Dawn's Blog

'Twas three days before Christmas and here in my room
I was learning to write the Chinese word for "food"

When out on our door we heard a faint knock
And voices so many it must be a flock.

English we heard so we had no fear
We opened the door to the holiday cheer.

And what, to our wondering ears should we hear
but a choir of carolers, but sadly, no reindeer.

A jolly good bunch, they were all very cute
Of various ages and languages too!

We dressed in a hurry, I put on my hat
to go with the group to another friend's flat.


We sang there and then we went on to another
and stopped where fudge had been made by a mother.

This poem has no reason, except to tell
that Christmas is great no matter where you dwell.

My rhyming is slowing; oh, look! there's an isthmus!
I hope you all have an incredible Christmas!

First, I would like to send a Happy Birthday to my sister Julie. She's an awesome sister and she deserves a good birthday. 

Besides being Julie's birthday, December 18th marks another important event: Christmas is exactly one week away. And things are beginning to look a lot like Christmas, even in China. I went to our village grocery store yesterday and was shocked/immensely pleased to see all of the employees wearing red and white Santa hats. Judging by their facial expressions, I would say that I was much more excited about it than they were. I even got the courage to try out my Chinese and told one of the girls that I liked her hat.

Our Christmas Tree! (with fake presents)

In other Christmas events, the school had a Christmas program this past week, where I participated in my first real choir. And it was a lot of fun. The choir was made up of teachers, students, some people who work with the foster home, and pretty much anyone who was willing to join (which is why they accepted me). We sang Jingle Bells, Oh Come All Ye Faithful, Silent Night, and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. And despite having me in the choir, I think we sounded pretty good.

I think the students are enjoying the Christmas festivities. Most of the classes have decorated their classrooms, and the teachers have been showing Christmas movies (in English, of course) and talking about Christmas traditions and what they mean. I have been incorporating Christmas song lyrics into my phonics classes ("Let's find all the short vowels in Jingle Bells!") and I plan to watch Charlie Brown's Christmas with them as a treat after they take their final tests next week.

I think that is enough for today's edition of Dawn's Blog. More Christmas news to come in the future. I hope you are all having a lovely Advent season!

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.