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.

Yesterday was my birthday. If you missed it, then you should feel bad. But don't worry, I'm still accepting gifts.

My 24th birthday turned out to be a very good one. Mostly because Chinese birthday cakes are delicious. Also because I have awesome family and friends.

 I started off the day with a 12 mile (each way) bike ride to the nearest Dairy Queen (not kidding). One of the guys here was also celebrating his 17th birthday on the same day and had been wanting to take this trip for a while, so he had planned to do it with his dad, brother, and friend, and they graciously invited me as well to celebrate my birthday with them. We got lost a few times, but the oreo cheesecake blizzard was totally worth it. Also, my bike is a piece of junk, and with about 3 miles left in the trip, one of my pedals fell completely off. But we all made it back ok.

No horses, tractors, or bugles allowed!

Then I came home to a lunch of fajitas made by my wonderful roommate, Lydia.

In the afternoon, I went on a little trip with my friend Jan (who is fluent in Chinese) to get my bike fixed and get a shampoo/scalp massage in the village. I've never had a scalp massage before and it was actually kind of funny more than anything.

After we had finished dinner (which consisted of PB & J and Easy Mac, thanks Julie), my roommate informed me that all of our friends where coming over for my birthday party in 20 minutes. We had a grand time of Chinese checkers and speed scrabble and card games of various types.

This is a picture of the front of my fridge. This is the logo of Haier brand, which makes the "high-quality" home appliances here in China. It makes me chuckle just a bit every time I see it.  I really wish I could have been at the marketing meeting where they came up with this logo.  It has the trademarks of most marketing strategies: smiling people, bright colors, ice cream, and a lack of clothing. But what exactly is this picture trying to convey?  Maybe a poll is in order.

Last week I found out that I'm going to be teaching phonics.  Which basically means I'll be trying to get the students to properly pronounce short "i"s (they tend to say "eets" instead of "its") and teaching things like the 8 vowel rules. Doesn't sound that interesting, but I'm actually quite excited. I've been learning a lot about linguistics, which I really didn't know much about before. I know about all kinds of stuff now like the International Phonetic Alphabet, voiced and unvoiced phonemes, and the history of the cot-caught merger.

The students are arriving today and tomorrow and we have opening ceremonies on Wednesday. I'm pretty excited to finally have students and feel like I'm accomplishing something after 2 weeks of training.

In other news, things are generally going great. This weekend I took a trip into Beijing to do some shopping (needed some more teachery clothes) and made cookies with my roommate. Baking has been a bit of a difficulty because we generally can't read the labels on things at the store and some things (like butter) they just plain don't have around here.

Also, I've been working on my Chinese, which is fun.

Here's some of the pictures I have taken thus far.
This one is at the Beijing airport.

Our kitchen

Our dining area (yes, that is a bowl of fruit)

My bedroom

The view out my living room window. Looks like Indiana.

I'm here! I'm in China!

Sorry I'm a little late on the update, I've been here for almost a week now. I arrived last Thursday afternoon (early morning for most of you) without my luggage. The trip here was quite eventful. My flight from Dayton took off about 10 minutes late, which made my 45 minute layover in DC even shorter. By the time I got off the plane in DC my flight to Beijing was already boarding. I had to take the underground shuttle and by the time I got to the right terminal they were paging me, so I literally ran to the gate and was the very last person to board the plane. But I made it :) And I needed the exercise.

My luggage was not so lucky. As I had suspected might happen, it did not make it on the plane but the airline brought it to my apartment the next day.

Things are going well. We've been doing a lot of teacher training and yesterday I got to present a lesson plan to the other teachers, which went pretty well. I got a cell phone and was given a bike whose tires I plan to inflate by the end of the day.  The other teachers (foreign and chinese) are all really nice and I think we will all get along beautifully.

I plan to put up some pictures of my apartment and neighborhood in my next post, so get excited.