7 down, 6 more to go

(family in Arkansas)

The last two weeks I was blessed to be able to go home to Arkansas and visit my family and friends. It was great to be able to relax at home and enjoy American life! I am now heading off tomorrow to Thailand for a month. Our organization has a conference every year down in Northern Thailand and then I am going with some of my friends in the organization for the beach for a week to relax before classes start again in the spring. It will be nice to have a break before the craziness of classes; studying Chinese definitely is more draining than I had expected but it is great to already see the progress. My landlord came over the other day to look at my apartment (she is going to change the cabinets in my kitchen so hopefully the roaches will go away and stay away) and she could even notice the improvement in my Chinese! I appreciate your thoughts as I am traveling the next weeks on multiple planes and buses (I will have taken 13 planes by the end of the holiday). Happy New Year (Chinese new year next week!)

(after flight number 1 of the holiday season-Changchun to Beijing)

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!

Football 2

This weekend has been a great weekend, busy but great. Once a month us without kids take turns babysitting for one of the families here at language school. Friday night I babysat our directors' kids, 2 boys and a little girl. They were real cute; they were so tired so we just ate our McDonalds and watched Peter Pan. I never realized how funny Peter Pan was. A great highlight of that night was when talking about Thanksgiving and asking where the Pilgrims came from the response was Mexico and then Egypt as a second try. So funny.

our somewhat "hardcore" faces

Every Saturday we get together in small groups and study and sing together. This week was our group's turn to take care of kids (that's right-kid control twice in one weekend). It was fun though-I had the older kids so we read the story of Menno Simons (founder of Mennonites) and then acted it out for the adults. Then I met up with our small group at the "rabbit restaurant" for lunch (there is a rabbit at the restaurant so it is fondly called that). That afternoon was our second football game of the year-we had a great time and played for over two hours. The only down side was it had been rain/snowing all morning so the field was pretty muddy-it would stick to our shoes like 2 inches thick-made running a little hard! That night we played the game Acquire and I won so that was exciting!

playing with Buddy the Badger

Today we had a lady's brunch which was great to get together with other women in the city and eat delicious food, sing and study together. I then worked on homework (practicing writing characters) and did laundry this afternoon. And the weekend is over and back to classes!

Photo Scavenger Hunt

eating chocolate fruit skewers

I just realized there are a lot of things I haven't written about on here so I am going to do a little catch up today and tell about our Photo Scavenger Hunt last month with our tutors (our October Tutor event). We met all our tutors at McDonalds (the usual meeting place) and split into groups. Our group was 7 people, 3 foreigners (Pat, Amy and me) and 4 Chinese (our tutors and another guy Pat knew from playing basketball). We got our list and headed off looking for clues!

with people dancing with fans on the street

It was a pretty crazy night as the three Chinese guys really took initiative at getting all the clues! They were so determined but yet not real organized, or actually not at all organized. They would run off in a direction and we would just run along behind hoping there was a clue in the direction we were going! It was so fun though and we really got to know the members in our group. The tutors had never done this kind of thing before so it was really fun to see them laughing at the strange things we had to do and trying not to be too embarrassed. As foreigners we can get away with doing strange things but it is much funnier for Chinese people to do some of the things we were doing!

playing cards with people on street

pictures with people taller than tallest in group

At the set time we met up back at the school to enjoy the fall snacks that were prepared (including some amazing home-made apple cider, actually everything is homemade here!). We sat around playing funny games while waiting for all the pictures to be loaded up onto a computer and then sat back and enjoyed the slide show of all the teams pictures. There were some pretty funny pictures. In the end, our team won the hunt!!! I guess the determination of our guys payed off! We took our dove chocolate bars as our reward and celebrated! The tutors still are talking about our scavenger hunt!

picture with people older than 60

"buying" Beijing 2008 merchandise

more pictures from scavenger hunt at http://www.flickr.com/photos/chinamegan

CLUE in Chinese

We try to have a tutor event each month to spend time with our tutors here at language school. We all meet with a tutor one on one for two hours every week day. Because of this we get to know them pretty well during that time but we also like to spend time with them outside of this scheduled time as well. These are often our most significant and important relationships while here studying Chinese. The tutors rotate each month so we also miss seeing our previous tutors.

playing games!

This Friday was our November tutor event. We had a game/movie/video game party at our office at school. It was quite the success. I am pretty sure the number of Chinese friends outnumbered Americans (we also invited any other Chinese friends we have to come as well if they want). We played games in the main room, a few guys played some PS2 and a few people watched Remember the Titans in our listening lab. There were all kinds of games from Uno, Rook, Settlers of Katan, and then our group-trying to play CLUE. The game was in both Chinese and English but the problem (one of them problems) was that it was in traditional characters (not the simplified ones that we all know-the traditional are hard even for many Chinese people to read). At the time I was the only foreigner at the table so I started explaining how to play CLUE in Chinese, of course. It was quite the task-I realized I don't even know an articulate way of explaining it in English but we kept trying. They finally understood the main ideas and we started trying to play. Another hard aspect was I don't know how to say all those weapons and rooms in Chinese and I just called the people by their color (Hongren, bairen, lanren-red person, white person, blue person). After a while we decided it was too hard and not very fun so we swited over to Uno-a great idea. We had LOTS of fun playing Uno and I taught them additional fun rules. By the end of the night we were all great friends and exchanging phone numbers. I made many new friends and got to hang out again with my previous tutor. I am so happy to finally be making more Chinese friends here and excited about hanging out with many of these new friends.

my CLUE table

(An additional fun fact-Chinese people are very interested in asking about our new future president-they all want to know what I think about him and my taxi driver last night knew more about him than me... I decided I need to learn some more political words in Chinese so I can know more what people are talking about!!)

A new president and new realization

So Obama has won. I know there are many mixed feelings about this. As I was telling my tutor today though, the most important thing now is for Americans to start lifting up the future leader of our country to our Father who sets up leaders for his perfect plan. It was pretty nice this year for following the results, just wake up and go to class and after class the results were in. No time to sit around waiting wondering who the winner would be. Although Obama won the US vote, us with my organization took a vote at language school and McCain beat Obama 17-3 with a vote for Ron Paul, a vote for Nick Geinhardt and 2 votes for Big Bird. I'm sure Big Bird would be proud he was only one vote off from Obama...

The other day I was in the supermarket by my house and was thinking I could go for some ground beef to maybe make some chilli. I go to the meat section (which I will admit I am still a big afraid of since there is so many strange meats laying around and all the parts of animals there). I find the "niu rou," cow meat and find some of what I think is ground beef. Except then I remember, oh yeah, I can read a lot of characters now, I'll read the characters for fun. Then I see the character for brain, at least I am pretty sure that is what it was. I immediately put that package of sticky meat down and decide to go for chicken breasts instead. Then I get to thinking...before I could read characters I wonder what I ate... Today in class we learned how to say you are a vegetarian or you only eat vegetables "wo chi su." I start to think maybe that might be a safter route for me...

chicken feet anyone?

how about a head?