The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear!

Its Christmas time and I just wanted to update you on how I have been celebrating the holiday season here in China. Mostly, this post will be so you can see the pictures! 

Once the kitchen fiasco was taken care of, Camille and I decorated our apartment! Some of it is quite tacky, but hey, we did the best we could with what we were given! Chinese people don’t really celebrate Christmas, but they really love the cheesy decorations! And you can see a little bit of what our apartment looks like! 

Camille decorating our tiny, but charming Christmas tree! We went for a slightly different look for the tree skirt…its actually a shower curtain! Again, we did the best with what we have!

We have two trees! Of course one of them had to be an LSU tree! Camille’s old boss actually sent her that in the mail and we were pumped!

This picture was taken from the door of my bedroom, so you can see part of the living room and into the dining room, which is separated by this very interesting sliding glass door.

The door that leads to the outside world! You may be wondering why we hung the wreath on the inside of the door and not the outside. Well, the light in the stairwell has been out since we moved in and it is too dark to see anything at night so we decided to put the wreath inside where we can always see it! There is a giant Santa head on the outside, so don’t fret!

Our window! Tacky? Yes I think so, too! But I kind of like it!

A close-up! 

Snowflakes and snow! Those two doors lead to our bedrooms. And yes that is a Justin Bieber poster you see in the background! In our defense, it was a gift from a student!

CAROLING

All of our students have been asking us to do things with them on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. There are so many students that it is impossible to hang out with all of them, not to mention we already have a few plans of our own for Christmas, like skyping with our families back home and going to Ch.ur.ch to celebrate the TRUE meaning of Christmas. Even if they wanted to, students would not be allowed to come to ch.ur.ch with us. So, Paul had a great idea to invite all of our students to celebrate Christmas with us this past Saturday by singing Christmas carols together. Saturday is the only day our students have off from school! Camille and I invited all of our students from the No. 1 High School and Paul and Erin invited all of their students from No. 3 High School. This means thousands of students were invited! We had all taught the students a couple of Christmas carols as part of our Christmas lessons at school, so the songs weren’t completely foreign to them!

We had a pretty good turn out, about 200 students showed up at the people’s square to join us. Most of the students thought they were coming to watch the foreign teachers perform so they were a little confused when they realized we wanted them to sing WITH us! We had hundreds of copies of song lyrics and got our students to sing, as best they could, Joy to the World, The 12 Days of Christmas, Jingle Bells, and We Wish You a Merry Christmas! We all stayed to hang out and talk with the students after singing. It was a lot of fun and I really think the students enjoyed hanging out with each other and us outside of school!

Paul doing a wonderful job leading the group! Check out the mass of students behind him!

More students!

Camille with some of her students! They really love her!

This is my student’s little sister! So cute!

Students from class 13! Ben, Ken, Zin, Kathy, Memory and her little sister! These boys used to be my troublemakers, but I have a great story for later of why they have become my most attentive students now!

Students from Class 3- Raymond and CC Smith! 

This is Rorwing from Class 9! She is one of the sweetest girls you will ever meet!

All of the foreign teachers minus Kevin– Paul, Erin, Camille, Aaron, me, and Chelsie- went to sing Carols. The Randalls came to sing also. Hope and Grace are in the picture. All of our students kept asking Hope if she was a teacher, too! She is 13!

 WAFFLE PLACE

After Caroling, we all headed over to the underground mall where they have this waffle place that makes delicious waffles and egg sandwiches! It is right next to our apartment, so Camille and I eat her at least once a week. Without fail, every single time we go we end up getting our picture taken, so I figured this time I would get some pictures of my own!

This is Liu (pronounced the same as Leo). He and his family run the waffle place. He is super friendly loves taking pictures with us! Man photo!

All the girls with Liu.

I hope you enjoyed the post and are having a wonderful Christmas this year!

Tis the Season to be Jolly...

I’m sorry that it has taken me so long to update the blog but things have been crazy busy here! I want to fill you in on whats been happening here…the good, the bad, the funny, and even the downright disgusting!

The Good

Thanksgiving was wonderful! The seven teachers from ZR got together with our Chinese friend, Dawn, and the Randalls. The Randalls are an older married couple who have three daughters, Hope, Grace, and Mercee. Hope is American and Grace and Mercee are Chinese. I love this family and they are so good to us, always welcoming us into their home! We had a traditional thanksgiving dinner including a frozen turkey, shipped from Beijing, mashed potatoes, green beans, sweet potato casserole, and even pumpkin pie! We all had to chip in and make something because it is no easy task trying to create a huge meal in toaster ovens, trust me! All in all it was a nice holiday. I even got to skype with several members of my family and cried a little when I talked to my maw maw and paw paw, which was to be expected! 

The whole group, minus Aaron, who took the picture, having a truly delicious Thanksgiving dinner. We even watched a little bit of the live streaming of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade online! 

They turkey we had shipped from Beijing!

so many yummy desserts!!!!

For my students, I taught them the story of Thanksgiving about how the pilgrims were Xns who traveled to America to find rel.i.gious freedom.  I had them create turkey hands and write down the things that they are thankful for. I shared that I was thankful for my family, my friends, my students, and most importantly my f.a.i.t.h. It was a wonderful week with the students and I even discovered that one of my students is a Xn!!! I was so excited! 1 in 500!!!! It can be few and far between here. Another student gave me his turkey hand to keep and this is what it said….

Sorry that the picture is kind of blurry! In case you can’t read it, it says “I thank Gd for letting me meet you teacher”. I almost started crying right there on the spot, it was just so sweet because I could tell how much he really meant it! 

Some of the boys in one of my classes showing off their finished turkey hands! I think most of the students enjoyed doing the activity because they never really get the chance in school to do art or crafty things!

Some of the girls from the same class! Some students are very camera shy and won't let me take their picture at all. Others, like this boy in the back, cover up their faces with the paper!

The Down Right Disgusting

Almost two weeks ago Camille and I returned home from our hip hop class at the gym (which we love btw! We are starting to become friends with the teacher and other members of the class even though not a single one of them speaks English and we can’t speak Chinese!) to find our kitchen completely flooded! A pipe in the ceiling had burst and was pooling, literally pooling on the floor! I proceeded to use all of my towels to try to absorb all of the water. Remember this for later in the story…I used my bare hands and towels! We call Diana, our waiban (that means boss) and she came over to look at it and realized it was a huge problem. The next day several workers came to look at the problem and  ripped off the ceiling leaving chunks of the ceiling and debris all over the kitchen and dining room mixing with water. We had to move all of the things from the kitchen into the dining room and living room. There are so many precious items sent from our families from America that we would not be willing to mourn the loss of! No one speaks English so no one can tell us what the problem is. Our main boss, Henry, just tells us that it is the "same as before", not that we have any clue what that means! Anywho, after a few days the kitchen re-floods! We did our best with bowls and buckets and towels to try and catch the water but the flooding is inevitable so we just let it be! Finally, Diana explains to us that it will take the workers some time to get the right kind of pipe to fix the problem, that the water is a sewage line draining from floors 7, 8, and 9!!! Ok, first of all, please explain to me how the water flooding an apartment of floor 3 comes from the apartments on floors 7-9 but not floors 4-6?!?!?! I don't get it! Second of all, and this is really the more important one....do you remember when I said I used to MY towels and MY HANDS to clean up the water the first time it flooded????? Ahhhhhh it was sewage water!!!!!!! Now you know why this is titled the "Downright Disgusting"! I will never be the same again! 

The ripped out ceiling! 

Bits of ceiling mixed with about an inch of water!

Camille standing in all of the water with her rain boots on....we had to conduct a mission to get the water cooler out of the kitchen and into the dining room!

So after two weeks of craziness our kitchen is finally fixed and our lives can get back to normal! Once this was taken care of, Camille and I are were able to decorate the apartment for Christmas! I'll post another blog soon...I promise....about all of the other wonderful things happening right now with our students! Even the midst of this kitchen fiasco, Camille and I were made aware of all the other ways we are blessed and one of those is definitely our students! 

The Last Month.... Part 2 (Our trip to Beijing)

We went to Beijing!

Its about two weeks now since we took our trip to Beijing. It was incredible! This was Camille and I's first attempt at traveling around China by ourselves. I think a few members of our team were a bit worried about us and the fact that we do not speak Chinese, but we managed! We got to experience so many new things....such as taking overnight train rides. Sunday night Camille and I left for Beijing on  what is called a "soft sleeper". It was amazing. The train ride to Beijing was about 10 hours, but with the soft sleeper you get a nice bunk bed to sleep on with soft pillows (it was better than my bed at our apartment, not joking!) 

Camille chilling on her top bunk! The room comes with four beds, so we shared the room with two other Chinese men. They were very nice and tried to speak a little bit of English so they could talk to us!

Bottom bunk! 

We were so excited for our adventure and to act like typical tourists so the photo shoot began on the train ride! Notice we were still sporting our tiger tats from the big game that morning! Still undefeated! woop woop!

We made it! Bright and early in the morning, but we made it! First thing we did was to check-in to our hotel and have an amazing American-style breakfast with eggs, toast, and bacon. BACON! This does not happen in Huangshi! Warning: this post might be a lot about Western food! Camille and I definitely took advantage of the opportunity to eat as much familiar/ non-Chinese food as we could! We set out from our hotel to explore and this is the first thing we saw in Beijing! 

Tiananmen Square
Our first stop was Tiananmen Square.  It is the world's largest public square and that is just what it looks like. It's a huge open area surrounded by government buildings, a national museum, and the Forbidden City. They have a flag raising ceremony at sunrise every morning and at sunset.  Unfortunately, we never made it to either one of those. 

I am standing in the middle of Tiananmen Square and behind me is the entrance to the Forbidden City.

Tiananmen Square

There were two huge screens like this in the square that played a series of beautiful pictures of various places in China. Camille posed before the Great Wall.

Of all the beautiful pictures playing, of course this is what happens when I stand in front of the screen! 

I tried to wait for a better option, but it was taking a long time and lots of people were staring so I got awkward and gave up! ha

We are still in Tiananmen Square in front of the National Museum.

War memorial in the square.


Lifestyle of the famous....

This is quite possibly my favorite memory of China so far. Camille and I assumed that leaving Huangshi (where we are gawked at because there are so few foreigners here) and going to Beijing (where there are thousands of tourists and foreigners every year) meant that we would get a break from being stared at or asked to take pictures. Oh how wrong we were!!! We didn't think about the fact that we would be going to the tourist spots of Beijing where there were also be hundreds of other tourists, Chinese tourists who have never seen a foreigner! 

This was the first of many pictures to come on our three day stay in Beijing. Luckily, Camille was quick enough to ask for pictures on her camera as well. We knew we needed proof that this had actually happened. Literally this lady and her family walked up to us and not being able to speak English, promptly handed over both her babies to Camille and I! The babies were so tightly wrapped that you couldn't even see them! After this, we had to take several more pictures with other people in the square. Camille and I decided we should make it a game and count how many pictures we posed for during our trip. We only counted it if they actually came up to us and asked for a picture, because there are tons of people who "try" to be sneaky and take pictures of us while we are walking by. Try is the key word there...imagine someone pretending to text on their phone but moving the phone to follow you as you walk! Its actually pretty funny to watch! Anyway....the grand total of pictures posed for over three days was a whopping 74!!!!!

Another of my favorite memories happened later this same day when Camille and I were leaving the Forbidden City. There was a group of young boys, probably in high school, who were following us. They were trying to coax each other to come and talk to us and ask to take pictures with us. Camille said she always feels bad for the poor boy that gets pushed towards us, forced by his friends to be the brave one, so she was kind enough to ask them if they wanted pictures. Of course they did! They freaked out! All of a sudden there was a mob of people, who upon seeing us take pictures with the boys, decided they were brave enough to take pictures as well. I kid you not, when I say there were 30 people huddled around Camille and I, jumping in and out, taking turns to stand next to us and snap pictures. Flashes were going off, people were tugging on our arms to look this way and that way! It was CRAZY! I have no idea how many pictures were taken, but I feel confident to say that I now know what a celebrity feels like! The best part was this little old woman who came up behind us and was hugging both of us towards her as her family took pictures. She was so happy that she was bouncing up and down and squeaking. Her joy at taking pictures made me laugh so hard that I started crying, so then she was laughing, and then Camille was laughing, and then the family was laughing! I really wish we had a video of this moment! 

Forbidden City

After Tiananmen Square, we headed to the Forbidden City, which is called this because it was off limits for 500 years.  It was the imperial palace for two dynasties of emperors the Ming and Qing.  Before heading in through the front gates, we bought audio sets that explained everything we were looking at.  We spent 3 hours checking everything out.  This place is massive!  I'm talking 178 acres!  

I think this might be the Temple of Heaven. I'm not sure...there were a lot of temples!

This was an exhibit of the parade uniforms for soldiers during the Qing Dynasty.

And now things begin to get silly.... First of all, a three hour tour is a long time so you have to keep yourselves entertained. Second of all, our motto is that "we get stared at anyway, might as well give 'em a show". The dragon is attacking me!

Kung Fu Panda Style! We want to be Po! Please check out the guy's face! If only you could have seen the look on the faces of the Chinese family that we asked to take this picture! Priceless!

These were fire extinguishers. They used to be filled with water and part of it is made of actual gold.

The imperial garden. 

Just throwing money into some pond at the Forbidden City.  No idea what it means because our audio sets didn't tell us, but we figured it was for good luck! haha

At the end of our 3 hour tour of the Forbidden City. (Cue Gilligan's Island theme song, which Lesley sang throughout our time here, "A 3 hour tour" get it)

Peter's Tex Mex Grill! A Gift from Father!

Peter's Tex Mex Grill! This was such a blessing to us! Mexican food has been the one thing Camille and I crave the most since moving here! So we might have gone a little overboard and splurged, but it was so worth it! We started with an appetizer of 9 layer dip and chips, that's right, 9 layers, not 7! It was delicious! We had tacos and enchiladas! And even got yummy desserts, homemade chocolate cake and homemade ice cream! Best meal I've had in 3 months! I warned you I would talk about food!  Our waitress, picture above, was so sweet and let us take pictures of her in her Texas flag shirt, which is the uniform of all the restaurant staff members. We got to talk with a good bit since we stayed at Peter's for over three hours! She helped us figure out other places to go in Beijing and told us about Snack Street on wang fu jing street. Pictures of that are coming later in the post!

Day 2

We climbed the GREAT WALL!!!!!  The Great Wall basically takes a whole day because it is on the outskirts of Beijing.  After a few mishaps, we made it to the right bus station that takes you to the Great Wall.  We rode on a bus for about an hour and a half to get to Badaling.  There are many different sections of the wall you can go to, but our friends suggested Badaling, so that’s where we headed. 

Headed up to begin the climb!

I think this is my favorite!

Just a sled ride at the Great Wall....totally normal!

Headed down the Great Wall! The steps are huge and really steep so you have to hold on to the wall to get down!

It was a very surreal experience.  We both kept saying, “I can’t believe we are standing on the Great Wall right now”.  It was one of the most breath taking sights I have ever seen.  The nature that surrounds it and the actual structure of the wall were incredible.  It just reminded me how blessed I am to be on this adventure in China.  Not many people can say they have climbed the Great Wall.  It wasn’t an easy climb though, it is so steep!  Most of the steps are not at the same height either, so you really have to focus on what you are doing. 

After climbing the Wall for several hours, we were both starving!  Luckily, there just happens to be a Subway located right outside the entrance.  It was fantastic.  They had the same cookies and everything just like home.  Yummy!  We finished up lunch and headed to some of the gift shops around the area. I bought an "I Climbed the Great Wall" t-shirt. I know, I know, its cheezy and touristy, but I HAD to!!!! 

I one of the stores, we found an LSU Christmas ornament!  It was so weird.  There were no other University ornaments sold there.  We were going to buy it, but it was way too expensive and the lady wouldn't go down on her price. We took this as a sign that LSU will definitely win the National Championship! 
After this amazing find, we got back on the bus to downtown Beijing, where we found Cold Stone!!! YUMMY! I know I talk about food a lot, but you have to understand that having Western food was a real treat for us! In Huangshi all we have is KFC. Thats it! 

Day 3

What a way to begin your day! Panda hats and Starbucks!! These panda hats were everywhere in Beijing and became the first purchase of many as Camille and I discovered that were are phenomenal bargainers! Since we are foreign, they like to bump the prices up on us majorly, but we knew what they were doing and fought back. We also used a little bit the Chinese we have learned, which helped a lot. Most of the vendors spoke English, but it was still helpful to be able to ask "How much?" in Chinese which is duo shao qian and "too expensive" which is tai gui le. The woman we bought the hats from wanted 65 RMB for one hat and we ended up getting them for 10! Bam! After that, the shopping spree began! Day 3 in Beijing is what we refer to as Shop till you drop day, because literally by the end of the day I was sitting on the floor in the Pearl Market worn out from shopping, waiting on Camille to finish! This girl could have gone on forever! Understandably so as we were in a shopper's paradise!

We started at the Silk Market, which is like NYC China town on steroids.  They had anything and everything you can imagine including silk ties, silk scarves, shoes, purses, clothes, accessories, knockoffs (Ugg, Polo, Chanel, etc.)  It was amazing. We also went to the Pearl Market, which is similar to Silk Market but obviously with pearls and a lot more jewelry! (Mom, this is where I'll be taking you when you come to visit, you will LOVE it!)

This is Snack Street, which I mentioned earlier. We came here for a quick lunch before continuing our shopping spree. The funniest part is I just noticed that Camille was in the picture! haha

Snack street is known for the odd Chinese and foreign foods such as scorpions and bugs on a stick. The worst part is that the scorpions are still alive and are moving!!!! Eew. One vendor was trying to convince us to touch the scorpions and he promised it was ok, that the stingers had been removed. I then, maturely double dog dared Camille to touch it! You absolutely cannot turn down a double dog dare, so she did it!! I was so proud! Theres a picture of that on her blog if you would like to see it. (www.camillemorganchina.blogspot.com) 

fruit kabobs

Sea horse and starfish also on a stick. They really like to put things on sticks.

Panda hats and coconut drinks.

Crawfish and you guessed it.....on a stick!

Entrance to snack street! Crazy tourists!

On the way home we had hard sleepers instead of soft sleepers...this means slightly smaller beds and 6 beds to a room instead of 4 and it is also about half the price! As you can see, not quite as comfy!

Sorry this post is as long as a novel! That wraps up our trip to Beijing.  Although it was only a short 3 day trip, I am so glad we decided to go.  It was a much needed break for our routine.  There was so much we didn't get to see while we were there, so I think another trip to Beijing is in my future!