First Day of Class

7:30 Alarm!
Banana+crunchy peanut butter breakfast

gather belongings

9:15 walk to the copy place at the pass
9:25 "the copy people aren't here yet." says a lady in the store.
WHOA! They've rearranged the shop that you walk through to get to the copy room. Now the eye glasses/contacts are on the left side of the shop and the journals/school supplies/usb gadgets, gifts/knick knacks are on the right side. I go in and say "Wha!" The lady sitting behind the counter smiles, "we changed it huh!" of course in Chinese.

9:30 at the copy place/post office under the main teaching building 21B. Quick copying of syllabus, listening practice worksheet, and worldview comparison chart. 10 yuan per copy: I pay 20 yuan.

9:45 walk to the Foreign Language Department
Gorgeous Day outside!
9:50 I hear the class change trumpet call.

As I walk towards the building on the path near the pond, I manage to squeeze by a river of students walking the other direction, out of the J building, where I am teaching. What beautiful faces. All different. All thinking different things. Some people talking to each other. One student is squeezing by the crowd, pushes past me in the opposite direction: must be in a rush.

I keep walking and as I look at the flood of students on my left, I see clearly, tall Jeremy, the only white American amongst black haired Chinese. I don't think he sees me.

9:55 I'm standing on the 3rd floor at the steps. I take off my jacket, boy it's warm! I watch students pass by, students excitedly catching up with one another at the start of the semester.

10:00 Jessica (one of Gordon's students who is an English Teacher) smilingly comes to me to chat and ask about my break.

10:05 I walk toward my classroom, I peek into my Sophomore English Major video class that I taught last semester to say "hello" and to tell them I'll see them Friday. They look puzzled - maybe because they assume that Jeremy's going to be teaching them on Friday.

10:07 I walk into my new classroom.
"I look like Jeremy huh?" The students look surprised.
"I'll be teaching your class." They ask, "just today?" I say, "the entire semester."

10:20 Class begins.
Great starting class:
Go over syllabus
Warm up activity: Pairs of Students compete to come up with the most sentences in this structure: "We both...., or Neither of us...."
Break
Pronunciation practice
Worldview summaries: Groups of Students work together to summarize different worldviews (ex. Nihilism, Existentialism, Christian Theism, Naturalism, etc.) for the purposes of learning new words and giving a short presentation of a summary.

12:10 class ends. I pack up, walk home. Uneventful
12:36 arrive home. "Hi Gordon!"
Cook lunch: green beans and oyster mushroom, Egg and tomato, heat up some leftover chicken stirfry.
Mini fondue: Melt Dove Chocolate and dip Banana, Marshmallows, and little piruoette cookies. (feeling a bit sinful :D)

2 read the Book and 31 Days of Prayer written by Ruth Myers
3:45 nap
5 jam on guitar
5:30 the Taylors feed the team: awesome meatballs, mashed potatoes, and mixed vegetables. [We've started a new deal: each family will cook for the entire team once per week - we'll see if this saves any money, maybe, it definitely gives 3 days of no cooking for the rest of the folks. SO CONVENIENT!]
We ate in 15 minutes (the fastest and earliest dinner of our lives: we usually eat around 7:30pm.)

5:40 I realize oooo, the Esplinad (one of the stores next to market street) will close in one hour. We need to go buy cake for our tiramisu tomorrow. Tomorrow, we're making pizza and having tiramisu for Brian's (Gordon's student) birthday!

Gordon and I suit up, head out into the cold: buy cake, french bread loaves, eggs, spinach, two pineapples, apples. Yay! We made it in time [we've had two bad experiences of not making it to the Binxi beef store 2 minutes after it closed, and to the Bank of China 7 minutes before the posted closing time, but it was closed anyway)

6:40 some of our team spill out into the hallway: dance with Olivia and pink panther, talk with Jeremy and Kanyon, Jodi, Steve, Robin's giving Joel a bath.

7:00 hangout
Gordon's plays an old game he likes to play: Warcraft, Orcs and Humans
Hui blogs this post, plays guitar, makes a budget spreadhsheet, sends some emails.

Tomorrow is a new day. I don't have class tomorrow!

We're Back!

Back from Thailand. Preparing for lessons. Watched some movies.
Reading One-year Bible. Cleaned the apartment. Gordon made a lantern
and a food dehydrator.


We apologize for not blogging more. Sometimes, I feel like my life is
unworthy to blog, so I stopped, but now I know some of you actually do
want to read about what we do day in and day out, so here's something.
More to come.

We're two days out of the heat wave. The temperatures were up above
freezing for a few days and the ground was covered with black slush.
During this time, many workers with shovels, tractors, and large dump
trucks managed to
remove all the black slush (which used to be about 6 inches of packed
snow), so that now as the heat wave has left, we can all walk on solid
ground, not black ice. I'm not really giving the full story, the major
roads have always been snow/ice free thanks to amazing manual labor -
we saw workers bundled up in orange safety vests on the roads in the
middle of the night chipping away ice, shoveling snow, and sweeping
away debris. They load the snow into large dump trucks by hand with
shovels and the trucks haul the snow away. But now, even market
street, and the small streets are ice free!

It's a gorgeous day outside, windy, but warm enough that I don't have
to wear long underwear. I walked out of our apartment, and with long
strides on solid pavement, I was able to jump into the
eyeglasses/contacts store and pickup a pair of 6 month contact lenses.
A few steps away, I bought some oxtail from the Binxi beef store. I
needed to add money to our cell phone plus I needed to figure out why
my cell phone wasn't working (I wasn't receiving any texts and
couldn't dial out).

I didn't know if there was a China Mobile store around, but figured
there might be a store on the route I was taking off campus. I walked
across streets, cars just slowly passing by. I noticed I wasn't as
afraid anymore of crossing the street and thinking I'd get hit as
before (the traffic here is so fluid, the cars just go around you). I
saw a China Mobile sign above the tall construction walls for the
Subway. As I approached the vendor, I noticed that the China Mobile
vendor site was closed, the roll top gates were down. Oh well, I'll
keep looking.

I recrossed the street and kept exploring. I peered into many stores,
as I passed people selling all sorts of knick knacks (shoelaces, shoe
soles, bags, gloves, wallets, sweet potatoes, corn puffs, yogurt
drinks, sunflower seeds, etc.) There were stores that sold eyeglasses,
barber shops, convenience stores, restaurants, train ticket booths.
Then I saw the China Mobile logo. Bingo! PTL! I walk inside to where
they are selling cell phones and the lady speaks to me very quickly in
Chinese, “Blah Blah Blah...[too fast for me to understand].” I look at
her confusingly, not sure if I heard her right, so I gesture to her to
repeat it. She then speaks very loudly, "DO YOU NEED TO ADD MONEY TO
YOUR CELL PHONE, IT'S OVER ON THE OTHER SIDE!" I say in Chinese, “I
can hear, do I need to go to that side of the store to add money?" She
says yes. I could hear her laughing and telling her coworkers, how she
thought I was hard of hearing. I add money to Gordon's cell phone.
Then I try to add money to my SIM card, after figuring out that I put
in the wrong SIM card, we fix the issue and I'm back in business.

I continued walking in my long stride on the loop back home, passing
by my regular fruit lady for some mangoes, pineapple, and pears, then
to the vegetable lady for some oyster mushrooms and potatoes. There
are always people that I pass while I walk. There is hardly ever a
lonely street.

Why am I recording this? Because what should have been an hour and a
half errand run turned into a 45 minute adventure!

November 14

Great evening. Mark Driscoll. Luke 12:21?

Finished up our Practicum. It snowed all day! We saw children building snowmen out our window on the 20th floor.

Jodi's mom's coming in about 15 minutes!

This is one of Gordon's students: he brings Gordon a sound card (because he doesn't have one on the PC provided by the apartment), and he found a USB that locks for Gordon.

:D

Buckle your seatbelts: Last weekend:

Thursday night: Date night turned into Hotpot with teacher friends
Friday night: Bolognese Pasta Dinner with 7 other Teachers at our apartment
Saturday morning: Life Education Class

For Saturday lunch, Gordon and I decided to venture off campus to eat something new. We were in a hurry because we had a ping pong appointment with some teachers. Gordon decided to ask a passerby in Chinese, "Where's that restaurant?" I rephrased it for him, "Where is a good place to eat?" She pointed us to a restaurant nearby and we went toward it. Next to the one she recommended, we saw a Korean restaurant with a huge red carpet coming out of the main entrance. We went in and were seated upstairs. We noticed it was a hotpot restaurant and we knew we didn't have much time to eat. The server said we could order dishes if we liked, so I hurriedly looked through the menu (not really knowing what anything said). I assumed that there were beef dishes scattered throughout the menu because the name of the restaurant had the word "steak" in it. I asked the waitress to recommend some good dishes, and she didn't really recommend much, so I randomly picked a meat (rou4), a tofu (dou4fu3), a veggie or kimchi cucumber (huang2 gua1), and a pancake (bing3) type thing.

We were hungry, and were in a hurry, not only that, were kind of stressed about how busy we were, so our faces looked pretty grumpy, plus the food was taking a long time to arrive. Finally, I saw the waitress bring a plate of meat on top of lettuce with some hot bean paste condiment on the side. We dug in. As we chewed the meat, I was like, hmmm, this beef doesn't taste as awesome as I would like. Really? Did I pay 36 yuan for this? Gordon chewed and he said, yea, it's not the best, it kind of tastes like lamb, but not really. I then casually mentioned that the menu said that this meat was cooked in the dog meat style (whatever that means). Gordon busted out laughing, "dog meat? did you order dog meat?" I just sat there and had no clue what was going on. Gordon asked, "Did you know that Koreans are known to eat dog meat? What did the menu read?" and I replied, "Gou3 Rou4" I started to realize what I did. We had not planned to be this adventurous today, but hey, now is as good of a time as any other.


We ate what we ordered and as we payed for our food, the clerk told us that there was a discount, we realized that this was the grand opening to the restaurant. The owner, latched her arm around mine and asked me in Chinese "so how was the food? It's a novelty that there are any minorities (foreigners) that could even possibly come to my restaurant. Please tell me what you think of the food." I told her "The food was good, but I couldn't read the menu very well and didn't know what to order." She said, "oh! you didn't know what to order? You must come back and I'll treat you." We said, no it's ok, we'll come back and try your food again later.


Saturday afternoon: Ping Pong with Teachers
Sunday morning: Go to the nearby church with students

Look outside!

Wow! We watched half of this Chinese Disney Movie - The Secret Magic Gourd, and we looked outside and the ground is COVERED with snow, it's still snowing outside - - visibility is very low!!!

I wonder what it will be like tomorrow - - -

November 2

Wow, It's been a whole month since we've blogged something!
Our camera is broken at the moment - fortunately, thanks to Jodi, we've been able to still share and take some photos with her camera.

Movie Night: The Blind Side


You know winter's approaching: these candied fruits are sold on our way to class: 2 yuan each.


Onions, cabbage are being dried EVERYWHERE.


At Olivia's Birthday Party: Us and Corbin.

Olivia's Birthday - Steve, Robin, and Olivia




On our date night, Gordon surprised me by taking me to the Student Center where there is a classroom full of electric pianos. He sang softly while I played. :D


A nice treat: on the same floor of the music rooms, there was a Chinese calligraphy classroom. One of the students invited us to try it out!

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

We have 3 days of not teaching - Wed, Thur, and Fri. We decided to visit the town since we haven't done much of that at all since we came here, especially not by ourselves. We walked 5 km to Central Street (which is the pedestrian walking street) to go look for winter boots and warm winter Russian hats (ushanka). As we were double checking that we were walking in the correct direction, we asked a man walking past. He asked us in English, where are you going? We told him we were going to Central street. He said that he was going there too. We find out that he is an air force pilot and is in Harbin for ten more days learning how to instruct new pilots. We end up spending a great afternoon with him walking and sightseeing.




Zheng Chen Gong. Zheng is from where Hui gets her maiden name. This bust is sitting on campus outside the Student Center.



Entrance to Walking Street - Zhong Yang Da Jie (Central Street)



Underground pass on Central Street (instead of crossing a bridge to go over traffic, we walk under the road)



We watched a few guys write beautiful Chinese calligraphy near the river. We actually bought one of the brushes from the guy for 10 yuan.



End of Central Street. Just jump in the river and swim to the other side! - Sun Island



Notice: there's a train (with about 50 cars) crossing the suspension Bridge (the Bridge reminds us of the bridge in Charleston)



A mall selling all kinds of items (bathroom break)



St. Sophia's Cathedral (it was smaller than we imagined, a wonderful sized building indeed!)



Gordon and Jim



Look at how much cargo this truck is carrying



At the Mid-Autumn Festival Party for International Students. We were invited to watch singing and dancing all organized by international students. These guys were rapping in Chinese to the instrumental soundtrack of "Beautiful" sung by Akon.



What a big bunch of grapes! cornbread, swissroll, sweetpotato chips, bubble tea, mooncake




Thursday - Jodi made her a little nook in our study on the floor with the coffee table and we worked on our self-observation forms for teaching together.



Look at the loot we got! Hui bought a new pair of winter boots! We also walked to a street that sold Russian goods and bought some Russian chocolate. We might not buy Russian hats because some shed, and a quality one costs way too much.

Random

I'm getting my first haircut in China by our very own teammate - Jodi. Yee!



Look at the freshness of the Chinese chives! We had eggs and chives stirfry as one of the dishes that evening.



This second elevator only works during the traffic hours of 7:30-8:30am and 12:30 and 1:30pm.



During our visit at Harbin Institute of Technology - where else are you able to see people playing basketball alongside people in military training?



At the end of our picnic, Shelley showed us her instrument - Guzheng (Chinese zither).