china is BIG

it's a big country: mountains and rivers and grasslands and deserts
with over a billion people: more than any other country
and a lot of history: japapanese occupation, the great leap forward and cultural revolution, the massacre at tiananmen square (and that's just the modern history)

this is the the first time i've needed to take TWO photos to cover the books we are reading!
 

 

our favorite was A Little Tiger - the author, Song Nan Zhang, is a canadian artist who was born in china in 1942. he lived through, and illustrated, so many of the historical events we've read about. it really helped us 'hang' the other tales we've been reading.
pepper breezed through all the novels, and fierce read the smaller ones. i read The House of Sixty Fathers to him; it was very exciting.
we watched a travel video of china, but much more interesting was a film we streamed from the NFB (great resource!) - another chinese artist who expressed his childhood and adult experiences through art: this time film.

pepper tried her hand at caligraphy (we thought the red looked totally awesome!):
 

this is the character for 'Fu' which means good luck. you need to hang this, on red paper and upside-down on your door and windows to have good luck in the new year:

with our upcoming trip to florida looming, we didn't have a chance to experience real chinese food. but we'll try to rectify that by feb 14 - the chinese new year.