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!