Since it's your holiday, would you like to perform for us?

Would you like us to perform at your Christmas party? Just call us!

Mathews Family Christmas 2010

A common sight at Christmas time this year. Me and Kirk.

Lily and I at Mr. Mai's Christmas party

The cold weather has finally arrived in Wuhan. For those of you who followed my blog last year, you remember how much I despise the cold weather. Being from the Midwest, I'm used to it. However, in China, if it's cold outside it's also cold inside since the heating isn't that great here. I'm not complaining too much though since it's been warm much longer than it was last year!

As you can guess, Christmas was the theme of the past few weeks around here. Kirk, Daniel, and I (the senior 2 teachers) decided to have our classes act out the Christmas story. It went pretty good. The students enjoyed laughing at their classmates who were acting as angels, wise men, a pregnant woman, etc. Every class, I would start out with the question "Why do C's celebrate Christmas?" This usually led to a student saying it was the birth of JC. I liked to have fun with it and say I had a birthday too, why wasn't Christmas at that time? Most of them remembered from last year's Christmas lesson that he was the Son. However, the funniest answer came from a girl who said, "Because JC was a great man and you are not." I thought this lesson went really well, and I hope the students took a lot away from it.

As foreign teachers, we're used to being asked to do some small performances every once in a while. But the week before Christmas this year was out of control! Mr. Mai's (an English coffee shop) and our school's English Club had asked us a few weeks in advance to help lead/perform at their Christmas parties. We were happy to do this and were expecting to do these anyways as well as a party we were throwing for Chinese English teachers. Three parties. Three performances. Three days. Busy, but we were expecting that.

What we weren't expecting was that the school administration was going to tell us to perform at two other parties. Not ask. Tell us. They didn't even ask our input on when these parties would be. I was pretty ticked off at our school. On top of forcing us to perform, one of the parties conflicted with the Mr. Mai's party! Now, we were at five parties/performances in 3 days. And on Christmas Eve, it was 3 parties at 3 different locations within about 5 hours! It's not that we didn't want to help out at these parties. Our group just felt used by the school, especially during a time when we were supposed to be able to relax! Here's a brief timeline of our few days leading up to Christmas.

Wed, Dec 29, 6:00-8:30pm - We threw a party for Chinese English teachers. Not as many came as we were hoping, but we had a great time eating snacks, playing games, exchanging white elephant gifts, and Daniel told them what Christmas means to us.

Thu, Dec 30, 6:00-8:00pm - We attended a party for one section of our school's students. It was mostly students performing. We sang "Feliz Navidad." Then we called up a bunch of teachers and had them dance with us to "12 Days of Christmas." The students loved it. I don't have the video, but you can go to Rebecca's blog (rebecca-diane.blogspot.com) and scroll down to her Dec 23 post if you'd like to see it.

Fri, Dec 31, 5:00-6:00pm - We attended the English Club's Christmas party and ended the party with a few songs, "Joy to the World," "Jingle Bell Rock," and the world-premiere of "Santa's Pants." What's that, you haven't heard of "Santa's Pants!!??" It's the parody I wrote of Bad Romance by Lady Gaga! She is hugely popular over here, so I thought it would be funny to write a parody of one of her songs. Basically, the song is about Cory (one of our teachers) who stole Santa's suit and did his job one night. However, he ate so many milk and cookies that he got fat and couldn't get out of Santa's pants. It wasn't as big a hit as "Nobody," but the students really liked it. If I can get a video of it, I'll try to post it on here some time.

6:00-7:30pm - Some student's parents picked us up from the school to take us to a nearby restaurant where one of my classes was having a Christmas performance for their families. We visited with the students for a few minutes then started the show off with a few songs. "Feliz Navidad" and "Jingle Bell Rock" if I remember correctly. Then we immediately rushed off to our last party for the night. I felt bad not sticking around longer to watch my students, but this was the party that we were forced to go to without any say on when the party was.

7:30-pm - 1:00am - We were finally not the focus of a party (at least for a little while) at Mr. Mai's. Some other foreigners were performing for awhile. Around 8:30, our group led some crafts (Christmas decorations led by Rebecca and Mandi) and a game (Christmas Bingo led by me, Kirk, Cory, and Daniel). Around 10:30, Kirk and I sang a few songs before we did "Santa's Pants" again. The second time went even better. We ended the night with a game kind of like the Singing Bee from TV. Mandi called up Chinese people and had them try to finish the lines of famous Christmas carols. The party ended at midnight, but we stayed and helped clean up before finally returning home at 1am. We could finally just relax and celebrate Christmas! I'm really proud of everyone, as it was a lot of work that week.

Christmas was pretty non-eventful, which was exactly what we wanted. We slept in and had a group devotional time before heading to Papa John's for our second annual pizza lunch. Then, we went back home, hung out, and watched Christmas movies, including the group favorite, Elf!

Late that night, I skyped in for my family Christmas. My parents had sent some gifts with me when I came in the summer and also mailed me a package with more. It was pretty much our regular family Christmas...except that I was in the other side of the world. We even took a family picture with me on the computer screen!

Dec 31 was Rebecca's birthday, so we had a pizza party before heading to our friends' home to play games and celebrate the New Year. I really wish I could write more since so much has happened the last few weeks, but we have been unbelievably busy lately! We have about two more weeks before China's Spring Festival which means about a month off. I have been exhausted the past few weeks, and I am so ready for this break. More on that next time. I hope your 2011 is great. Make it happen!

Turkey, Burger King, and Cramps!

Donuts in Shanghai!

Parents setting up their kids on dates.

Hanging out at the Bund in downtown Shanghai

Decorating our Christmas tree in Daniel's apartment

Hey everyone. The last few weeks have been pretty eventful, so here it goes!

The weekend following Thanksgiving, the Wuhan crew traveled to Huangshi to have our Zhong Relations team Thanksgiving. Gavin and Kelly McGraw, who lived in China last year and are now on the Zhong board sent our team some of the foods we'd been missing. Thanks guys! We enjoyed eating, hanging out, "prying," and talking about how the first few months of this year have been. It's always a great time when we can get together. I really like visiting Huangshi. It's a "small" city of about 1 million people compared to Wuhan's 10 million. I really like the small-town feel of being able to walk pretty much everywhere. Plus, foreigners get even more stares there, which is funny.

This past weekend was the Shanghai Marathon. I've been excited about this race since before I even returned to China. I had run a marathon just under 3 1/2 hours in Iowa a few years ago. I felt like I hadn't trained as well as I'd liked for that race, so I wanted to train really well this time to see what time I could get. I had some knee problems early on, and then ankle problems towards the end of my training about which I mentioned last week. Fortunately, I figured out that a certain pair of shoes had been causing the problems even though I wasn't running in them and they were even one of my nicer pairs of shoes! By last weekend, while not as prepared as I wanted to be, I had no injury problems and felt better prepared than my first marathon, so I was excited.

Kirk, Rebecca, Patrick (a really fun Chinese guy we met and became good friends with at Mr. Mai's), and I arrived in Shanghai Friday morning. Rebecca was the only one who had been to Shanghai before, so we had a blast walking around one of the biggest cities in the world. There were so many western restaurants. We didn't eat any Chinese food the whole weekend. I wanted to eat unhealthy all weekend, but I tried to minimize that until after the race on Sunday! I think our entire eating consisted of Subway, Burger King, Carl's Jr, Pizza Hut, Dunkin' Donuts, Krispy Kreme, and Coldstone (twice). It was great!

Another highlight of our visit was a "set-up" park. It was a park where hundreds of parents would meet and try to bargain with other parents and set their kids up on dates! It was crazy. We walked around and looked at all the mini-ads/personals with the parents. While we were there, a mom even approached Kirk and I to talk about her daughter!

As far as the marathon, here are a few of the highlights and lowlights:

1. When we arrived at the starting line, there were no corrals (places where runners who want to run a certain time can start). Instead, Kirk and I had to start behind a few thousand people. It was frustrating. It was about 6 miles before I was out of a crowd and could run my pace.

2. Around the 10 mile mark, I passed a runner who was smoking a cigarette!

3. At the half-way mark, I was supposed to meet Rebecca and Patrick so they could give me some energy gels. Unfortunately, they were having troubles of their own trying to get to that spot and couldn't get there in time! They felt terrible, but it wasn't their fault. They tried to find me at another spot in the race, but missed me there too.

4. Around the 16-mile mark, I passed a guy who was running the full marathon in bare feet!

5. Through about 20 miles, I was just a little behind my pace, but not too much. I had pushed it pretty hard trying to get caught up after the crowd at the beginning. Not smart! Because...

6. Around mile 22....body breakdown! I think it was a mix of things: walking around Shanghai a lot the days before, not having the gels that I was planning on getting, pushing myself too hard at the beginning of the race, and maybe just not being as prepared as I thought I was. I started to get cramps in my quad muscles. While I was stretching those out, I got a cramp in my left hamstring!

7. I ran and walked a little towards the finish feeling awful. With about a half mile left, my left hamstring completely locked up. I couldn't bend it or even stand up completely straight. I just sort of stood there hunched over for a minute or two and stretched it out the best I could. Finally, I was able to slowly jog to the finish.

8. My finish time was about 3 hours and 45 minutes. It was very frustrating since I had been training for over 3 months for this race, only to fail with 4 miles left. But I guess that's what happens sometimes when you're running so far. I hope to run another one in the next year or two, so hopefully that will have a happier ending!

9. Kirk ran the half-marathon in 2 hours and 5 minutes. His goal was to break two hours, but his time was pretty good considering he was having knee problems the last few days before the race. This was his first long race, so he did a great job. Unfortunately, Rebeeca wasn't able to run because of her sickness, but her and Patrick had a crazy day anyways trying to find us along the course!

That's what's been going on here lately. The next few weeks, we have a few Christmas parties that we're leading and/or volunteering at. So it should be another busy but fun season. Not sure if I'll post another update until after Christmas, so have a great holiday. Let's be thankful for all that we have and what this time is really about!