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!