Another Update from China

Dave sent the following via Skype:

Its been really cold here lately too. Everyone keeps saying that this is weather that we normally see in January. So hopefully it won't stay this cold too long. We stay pretty bundled up, but the classrooms are cold and not heated at all. They leave the windows open too. Students wear like three pairs of clothes and jackets in class.....kinda crazy.

But its funny. Our kids don't wear as much clothes as the rest of the students so their teachers are freaking out. They can't understand it. We try to explain that we are from Utah and they are used to colder weather than this but they still don't get it. A few kids wear the gloves but most don't. I usually have a sweatshirt on in class, so its not too cold, but way different than schools in america, and the whole leave the windows open thing is definitely different. They want to keep fresh air in the classrooms so the students don't get sick.

We celebrated Thanksgiving last week. There is a restaurant here that is owned by a chinese lady from Hawaii. She makes really good western food, and she wanted to do something big for the teachers. Alot of teachers are also from Canada and their thanksgiving is a few weeks before ours so she split the difference and did a big thanksgiving buffet. It was a lot of fun. And our friends said it was the best thanksgiving dinner they've had in the six years they have been here.

We had turkey and ham and mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. I had never had sweet potato pie before but I had heard of it. It was really good. Much better than I would have thought. So after thanksgiving, we decorated for Christmas. The kids were way excited. Before we came out our friend bought a bunch of stuff from some other teachers who were leaving this year, and managed to get a christmas tree and ornaments and that kind of stuff. So we have a little four foot tree in our living room with lights and our stockings hung on the wall. We are definitely going to do Hong Kong Disney as part of christmas. Its not as big as other disneylands, and is mostly kid based so it works out perfectly. Shannon has a friend in Hong Kong who will let us stay at his place for a few nights and so we are going to go in two weeks. We only get Christmas day off from school for the holiday. We normally get two but one day falls on the weekend so they said that counts....funny. So it works out better to go early when we have a three day weekend.

The kids are getting really big. They have grown up a lot since we got here. Tyson is picking up more and more chinese. What we mistook for random gibberish from him one day was actually some chinese words. Alot of times he will just make stuff up so you never know what to believe, but the other day we were in a store and he was spouting off some stuff, and a chinese lady who spoke english was very impressed with him. He was saying "You are my little friend".

Savy's teachers were so excited the other day because they finally got her to eat something. For some party or whatever the kids got a big piece of cake and they were so excited to see she had eaten 3/4 of a piece. Savy told us later that she ate all the frosting off and hid the rest of the cake behind some books! Shannon and I laughed and laughed at that one. What kind of kid doesn't even eat cake?

So those are the highlights for the last couple of weeks.