圣诞快乐! Sheng Dan Kuai Le! Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas Everyone! I hope you all enjoyed yourself during this special time of the year! This Christmas was definitely like none other for Josh and I, but we still managed to enjoy ourselves a lot!
















The Christmas celebrations all started with inviting our students to "Christmas Corner," a special version of the "English Corner" (which we hold once a week for the students to give them a chance to discuss American Culture, Job Interviewing techniques, and simply to practice their English communication skills). The Christmas corner turned out to be a great success. We showed them pictures of American Christmas traditions, taught them Christmas songs, and even got to read with them the Christmas Story! We all had a great time!
When it came time to Christmas Eve, none of us had any plans of how we were going to celebrate, other than hold another Christmas Corner for those students who weren't able to come to it the night before. However, disappointingly, when we arrived at the classrooms that evening all of lights were shut off and no students were to be found anywhere. So, Josh called one of his students to ask where everyone was, and she informed us that the administration had given all of the students the night off, so, of course, they were all out shopping or on dates, since they never get nights off! So it seemed like our plans were ruined, but then, once we got home, the student that Josh had called, called back to tell us that she and her friends were coming back and wanted to come to our apartment...Josh had told them not to come back from shopping, but it seemed like Christmas was something they were truly interested in. So on Christmas Eve the four of us (Josh, Dan, Amanda and I) sat around our apartment with four of Josh's students and discussed the meaning of the Christmas holiday, then Josh busted out the Wii and we introduced them to Wii tennis and bowling, they had so much fun!!















On Christmas day, Josh, Dan, Amanda and I went to a wonderful Spanish Style restaurant named Tapas for Christmas lunch. It was definitely not a traditional Christmas meal, but it was really good! We had sauteed chicken and vegetables with rice, potatoes with yummy garlic paste and a Spanish omelate. So delicious!
For Christmas dinner we invited some of our students out to dinner and then to our place for a movie and hot chocolate. None of them had ever had hot chocolate before..they were so excited to try it!! When we met them at the front gate at the university we were surprised to find about nine of our students waiting for us. When we met them they all showered us with Christmas presents: wrapped fruit, candy, and one of my students even knitted me a beautiful scarf! They are so sweet!
















We went to a Sichuan food Restaurant near to the university. Sichuan food is a spicy type of Chinese food from the Sichuan province of China-- it seems pretty popular and we really enjoy the taste of it too! At the restaurant we got our own room and already the table was full of people..then to our amazement three more of my students walk in apologizing for their lateness and yelling Merry Christmas! It was a wonderful dinner! It was so comforting to realize how many of our students wished to join us for Christmas dinner and celebration! We felt very loved!
After the restaurant, we all came to our apartment and played the card game "Slap."















Josh and I taught some of the students this card game during our trip to Beijing and they haven't stopped talking about it since! Then we watched a movie, and to our surprise they chose the movie "the Sixth Sense," which was really surprising because our Chinese students seem to be extra sensitive to anything having to do with ghosts or creepy faces. Needless to say they were very afraid, but they all seemed to enjoy it in the end!





























We had a great Christmas! Probably the best it could have been given our circumstance! I think the best part was enjoying this wonderful holiday with our students and seeing the enjoyment on all of their faces and hearing it in their voices when they shouted "Merry Christmas!!" One of my students even sent me a message after our celebration that said, " It's the best night since I arrived at this college. Thank you!"
Moments like this make all of the frustration, homesickness, and other trials that we have experienced on this trip all worth it! We are so blessed to have been able to have this opportunity! And we are so blessed to have all of you in our lives! Thank you for all your thoughts and prayers! We hope you have a happy New Year! We love you all!

Love, Ashley and Josh

P.S. The picture at the top of the page are our make-shift stockings. (Dan's, Amanda's, Josh's, and mine) :)

Beijing Huan Ying Us!!! ("wo men" actually)

Hello Everyone!

Yes, we are finally writing to you!!! I am so sorry for the long delay between blogs!

Since our last blog we have finally made it away from Dalian! We have all been aching to begin our travels, so fortunately last week many of our students were going on a trip to Beijing to gain experience flying on an airplane..and we were able to go with them!
Besides flying on the airplane, which was an adventure in itself since some of our students had never flown in an airplane before, we also made it to see the 2008 Olympic sites, Tienanmen Square, and the Forbidden City. We also were able to eat Peking Duck, which China is famous for!!













Olympic Sites: (Bird's Nest and Water Cube)
We were able to go inside both of the sites, but only had time to go into the Bird's Nest, which was pretty impressive, but there was nothing to do inside of it besides look around and pretend to be Olympic Athletes! (We couldn't go on the track though! :(

















Tienanmen Square:

Tienanmen Square was so massive that we couldn't even realize how big it was just standing in one spot! I think we would have appreciated it more if it wasn't so dang cold!!! Our tour went to watch the flag raising ceremony that occurs at every sunrise...but it was soooo freezing...we couldn't even focus on enjoying ourselves! (In the picture you can see the entrance to the Forbidden City behind the flag pole.)

















The Forbidden City:
















The Forbidden City, also known as the Imperial Palace, was the highlight of the trip! It was so huge that it took us the whole day to walk around and view it in its entirety! It was mind-boggling when realizing that we were walking on the same floors as the powerful emperors of China's historical dynasties. (Picture above: a few of my students-Adriana, Miranda, Summer, and Autumn-and I in front of the City, Picture Below Right: Picture of the Large Stone Carving that weighs 200 tons! and was thought to be moved from its carving sight to the Forbidden City
by sliding down roads that they had iced over! Can you see Josh at the top??)






















Well, we had a great trip to Beijing with our students and we can't wait to return to see more of its famous sites once Josh's younger sister Cherith comes to visit at the end of December. I will write soon to tell you all about our Chinese Christmas...to be continued..I promise you won't have to wait two months!! :)
We love you all and miss you all so much!!

Love, Ashley and Josh

It's been so long...

Hello everyone!

I know..it has been so long since we have last updated you...I am so sorry.

Work:
Since our last blog all we have been basically doing is working. Work is getting less and less stressful because we are finally getting the hang of everything. The students are great and seem to be enjoying and benefiting from our classes which is amazing! We have started an English corner/club that we meet with every week. During these club meetings we are giving students extra practice with their English skills. Yesterday we taught the students about Halloween in America. The students had a great time..we showed them what costumes and Jack-O-Lanterns were and they even made their own masks. Then we had them wear their masks, knock on the classroom doors and yell "Trick-or-Treat" to get candy. They had a lot of fun. Today my students came into class yelling "Trick-or-treat" and "Happy Halloween"..it was great!

Birthday:



















Last Monday was my 22nd birthday! We had a lot of fun. On Sunday night the four of us and Harry went to an Italian restaurant called The Olive Garden, which was nothing like the one at home, but still a treat. Then we went to a Bavarian beer house for dessert. There we had an amazing slice of warm apple pie and an even more amazing volcano chocolate cake with warm fudge that oozed out of the middle of it! They were so delicious!



































On my real birthday everyone had to work which is the bummer of having a birthday on a Monday, but after work I had a surprise visit from all the assistants in our department. I was so surprised! They came in and sang me happy birthday in Mandarin and English! Then we had cake and opened presents..our friends from the office are so generous!





























Later for dinner we were invited by our wonderful neighbor, Jao Ping, to eat dinner with her and her husband at her restaurant which is almost directly underneath our apartment. We had a great hot pot meal, which is sort of like boiling soup right at the table. The pot sits on a hot plate and you cook whatever meats and veggies that you want. Then as a birthday tradition they brought us eggs and noodles and prepared a huge sweet and sour fish for us! The noodles and eggs I think meant longevity and the fish for wealth. Everything was amazing..near the end of dinner we got a visit from Jao Ping's daughter Keai (which means cute in Mandarin). She is the cutest thing ever. Her mother has relatively good English skills and is desperately trying to begin teaching Keai English as well. Jao Ping likes to show us how much English her daughter knows, but a lot of times Keai is too shy to perform for us. She is such a smart little girl and will probably be very successful in her life, especially with such a hard working and wonderful mother.
Needless to say I had a wonderful birthday in China!











































DanDong:
Just last weekend we ventured out of Dalian with our new friend Hunter, who is also a foreign teacher from New Zealand, to a city called DanDong. DanDong is where the Great Wall begins. The section of the Great Wall that we saw is unfortunately no longer connected to the longer section near Beijing and has been refurbished quite a lot, however it was still exciting to be able to see it finally!














Another exciting view we saw just across the river from DanDong was North Korea! We actually walked across what is known as "The Broken Bridge" which was destroyed by the US during the Korean war. The bridge used to connect China to North Korea, but now only goes half way across the river and then breaks off. There is a newer bridge right next to it, which sort of has an eerie feel to it because the whole time we were there we never saw anyone cross it.














While we were walking back from the Great Wall we took a different trail which lead us to where the river eventually turned into a stream, which made N. Korea only a stone's throw away..literally!
While we were in DanDong we even got to witness the beginning of a Chinese Wedding which has the bride and groom drive up in a parade of cars covered with balloons and flowers, while they are greeted with tons of fireworks, confetti and pigeons being let loose! The bride we saw looked scared by all the commotion.














We had a great time in DanDong...we figured what other time in our life are we going to be able to have the view from our hotel window be that of North Korea!! Crazy! :)

Well I think this fills you in on our lives since our passed blog! We miss you all so much and hope you are all doing well! We love you all!!

Love,
Ashley and Josh

Having fun on our vacation!

Hello Everyone!











Well, our week-long vacation has begun and we have already been making the most of it. It started yesterday (Monday) when we walked on the Binhai Road, which is a 12 mile walk along the East coast of Dalian. We started off at Xianghai Square, where we saw sculptures of all of the Olympic sports (Yes, we even thought we saw one for Speed Walking). I saw this sculpture of a woman volleyball player and it reminded me of you Nikki! These sculptures are pretty amazing, we figured out that they display the three key movements in each of the motions...pretty cool! On the rest of the walk we saw some beautiful views of the Yellow Sea, got invited to join a group of wonderful (non-English speaking) Chinese people for lunch on the side of the road, and ended up at Tiger beach. It was a great long walk and we got to see much of Dalian that we never knew existed.











While on our walk we went passed what was Dalian's Forest Zoo, known as Asia's largest zoo (so we heard). So, we decided to visit it. The zoo was enormous..not many more animals than you would see at a normal zoo I don't think, but the amount of space it took up was amazing! We even had to take a 15-20 minute long gondola ride to get to another part of the zoo! The zoo was unlike one Josh or I had ever been to in America. For example, feeding the animals was a common trend and animals being let to roam around the park. One of our favorite parts of the zoo was visiting the bear exhibits. Both of us were expecting to find a few different kinds of bears sleeping in their caves and barely being able to get a glimps of them...wrong! All of the bears (including polar bears, sun bears, and a few others) were out and putting on a show for the crowd. We were able to throw apples and cucumbers to the bears to make them do tricks like spin around or wave...it was amazing! And we were able to see them up close and personal, only having about 15-20 feet distance and a deep moat in between us!
After the bear exhibit, we went to our first show titled "Violent Animals Performance." Here we saw four tigers and one lion doing tricks and walking on balance beams...but that's not all. After the show the crowd was invited to come into the giant caged in stage and take a picture with one of the younger tigers for only 10 yuan ( about $1!) How could we resist! :) It was one of the scariest things we had ever done...but now we can say that we touched a tiger with our bare hands and never do it again!!



Next we took a beautiful gondola ride to the next part of the zoo to catch the Thai Elephant performance. As we entered the park, standing straight in front of us was another photo opportunity of a lifetime.. being lifted in the air by a Thai Elephant! After I had already encountered a tiger and survived, what was there to stop me? After watching many other individuals successfully be lifted up and down I decided I would pay the $2.50 and experience another feat I never thought I would accomplish! It was pretty amazing, I don't really remember thinking anything while up in the air, only feeling an odd sense of security with the elephant's trunk wrapped tightly around me. You can watch this video for yourselves on our youtube link!




















Well, other than walking around the park (with little to no lighting) trying to find an exit and encountering a heard of free-roaming alpaca, the rest of the zoo trip was pretty uneventful. :) Needless to say we are having the experience of a lifetime already! Can't wait to fill you in on our next adventure in China!

We love you all so much!

Love,
Ashley and Josh

P.S. Tomorrow is Dalian's version of Disneyland called Discoveryland! Woohoo!

Second BIG update!

Hello everyone!

Sorry it took so long for us to update you on what has been going on since our first blog...things have just been a little hectic around here, but they are finally settling down I think.

OUR CLASSES:

Since our first blog we have started teaching in our own classrooms. There were quite a few switches and changes to our schedules which made it hard to get a routine going, but I think our classes are finally set, which makes it easier to plan and prepare. Josh and I are both teaching two classes: one intermediate class and one low level class each. At first they were going to give me a class of 26 low level students, but after my first day I knew it would be close to impossible to give attention to everyone of them like they needed, so I fought to have the class split in half and shared between Josh and I. Since the split the students have shown a lot more confidence in speaking up and asking questions and it seems as though they will be able to learn so much more since the students will be able to get more individualized attention with the smaller class sizes.
These classes have proved to be quite a challenge, especially the low level, because most of the students' have very very limited English comprehension skills when it comes to listening and speaking. So we are trying our best to communicate with our students through pictures and modeling. The students are great though, they are so eager to learn and are very respectful to us as their teachers. It is so awesome to see our students' faces light up when we see them outside of the classroom! It's so great! Overall I think it is going to be quite an enjoyable and rewarding experience for the both of us.

THE BIG PERFORMANCE:
















Well the big performance finally came and went this past Thursday. The four of us had been preparing for a few weeks to sing a portion (yes including solos!) of China's Olympic Song, "Beijing Huan Ying Ni" which means "Beijing Welcomes You." None of us know how we were signed up for this gig and all of us were in denial that we were going to be singing in front of thousands of people for the University's 50th anniversary celebration! As the date of the performance came closer, we each became more and more nervous about the performance because we began to see what a big deal the celebration was when we saw the campus going through a whole beautification transformation before our eyes! There were ladies scrubbing the steps of the buildings, tons of decorations, and truck loads of flowers being planted all around the campus.
















The day of the performance we all four had to go in four hours before the performance to get our hair and makeup done by some of the fashion students of the college. (Yes even the boys got makeup!) Once we got all done up all of the students lined up to take pictures with us like we were movie stars! Finally our time had come and we all belted out our tunes barely even understanding what we were saying. But the crowd loved us! There were fireworks, smoke machines, bubble machines, the whole works! The experience will be seared into our memories for a lifetime! (There is a video of this on our Youtube link! Check it out!)

LOOKING FORWARD TO:

This next week is what China calls its National Holiday, where the whole country gets a week long vacation! We are so excited to get a rest after these crazy past two weeks. We plan on using this time to do more sight seeing in Dalian and do all there is to do in our city, that way when the long vacation comes we can use that time to see the rest of China.

So far we are having a great time here, but miss everyone at home immensely! We love you all and appreciate all of you so much for following our updates and watching our videos. It makes us feel very comforted and loved to know that we have all of you at home thinking and talking to Big Papa for us! We love you all soooo much!

Love,
Ashley and Josh

P.S.
Happy belated birthday Nick! And happy soon to be birthday Anthony and Jordan! We love you!

How to use a spoon properly

Yesterday we ate at Pizza Hut! This was not the ordinary Pizza Hut that we had experienced before in the past, no, this was a sit-down, full-service restaurant. This place had nice music, excellent service, and mood lighting! Anyway, after the best pizza ever (we're getting desperate here-but it really is better in China, promise), when it came time for dessert we ordered an ice cream sundae. Another note, ice cream is not very good here, it tastes like freeze dried, watered- down, wanna-be ice cream. As we gorged the sundae, we all noticed that I was holding my spoon just like I hold chopsticks. It was pretty hilarious! I can only imagine what I am going to forget how to do "properly" (the American way, that is) over the next months.

By the way, everyone needs to check out our videos on YouTube, we have been trying to update them a couple times a week at least so you can all see how our China experience has been. Just click on the link "Our Videos" on the left of our Blog. We love you all!

Our first blog!

Well, here it is!! Our first of hopefully many blog entries to keep you all updated about our adventure!

As some of you know, we have been in Dalian, China, for about six whole days. We are slowly getting used to being in a totally different country. There is definitely a culture shock...whenever we need to do anything outside of our apartment it is a struggle to communicate. Luckily we have our handy phrase book and our wonderful helper Harry who has gone almost everywhere with us.

Things are a lot more comfortable now that we have our own apartment to retreat to. For the first few days we were living in a "teacher hotel" on campus, which was fine for a little while, however we did have trouble with power shortages, strange smells, and the wonderful sound of freshman students doing military drills outside of our room at 5:30 in the morning!

The food here has been great! Every restaurant that we have been taken to has been delicious in its own way. So far we have gone to Korean, Japanese, and a few Chinese restaurants. We have also made it to a McDonald's, which is actually better than what we have in America...or maybe we were just dying for western food. :)

We are supposed to start teaching next Tuesday, however we have yet to find out the level of our students and so we have been unable to prepare. Hopefully we will find out our schedule and all the information we need at tomorrow's meeting!

In general we are having a great time! I'm not sure if it has hit us how long exactly we are going to be here...but we are just trying to take each day one and a time!

We miss everyone soooo much! We will try to keep this blog as updated as possible...please take a look at the pictures and videos we are going to post also!

We love you!!!!