On my way home

Greetings friends!

Well, I have survived the first semester of Chinese Language school! I am leaving in an hour to start my winter travels. (I am flying to America the next two days, arrive in the states Dec 31 through Jan 15.) Sorry it has been a while since my last real update. I hope to spend some time writing in airports and on planes the next few days. Thanks for all of your thoughts over the holiday season and finishing off the semester. I would really appreciate your thoughts for my travels for the next two months. I look forward to being able so see many of you while back in the states the next two weeks. As I head off to finish packing I will leave you with a few pictures of my small group. Every Saturday we meet with our small group to sing, study and fellowship together. This was our last dinner out as a small group last week (we went to the Indian restaurant in town). We are all very ready for a holiday as you an see in the second picture! Have a Happy New Year!!

It's getting cold out there!

My balcony windows-double windows both frozen with ice in mornings

This week has been our coldest week yet here in Changchun. The highs were around 5 degrees F with the lows in the negatives. The worst part was the wind putting the "feels like" around -16F. Needless to say, we have been bundling up a lot. It also has been snowing off and on here lately keeping things looking nice and clean and beautiful! Here is a picture from one of our snow days where Hannah and I made a snow blob. Check out flickr for more.



Thanksgiving was a great time here for us. First of all, we got two days off from school which was fun. The only bad thing was we felt more tired after the break than before! But we did some fun things that weekend. We had our language school Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday night and had all kinds of amazing things! We invited our teachers to celebrate with us this year for the first time and it was so fun to be able to share that time with them and continue to be building relationships for them. Also that weekend we got together with people from our organization from all over NE China. We had another meal, a time of singing together, then another big football game! It was pretty cold playing and there was a few inches of snow on the field but we played hard!! See flickr for more Thanksgiving pictures.

There were just a few dishes after Thanksgiving dinner

Li Laoshi (teacher) and her son

NE China Football Team!

It's amazing I only have 3 more weeks of school left this semester. I am sure they will be full and busy but also a great time to talk about this important season. This next week we are reviewing in all of our classes (speaking of, I need to go prepare our review for Chapter 6...). Then starting the next week we will be talking about Christmas and learning how to tell the Christmas story in Chinese in most of our classes. This is such a great time to spend sharing with our teachers and tutors the reason for the season! In other Chinese learning news, I now know how to buy airplane tickets and say all the important parts of an airport in Chinese!