Hello Everyone!
All continues to go well in Shanghai. Edoukou and I have a three day weekend next weekend and then we go off the following weekend to Nanning which is on the border of Vietnam and China. We are going to see waterfalls. Supposedly they rival Niagara. I am so excited!

We will be home June 29th to August 15th. We will be staying with family and friends. I don't have a contact number yet for the states and don't know exactly how I will get one, but will enter it here when I do have one.

Good News:
Edoukou is doing very well with her Mandarin! Last week her group performed a play and came in second in a Chinese competition at school! They performed the play for the whole school last Thursday. She received many Kudos! I am so proud of her and she is realizing that foreign languages are her thing! She wants to learn French when we get home. Chinese people that hear her speak always compliment her and tell her she speaks like a native! I use her all the time as an interpreter! And she is great at eavesdropping on people on the bus, in the restaurant, at the store! It's so fun!

Bad News:
We have to move! My landlord is selling our apartment! So we have to move! We love our apartment, and it won't be easy to find a replacement, but there are many places to choose from! My friend just moved into our same building two doors down, so we are trying to stay in the same compound. We like our security guards, the closeness to our bus stop, and my massage and pedicure places. Edoukou is excited to move to a new place and I am not too worried about finding one, but packing up is never fun! And you never know, this move could be a good thing!

More Bad News:
I was out shopping this weekend at Che-poo-lu (which we call cheapy loo because you can buy things VERY cheap) with my co-teacher Wang Mei, looking for costumes for our students' year end concert and I got pick pocketed! The first time in 44 years! I am more sad about my perfect non-pick pocketed record being taken from me than anything else! It happened as I was looking at purses (of course) for 25 yuan (which is $3.00). A lady next to me was pushing on me( I thought) and I guess she was digging in my purse. Luckily she just took my pouch which had my money. I lost $30.00, but luckily not my wallet Edoukou had bought me for Christmas (because I had just changed over to my new pouch I bought!).

Oh well, life goes on and I received a ride in a police car. We saw a woman that had just been caught stealing and checked her purse, but she didn't have my wallet. Then the police officer told me they had another woman down at the office that had also been caught (it was a busy day for pickpockets!). So they took us there in the police car! The officer asked if a police officer would do this for me in the US and I said no. He was very happy to assist me! I never found my wallet, but I did see how the police officers worked!

Never a dull moment in Shanghai!

Thailand

We made it to Thailand and back safely! It is a wonderful place. People were wonderful, food was fabulous and the beaches were magnificent! Here's the photo journal of our time in Phuket, a small island at the tail end of Thailand. Enjoy!

Here is our first hotel, Grand Palm Hillside. We had 11 pools to swim in!

This is the view from our hotel. Notice the big, white Buddha on the hilltop.

The lobby and restaurant.

Great restaurant with fantastic Green Curry! We played Connect Four while we waited.

There are elephants everywhere. We didn't ride any because Edoukou said it was cruel and unusual punishment for the elephants. So we just hung out with the concrete ones.

One thing to do on Phuket is island hop. So after the first day we went to Phi Phi Island which was a beautiful place and one of the islands hit by the tsunami.You would have never known it had been destroyed a few years previously.

We snorkeled almost everyday. We found lots of things like this sea urchin. We also saw a turtle, lots of yellow fish with blue stripes and rainbow fish. The coral was mostly beige, but one area was a fluorescent green!

This is the location for "The Beach" movie.

This is a beach we went during an "island hopping tour."

These are called "banana pancakes", the most delicious dessert Thailand offers. They put bananas, or anything you want, in the middle and then fry it up! Then they put powdered sugar and sweetened condensed milk over it all and yum, yum!

Christmas Card

Make a Smilebox greeting

Christmas in Shanghai

Merry Christmas!

Edoukou and I had a wonderful first Chinese Christmas! We have two weeks off for Christmas Vacation and then another two weeks off for Chinese New Year at the end of January. At school, we had a Christmas Concert with all the preschoolers and many primary students performing songs and dances. This year's theme was Christmas Across the Continents.

Edoukou's class continent was New Zealand, so they sang a native song and Edoukou was picked as the drummer since her friend (who was the original drummer) went to Taiwan for Christmas break. My class and the other K2 class performed "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" since our continent was Australia.

Most of the staff celebrated Christmas by giving presents. I received a beautiful Pashmina scarf form my Ayi and lots of chocolates and cookies from my students. (How do they know me so well after only 4 months?!)

On Monday we took a trip outside of Shanghai to Hangzhou, which is about one hour away. It was a great trip and we learned lots about that area. About 20 people from school went.

Wednesday we went to Marks and Spencers which just opened up in Shangahi. They had lots of great winter clothes and shoes and a Santa! I really wanted to take a picture with a Santa in Shanghai.

Wednesday evening Edoukou, Margaret (our Australian friend) and I attended 9:00 pm mass at a catholic church in Shanghai, St. Peter's Church. It was a wonderful service. The church was full of Westerners and Asians. We sat next to a group of people from France. There were also Chinese, Africans, Americans and other Eupropeans. The mass was in English. I believe the priest was American and there were several other priests from China and one from Britain. The priests began the service by carrying baby Jesus around the church. Baby Jesus was a statue with flowers around him. Other than that, it was just like home. The church was huge and very European, with benches and kneelers. Edoukou wasn't quite sure when to kneel since we don't have kneelers at our church in Tacoma. The beautiful hymns were the same. They were sung by an incredible choir. We made it home by midnight, watched Alvin and the Chipmunks and went to sleep.

On Christmas day, we woke up and attacked our presents! Edoukou had a great Christmas! She received everything she wanted because 1, I am an awesome barterer and 2, because everything here is so cheap (for us)! She had new boots, Jelly Bellys, a camera pouch, and soft, warm pajamas for our freezing, cold winter evenings. I received a wonderful Coach wallet from Edoukou! I was so proud of her. She bartered her way down from 240 Yuan to 40! What a girl! She's learning fast!

After our present frenzy, we headed to our friend Beatrice's place down the road from us. We went to her house with two other Americans for a nice relaxing Christmas. We watched Santa Claus 3 and It's A Wonderful Life. One American had never seen it before! I don't know how that happened and she doesn't either, but we were happy to help her experience it for the first time.

I was happy I didn't have to make dinner! I got out of cooking Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner this year! I am the luckiest girl ever! I did make individual Pineapple Upside Down Cakes that were yummy!

I enjoyed not having all the hype. Even though there were many signs of Christmas around, it was nice to concentrate on the actual day and not the rushing around beforehand. We were able to focus on going to mass and being with friends. It was a wonderful Christmas.

Christmas is coming!

The Christmas season is upon us, even in Shanghai. For a country that has outlawed religion, there is a lot of Christmas going on!



Julie, my Preschool boss, will not be here for Christmas break. She is visiting her brother in Switzerland. So she has kindly given us her Christmas tree to use. It is a little fake tree that has cute decorations. Edoukou and I will set it up this evening. We are going to RT Mart (Fred Meyer to you and me) to see if they have lights.



All the shopping malls have Christmas decorations up. They even have a Santa Claus to take pictures with. They were setting up his house in one mall we were at and Edoukou and I were wondering if the Santa is a Chinese Santa or a Western Santa. Huge colorful wreaths, Christmas trees, snowflakes and tinsel are easily found in these malls. Local stores and shops are not decorating, but McDonalds and anything western is. I asked my Chinese co-teacher Wang Mei if she has a tree and does she decorate and she said no. For Chinese people, Chinese New Year is their big celebration of the year. So it surprises me that the retail industry has bought into it. I guess money is money and the more you can make people spend, the better.



There will be quite a few westerners around this Christmas so there are Christmas dinners being planned. My friend goes to a foreigner's church and we might go to Christmas service with her unless we find a Catholic evening mass. To go to the churches here you must present your passport to prove you are a foreigner. Chinese people are not allowed in churches or allowed to hold meetings/services in their houses.



Usually Sundays are reserved for family gatherings and you see many people out and about travelling. Although, since most places are open on the weekends here, many people work on Sundays. Even banks are open on Sundays.

Saturdays!

I love Saturday mornings!

Not only do we have a chance to sleep in, but we have a nice, relaxing start to our day. My day starts around 8:00. I have finally become an early morning riser on weekends. This must come with age! (OK, 8:00 may not be early to you, but it is to someone who normally wakes up at 10:00!) Edoukou, on the other hand, manages to stay asleep until 11:00 or 12:00. Life here, although not extremely complicated, does take its toll.



This morning I had my shower, got dressed, put in a load of clothes ( we have a washing machine), threw on a sweatshirt and scarf and went downstairs to get breakfast. Now, I have never been a breakfast person, but I have found the most amazing morning food! We usually have two different kinds. They are very hard to describe since no one knows the ingredients, but I will give it a try.



The first one looks like a big round pizza dough. It has green specs in it and I can't figure out what they are. I don't know if it is chives or spinach, or what. They have a lot more greens here than we do. The light greens are all called cabbage. The dark greens are all called greens! There are no English words to describe all their vegetables! It also has sesame seeds on it and it is fried because, of course the best thing about it is the grease! There are all kinds of oil here: peanut, sunflower, olive, etc. I don't know the taste for each one, but I' sure they use the cheapest. I buy according to the weight. Usually, I buy 1.50 yuan, which is 25 cents USD. Yep, that's about it, grease, sesame seeds and little green specs. Yum!



The second breakfast I splurge on. It is 2.50 yuan, which is 35 cents. It is a very complicated food. First the cooker puts a pancake like mixture on a steaming hot griddle. (He makes it in front of us, where the other one makes it in the back of a restaurant and brings it out already cooked.) Second, he cracks an egg on it and spreads it over the pancake mixture. Third, he adds those little green specs, something yellow, hot peppers, and this brown globby stuff which is sweet. Fourth, he folds it half way, then adds a crisp , wafer like cookie thingy. Fifth, he folds it up all the way, puts it in a plastic bag and sends us on our way. (To do our part to save the environment, we are going to take a Tupperware container to put our food in so we don't use plastic bags.) He does this everyday, six days a week, without ever cracking a smile. So, our mission is to make him smile, just once. I don't know how we will accomplish this. My extremely poor Mandarin never makes him smile, it just makes him annoyed. But I'm sure there's a way.



After I got my delicious breakfast, I stopped in at the Family Mart (7-11 to you and me) and bought a Minute Maid orange drink and a peach drink for Edoukou. On my way back to the apt, I stopped to check the weather/communication board. All apts have these boards. They tell the date, weather, and other stuff I can't read. The weather this morning was .5 Celsius. Yes, winter is here in Shanghai! Although the weather fluctuates. This week it was 12 and 15 on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday it was 3.



Now I'm back in my cozy apt. My heater is on. My clothes are hanging in the living room drying. I have another load to do today. The sun is shinning through my big living room room window, making my light wood floors look clean! Ah, but there are some dust bunnies eyeing me....I guess it's time to go shopping! (Dust bunnies can wait!)

The Great Wall of China

As you can see, I have been busy working on this blog. (It is very fun and a little addicting!) It's nice to finally have the time to do something like this! I added the website Xist.com because I found so much useful info on it for my classroom and thought I would pass the site on. It is interesting to read all about the different countries. Did you know that China is almost as big as the US?

The Great Wall of China-

On Halloween day we left school to go to Beijing and the Great Wall. This trip was born from a joke! Since our kindergarten classes are studying the 7 continents this year, we decided to add in the 7 wonders of the world, and since we were studying Asia, we decided to the first wonder would be the Great Wall. My colleague mentioned one day that we should go to the GW with our students. (I thought she was joking, so I laughed and said how awesome that would be!) Before long we had an itinerary ready, our boss' approval and parents rearing to go!

One of our teachers, Nancy, has a husband who is a travel agent for large companies and he put our trip together for us. It was fantastic. We had three goals- the GW, rescued pandas and Olympic stadium. Since this was a trip for our students we added in different modes of transportation so the students could have those experiences as well. Parents had to accompany their children and pay for themselves. The two and a half day trip cost $300.00 USD per person which included everything; meals, transport, and entrance to the GW. I had 5 students sign up and the other class had 6. So we went to Beijing with eleven 5 year olds.

We took a bus from school to the train station. The overnight train took 12 hours to reach Beijing from Shanghai. It left at 7:00 pm and arrived at 6:50 am. All the train cars were sleepers with four beds, two on top and two below. The ride at night was very comfortable. We didn't see much outside the window since it was already dark when we left. After the children ran the hallway for an hour, everyone got ready for bed and I had my first lesson on a PSP Playstation

Most of the boys had Play Station video game thingies with them and they were trying to teach me how to play. They were very patient with me and loved playing for me when it was my turn because I was too slow. The only thing I managed to play was Pac Man! Everything else was beyond my comprehension!!!

After a very good nights sleep, we arrived in Beijing! We hired a bus to take us from place to place and our first stop was breakfast. We ate at a Cantonese restaurant which served delicious varieties of dumplings (what we call pot stickers in the US), rice , vegetables and tea. After breakfast we boarded the bus to the zoo.

This particular zoo is the one that is housing the pandas which have been displaced by the earthquake. They had 7 pandas total! A huge area had been made for them to swing and play. Two were older pandas and the rest were young. Pandas are normally loners and only meet up with other pandas to mate, but these that were born in captivity were playing and having a ball with each other. They were so soft and furry and cuddly looking, and of course eating bamboo. Did you know that pandas spend almost all day eating? They sleep at night, but wake up after about 4 hours of sleeping to eat. The bamboo cannot sustain them for long. Pandas used to be carnivores, but because of the change in their environment, they are now totally dependent on bamboo for their food supply. Supposedly there are only 15 pandas living outside of China, while over 100 live in China zoos and reserves. Those that are born in zoos live for quite awhile. I'm not sure how many have been released back to the wild, if any.

The zoo had many other animals, but we were short on time (plus our classes had just been to the Shanghai zoo for our field trip) so we got back on the bus and headed for our hotel. We stayed in a 5 star hotel(China standards, not US they told me) which was very nice. After checking in and a shower we traveled to a Western buffet for lunch. French fries, pizza, fruit and Chinese dishes were among the items available.

The Bird's Nest is the name of the stadium where the track and field portion of the Olympic Games were held. And it looked just like a bird's nest! Inside was huge...90,000 seats? (I may just be making that up.) We were able to go all the way down to the astro turf. Can you imagine being 5 and looking up into the seats from the field? It must have been amazing! Right next door was the aquatic center. By this time the students were tired, so I took them back to the bus while parents went on to see the aquatic center.

Since we had time before dinner, our tour guide took us shopping (a favorite pastime of Chinese, Americans and Singaporeans!). Some went to the grand shopping malls to get winter clothing since the temp was suppose to drop by Sunday and we were told it would be incredibly windy on the wall. The rest of us went to the famous food street that sold everything from edible cockroaches to seahorses. Edoukou and I tires deep fried cream. That was as courageous as we got! We didn't see anyone trying anything except the candy apples and noodles.

Dinner was traditional Peking Duck. To eat Peking Duck, you take a piece of very thin crepe like dough and smother it with a special sauce. Then you put some duck in the middle, roll it up and eat it. I'm not a big fan of duck, so my opinion is biased, but I think I'll stay with Mr. Turkey. Did you know that Peking Duck is actually Beijing Duck? The westerners that were trying to tell people about the duck called it Peking, meaning to pronounce Beijing. But the B in Chinese is very close to our P. It is softer than a P but harder than a B. (yea, now you know why I still don't know Chinese!). When pinyin came into use, they spelled it closer to the Chinese pronunciation. (Pinyin is the phonetic spelling of Chinese characters/sounds.)

After dinner, we had a parent that needed to get some warm clothes for her son, so we HAD to go to the fake market. :) It was 5 times bigger than the one in Shanghai! They had everything including an awesome green winter coat for Edoukou! I'm sure most of the shops made enough money during the Olympics that they could take off a whole season or year!

On our way back to the hotel, we passed the Forbidden City (all lit up) and Tianemen Square. These places, plus the Summer palace and Ming's tomb will be enough reason to come back to Beijing. Even at 9:00 at night, everything was so clean and neat. Supposedly this was because they had been cleaning frantically before and during the Olympics. Two months later, it is still squeaky clean!

Sunday was the awaited day! The Great Wall! We got up by 7:00 for breakfast and check out. Our 5 star hotel offered an excellent American and Chinese buffet. Boarding the bus our students were rested and ready. They had been waiting a long time for this! The GW was less than an hour from downtown Beijing. Our destination was Badaling, the most famous part of the GW. There are four parts you can see close to Beijing. The non-Beijing parts of the wall are scattered along the Mongolian Chinese border all the way to Korea! The history of the wall is fascinating! (I have included a link to wikipedia for the history of the GW.)

You can see the GW way off in the distance. It looks like white rocks, and if you don't know what you are looking for, you would think it is only that. We passed one entrance to go further up to Badaling. Once there, the bus dropped us off and the climb began. We paid our entrance fee of 50 yuan (7 dollars) and started posing! It looks just like it does in pictures! It was a beautiful sunny, clear, crisp autumn day! The wind was nonexistent as we began our climb. Now, people had been telling us how steep it was, but I thought they were just wimps! I couldn't believe what we were expected to walk/climb! There are two ways ways to climb the wall, the easy way and the hard way. Of course, everyone opted for the hard way!

The first part was no problem. It's amazing; no graffiti, no huge carved naughty words, just brick and mortar. There were many people climbing, but the farther you went the less people. At one point you became a huge believer in gravity! People should have been falling off the Wall because of the steepness! Luckily there were hand rails along the sides to help you going up and coming down. We found it was much easier to run down than trying to slowly walk down . We made it to the 4th tower before we headed back. It just went on and on and on.....

The Grand Canyon is one thing, but to be on something so grand and to know that it was made by human hands thousands of years ago was incredible. To think of the blood, sweat and tears of the people who built it and the thousands of soldiers who had to guard from it was mind boggling. But the proudest moment was when one of my students looked out over the Wall and exclaimed to his mom, "I don't see any enemies!" Yes, Ryan had been listening in class after all.....

Another grand buffet was waiting for us after we descended. I was so happy I had not lost any students. (Really, I had that fear. If you knew my students, you'd understand!) We left the wall for the Beijing airport and flew home without a hitch. It was an amazing trip!