. We went to his hometown by car and spent the night at his aunties with his mom. It was really really awesome. He lives in a very small village. Maybe only 1000 people and he told us that this is the way that most of china is. We got to meet his grandparents and he showed us the dam in his village that flooded almost 10 years ago. He is 22 but the chinese count birthdays different than the americans. He was born only one month before me so I am 22 here as well. He grew up in a 3 story home right next to this beautiful river and his grandparents live up the hill from him. They live in a small 2 story cottage made out of logs and mud. We ate lunch with them today and had tea with them yesterday. His grandfather's 80th birthday is on October 12th and this is a very big deal. His grandma is in her 70's and she still does all the cooking and cleaning for her husband and they are very very healthy. They raise mulberry leaves for silk worms and grow all their own vegetables and fruit. We walked about 10 or 11 km today because we wanted to go and see Zhu's classmate who had a bunch of puppies but she called him and said that the puppies were all gone when we were almost there so we had to turn around and walk back. The village is so beautiful. It's in this forest and very misty and rainy but quite cool. The atmosphere is so different from the city and I am very grateful to have been invited to see his hometown. We ate fish, rice, tofu, taro, and soybeans with peppers last night for dinner and today for lunch at his grandmothers we had taro, pork, potato and rice, and this really long vegetable that we saw growing outside. I forget the name of it. Zhu's grandparents cannot read but they work very very hard. They speak the linan language but cannot speak very much mandarin at all. That is the dialect of language that they speak around this area. Many many people speak mandarin but some only know the linan language. We came back on the bus and stopped in the town where Zhu's boarding school was for high school. We got to walk around the campus a little bit before we took the bus back to linan. Tonight me and sarah are going to go to people's square to look at the puppies there. I am doing laundry right now and really really enjoyed my weekend.