Ni zuijin mang shenme? （你最近忙什么？）

Ni zuijin mang shenme (你最近忙什么？）, or "you recently busy what?"

Oh, glad you asked. Here are a few highlights from the last two weeks of what I have been up to.

Friends from afar
Last Wednesday the CLP (our language program) was blessed to get to meet the friends of one of my classmates who came to visit. Two men from America came to visit my classmates as well as bring some encouragement to us here. We all gathered Wednesday night and they treated us to Pizza Hut (a HUGE deal-we miss pizza but it is so expensive we rarely go-especially as students). After we all ate to our content (great content) one of the men shared with us from our favorite book and brought a challenge as well as encouragement. Such a blessing.

Some of the boxes...not all...

Saturday afternoon football
A few Saturdays ago a bunch of us got together for a day of some "american style" football. About 15-20 people came out to play and we split up into teams at a nearby university's dirt field and got into the fall spirit. Most (if not almost all) Chinese people know very little about American football so we had many observers as the big group of foreigners ran around throwing and trying to catch the football. Some of the families also came to watch so there were lots of kiddos running around watching and playing nearby as well so we were quite the interest point for the day. It was so much fun to play and to be able to enjoy the community of language school here. We played for almost 4 hours! (We all then felt the results of playing for that long the next few days as we were complaining about being sore more than our classmates who ran a half marathon that weekend)

Day of Rest
Yesterday the CLP observed a day of rest and reflection. All of our classes and tutor times were canceled for the day. We started the day off Tuesday night with a time of singing and focusing our hearts. It is so great to get together and sing in community. I am definitely enjoying that this year. Wednesday we had a time of community singing and reading of our favorite book and then the afternoon off. We then ended the day with singing some fun songs and then a community soup and bread dinner. I don't know if it was becuase many hadn't eaten in a day or because it was so wonderful but we all thought the soup dinner was amazing! Such a blessing to fellowship with our classmates and staff. I finished off the day meeting with some ladies to work on our Beth Moore study about Daniel!

eating dinner at the CLP

the soup was a success!

Test Time!!!
Today we had our first test here at CLP. It was in our characters class. In Chinese, many of the characters (or pictures as my some friends call them-the words in Chinese) are composed of two parts, the radical and the phonetic. The phonetic side can give you some idea of what the word may sound like (so if two characters have the same phonetic they may sound similar). The radical side can give you some idea of the meaning (like things to do with clothing, or with metal, or birds). In our character class we had to memorize 50 different radicals adn learn about them and many phonetics. We also had to memorize our school address in Chinese and be able to write it. Today we had our final exam for the class. I think we all felt pretty good about it! It is amazing to think that in only a few short months I have learned these 50+ radicals which can help me know meanings to countless many other characters! More about my classes to come in my next newsletter!

study time

For more pictures check out my flickr! (www.flickr.com/photos/chinamegan)