Fall Camp

About two weeks ago, I had the privilege of going on a camping trip with 31 high school students. We roughed it out on the beach with our tents for a night and then hiked a mountain for five hours the next day. Some team-building games were thrown in there, too, along with eating a dinner comprised of any food we could scrounge up, and then breakfast and lunch the following day at a local restaurant. 

The timing of this trip probably wasn't the best—we went on the trip the day after we had a huge audit of our high school—so we teachers were a bit unorganized and tired, yet the students had a good time anyway. Spending time with the students outside of the classroom always serves as a good reminder why I enjoy being a teacher. Those kids need a lot of love! 

Below are some pictures from the trip. Since I don't believe in lugging cameras around, these were taken with my cellphone... so sorry if some of them aren't clear! I didn't include that many pictures of the students for safety reasons, but there are some pretty neat pictures of the beach and the mountains. China really is beautiful!

City kids setting up their tents.

Here was my tent. Never mind the fact that I had to move the tent in the middle of the
night because I staked it too close to the ocean when the tide came in.

Thankfully it didn't rain, even though it looked like it would.

I know this picture isn't the best quality, but it
shows the beautiful full moon that we had.
No wonder the kids were crazy.

Instant noodles cooked over coals. The students were given a limited amount of money
and had to feed their group members (about 10 in total). This group chose noodles.
My group chose to pay a local store to scramble some eggs for us. Pretty smart!

And this was taken at 5:30 in the morning.

The "sunrise" at 5:30.

A fishing boat heading out for the day.

The rest of these pictures are from the 5 hour hike that we had.
It was a pretty challenging hike! Thankfully we only had one lightly-sprained ankle.

And yes, we finished our hike at the top of the rock that has nothing underneath it. 

Some pretty foliage down below. I wasn't willing to get any closer to
the edge, though, since the drop off was steep.

The Busyness of Life

As you may or may not have noticed, it's been a while since we've updated this blog. The intentions were there, but the time was not. In subsequent posts, I'll update you on all that has happened over the past month, but for now, we're going to have a little Chinese lesson.

This is the Chinese character for busy (忙, máng). There are two parts to this character, and they're very significant. On the left stands the radical—radical is just a fancy word that usually means "part of a character that gives meaning"— for heart (心, xīn). Opposite that is the character 亡 (wáng), which means, "to die, to lose, to be gone, or to flee."

While some people state that the right side just gives it a sound and not a definition, I think that the two parts of this character should be taken at face value. After all, isn't it true? When we are busy, our heart is gone, dead, lost.

These past couple of weeks, we have been really busy with lots of people coming to observe our classes and audit our school, along with having to prepare materials for students, such as transcripts and midterms. I noticed a few days back that my heart was not where it should be, that I wasn't living how I should. All I could think about was relaxing and letting my mind go numb so that I could forget all the stress. My heart left, fled, and here I was, living like a robot.

Ironically enough, there is another Chinese character with both the character for heart (心, xīn) and the character for death (亡, wáng): to forget, 忘, wàng. These past few weeks, I had forgotten my priorities... I had lost my heart for doing the Father's will, for showing His love. It's probably fair to say that when we're busy, we forget what is most important.

Now that I have realized my heart was numb, I know that I need to return to the giver of life, the giver of hope, and the rock that I should build my life upon. "For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken. On God rests my salvation and my glory, my mighty rock, my refuge is in God." (Ps. 62:5-7)

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

In case you were unaware, this past Thursday was the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节/zhōngqiūjié） here in China. To celebrate, almost everybody takes Thursday off of work to spend time with family and eat mooncakes (月饼/yuèbǐng), along with a lot of other food. 

As with any holiday in China, if you get a day off, you generally have to make it up somehow. This year we got Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off, and so we have to work Sunday through Friday this week, get a day off next Saturday, then work Sunday and Monday. Why? Because we also get October first through the seventh off to celebrate the start of communism in China. While the schedule may get kind of hairy from time to time, we enjoy the different holidays that China has.

On Wednesday night, we celebrated by going over to a fellow foreign teacher's home. We stayed up late talking with him and his wife, playing games with his four children, and sampling eight different types of mooncakes. We tried egg, beef, coconut & milk, pineapple, purple potato, red bean, corn, and concubine mooncakes. Yes, you read that right, concubine mooncakes. We think it has something to do with old legends, but your guess is as good as ours. As Shakespeare once penned, "What's in a name? That which we call a [concubine mooncake] By any other name would [taste much better]."   I thought it tasted like a strange tomato soup, but it probably would have tasted much better if they would have labeled it "Minestrone" or something of the sort.

For the actual holiday, we went with my former Chinese teacher to hike a mountain here in the middle of our city. She has no family nearby, so she took us on a short trek. It was a clear, beautiful day, with very few clouds. And of course, the weather in our city is a little behind on the times- it's still getting up to the 80s during the day- so we were a bit roasty-toasty on our hike. Regardless, we had a great time and it was the perfect day for taking pictures.

The next day, I went with a friend to visit her family in a village two hours outside of our city. Leaving the city of 8 million and heading to the Indiana-like countryside was quite the pleasant change-up. The hospitality in the countryside is also quite different from the city: foreigners are more and more common here in the city, but we are a rarity in the outskirts. So I was welcomed into the house and was given tea and beer to drink, along with some pre-meal snacks... grapes, mooncakes, and fried chicken (what a good combination). Mind you, everyone else was off preparing the food, and I was sitting by myself on the couch. Finally I was allowed to go pick cucumbers from the garden, and I sneaked some peaks at what they were cooking for lunch. 

To honor their guests, the hosts tend to prepare a lot of meat. We had huge helpings of steamed crab,  boiled fish, fried chicken, roasted chicken, and who-knows-how-it-was-prepared pig intestine. Naturally when we all started eating, the plate that was closest to me was the pig intestine, and that was the first thing I picked up with my chopsticks. As I was putting it in my mouth, my friend's husband asked if I knew what it was. I knew it was not anything I would normally eat, so when he told me it was the large intestine of a pig, I wasn't all that shocked. The taste wasn't half-bad, but when I went to swallow it, it was a lot longer/stringier than I was expecting and I started to gag because half of it was down my throat while I was still chewing on the other half. I washed it down with my tiny cups of tea and beer, and thankfully I didn't make a fool of myself. The rest of the meal was great (uneventful, really), and we finished off our time together by looking at pictures. I even got the honor of lying on a traditional northern Chinese bed (炕，kàng) that they heat underneath with a stove, even though it was 80-something degrees out. Now if only we could get one of those in our apartments this winter...

This is a Kang, but the one I lied on was much more modern than this.

Today was the last day of our Mid-Autumn Festival break, and so we enjoyed it by having good conversations with friends over Skype and at a small group. We also prepared for the next six days of work. Though this was a busy break, it was an excellent one; we are so glad that we took the opportunities we did to get to know people better and to explore a little bit of our city.

 

And for inquiring minds...

We figure we should post pictures of our apartment so that you get a feel for what our everyday life is like. This is by no means a standard Chinese apartment; this is the apartment our school provides for us in the foreign (think "anyone who is not Chinese") teacher dorm. It's quite a nice set up for just the two of us!

Our living room. All of the furniture came with the apartment, except for our rockin' purple couch. Notice our AC/Heating unit up on the wall? Three of those cool/heat our entire apartment.

This is our bedroom, with quite the menagerie of furniture. We're hoping to paint it this coming October holiday (yes, we get seven days off to celebrate the start of communism in China). Any votes on what colors we should paint it?

This is our spare bathroom. Our "master bath" is exactly like this one, except we have towels hanging all over the place, trying to prevent mold.

This is our kitchen, though this picture makes it seem a lot bigger than it actually is. We pretty much only have room to wash dishes and cook on the gas stove. Having two people in there is pushing it... three is definitely a crowd.

And this is our dining room, with our lovely oven and microwave that we just recently got. We promise that those two bottles on the counter are just white vinegar, though they look like something else. 

So that's our apartment! You should come visit sometime, since it's much better in person.    

Marching right along...

School started this past week, and though it has been a bit crazy, we are still convinced that this is all a dream. It's so good to be back with the students and with our old coworkers. Granted, we're quite stressed with all of the responsibilities that a new school year brings, but we are excited.  We know that we're not always going to feel like this, so we want to cherish these moments. 

I (Marta) get to teach 7 twelfth graders whom I taught when they were in tenth grade. It is neat to see how much they've matured. My relationship with these students seems to have picked up right where we left off, which is helpful for when we start tackling biology. I also teach 8 eleventh graders three different subjects: literature, integrated science, and SAT math (in the spring, I will get to teach them another subject to prepare them for the Test Of English as a Foreign Language). And to round out the schedule, I teach 18 tenth graders just a basic English course. I have enjoyed getting to know these new students, though it's a bit challenging to gauge where each one is at... and to temper my word choice.

Daniel has the opportunity to teach English to 56 fifth graders, the same students he taught two years ago. He also gets to teach them PE, along with 61 sixth graders. His birthday just so happened to be the first day of school, and I'm pretty sure the best gift he got that day was to see those 56 smiling faces as they reunited for the first time in over a year.  

There is no other profession quite like teaching. While it may be very stress-inducing, I would argue that it is one of the most rewarding jobs out there. (Now hopefully we just remember that in the times we feel burned out!)

A Reprieve

When we arrived in China three weeks ago, stifling heat surrounded us and the humidity was out of control. It reached up to 99°F during the day (though it would feel like 105°-115°, depending on the humidity) and dropped to 80° at night—not much relief.  They sold out of air conditioners in our city, since this was the hottest summer on record for the past 50 years! To top it all off, smog blanketed the entire city, so much so that we couldn't even see the mountains that are less than a mile away. 

[Good thing we're practicing gratefulness in all situations. We're so very thankful that our sweat glands are working properly, along with our olfactory systems!]

Believe it or not, there are supposed to be mountains in the backdrop.

This past week has been so beautiful, such a drastic change from the first two weeks. It's been in the 80s during the day, without too much humidity, and then low 70s at night.  And it's been clear! I had forgotten how beautiful the mountains are.

And this is just the view from our bus stop!

So yes, we've had a break from the heat, and we've had a break this weekend to relax before we start teacher days this next week. We had new teacher orientation last week, which was very helpful; we learned more about the school, Chinese culture, and our new coworkers. Now we just have five work days left before the madness begins September 2.

Changes

Since coming back, we've noticed a lot of change here in the city. They're fixing the road so that traffic will flow smoother (meanwhile, making it all the more congested) and so that we have more frogger territory. The city is also in the midst of constructing a subway system, though that's not going to be done for quite some time. Downtown, they revamped the Starbucks and made a sweet underground mall with an excellent Thai restaurant nearby.

This was the traffic jam we ran into today. After not moving for 20 minutes,
 we decided to get off the bus and just walk home.

They also repainted and re-roofed our school, preparing it for the wear and tear of a new school year. And they've changed more than just the appearance of our school; there have been multiple shifts in staffing, too. Some teachers have left, and new teachers have been hired. Many of the administrative positions are different now, with people being shuffled around and given new titles with new secretaries. This is probably why we're participating in new teacher orientation this week, even though we really aren't new to this school. With all the policies and guidelines that went into effect after we left, it will be somewhat like we're teaching at a new school.

This is our school with scaffolding all over the place.

Though I suppose all of this could be slightly frustrating, we are excited that things are different. If we came back and everything was the same, we would be more likely to fall into our old pattern of living with the same ruts. Now we have the opportunity to form new friendships, new habits, and new understandings of the culture. This is good! We just hope that other people realize that we're not the same as we were before, either. God has done a lot of work in our lives over the past year, and although we may look the same on the outside, our hearts have changed for the better.