Busy American Holidays...Relaxing Chinese Holiday!

Hey everyone,

Just like I'm sure you were, I have been extremely busy over the past few weeks. Here's a few pictures and videos that I thought you might enjoy with a very short summary of some of the other things I did over the holidays:


First, here's a video of the other teachers and I singing a Chinese pop song, Gai Bian Zi Ji, in Chinese!

Taylor getting ready to play Dance Dance Revolution at an arcade with all his fans!

My Christmas gift from our group. Since I'm the organizer of our group, they got me a bright green sweatshirt that says Valiant Organizer.

Skyping with family my Christmas evening and their morning.

Melodie (in this picture on the right) is from Texas. She loves riding horses. For her birthday party, we found a place (with a whopping 3 horses!!!) where we could ride.

The Wuchang part of our team on Christmas morning.

Kirk and I were baby-sitting Sophia and Elise (Adam and Becca Carpenter's daughters) for the night when Taylor and Nathan decided to drop by.



You saw one of them above, but much of our time was spent preparing and performing for different Christmas/New Year's parties. The Chinese are very interested in learning about our culture and holidays. It was a lot of fun, but also quite stressful teaching, getting ready to perform, and also trying to get our own plans for Christmas figured out. They all went well though.

A big thanks to the Carpenter's (the leaders of Zhong) and the Whincop's (an Australian couple who we go to fellowship with). They let us stay at their homes for Christmas and New Year's weekends. It was a blast eating, playing games, and watching movies with my team there.

For Christmas morning, a few of us were able to go to Chinese chrch with some of our friends who are not C's yet. It was really encouraging for us to get to go with them. You can be thinking of them as we will hopefully have more opportunities to share with them in the future.

I am done teaching for over a month! China's big holiday, Spring Festival, is on January 23rd. Our students have final exams soon. Since our classes do not have exams, the other teachers take our classes to prepare for them. I'm planning on going to Hong Kong, Chengdu, and a friend's hometown to celebrate.

I'll try to post a quick update and pictures at some point later this month. Happy New Year!

Psalm 119:37