Dawn's Blog

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I felt like this was a good time to write a blog.  It feels a bit strange to celebrate a holiday without most of the traditions that I have associated with it for the past 24 years. But the good thing is that I have some new and different activities to take their place and good friends to celebrate it with. 

I continued our family tradition of holiday running by doing a 5K this morning. Not a real one, just one I mapped out on Google maps. The 25 degree weather made it quite refreshing.

Tomorrow the school is having our Thanksgiving Dinner, and we are doing our best to make it a genuine American Thanksgiving Dinner.  We are feeding not only the students, but all of the other foreigners here as well, so its quite a task. Some of the teachers are making multiple pumpkin pies, and I am in charge of the 150 deviled eggs. We hard-boiled them today and will have the students help us finish them in the morning. I really really hope they turn out well. We're going to have a lot of disappointed people if they don't.

One great thing about Thanksgiving is that the most important part of it doesn't depend on where you are or who you are with. I don't even need to put a tree in my house or hide fake eggs to celebrate (although I do plan to trace my hand and make it into a turkey).  So, in true Thanksgiving tradition, I would like to share a few of the things that I am thankful for this year.

Things I am seriously thankful for:

God's love that never gives up on me
My family who have always been there for me
My friends back home and here in China
The beauty of creation
Being financially stable
The opportunity to be here
My health
And about 1000 other things

Things that are not as serious but I am no less thankful for:

My warm, cozy bed (I can't believe I once thought it was uncomfortable!)
Heat in my apartment
Peanut Butter
Good books (for that matter, anything written in English)
My bike
Jenny Lou's (A grocery store in Beijing that sells all the Western foods we can't get anywhere else (like cheese and cereal))

I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving!

Goodness, it has been a long time since I blogged. I've been busy lately and there hasn't been a whole lot to blog about. Last week was our halloween party/talent show. I was a penguin. A couple of my friends here rewrote the words to Miley Cyrus' song "Party in the USA" so that it reflected our experiences coming to China, and we sang that.

I'm actually becoming quite the musical performer here. I have also joined the Christmas choir (I was informed that I should sing soprano) and our first practice is this week. Also, I have recently volunteered to teach the students how to square dance. I plan on this being awesome. Who knew my square dancing skills would actually be useful? And to top it all off, I spent a lot of time today thinking of and singing songs with the word "mountain" in them, which brings me to my next story.

Last night I decided last minute to go with some people today to go hiking around a mountain. It was a good decision. It was a beautiful, warm day. I knew that China had some beautiful land, but I hadn't seen that yet. We had a nicely diverse group - five Americans and four Chinese. We did some hiking, did some climbing stairs, had a picnic lunch, did some people watching, did some more hiking, took a lot of pictures, hit a dead end and had to hike back the way we came, fell asleep as soon as we got back in the van, and had Korean barbecue on the way home.

While we were hiking, we heard a man singing some traditional chinese music, I mean really belting it. So we asked our Chinese friends what he was singing, and apparently it was a traditional mountain song. So this got me to thinking about our "mountain" songs, which brings me back to what I was saying before (please see poll to vote on your favorite mountain song!)






At one point during our hike we heard some small dogs barking and looked up and there were three poodles barking at a woman's feet. She was wearing exteremely furry boots which apparently looked like animals to the poodles.  It might have been one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Every time this poor woman started to walk away from them, the dogs would run and bark at her boots, and the dogs' owner couldn't do anything to stop them.