Soph Serve

Each week we have Sophomore teacher meeting - mostly to go over announcements and share ideas for the next week's lesson. Here's a shot of us at our last "Soph Serve" meeting of the year.

Waffle House

Last week one of my students wore a t-shirt that proclaimed, "We love waffles!" on the front. When I asked if she'd ever actually tried one though, she said she hadn't. Since we have waffles on Saturdays in Peter Hall I thought it would be cool to see if she and her friend would want to join me for breakfast and they did indeed want to. Students aren't allowed to eat in our dining hall, so I just went downstairs and took 3 plates, forks and waffles and made my way up to my room where we enjoyed a fun and delicious breakfast and two girls got to try their very first waffles!

May Holiday

Last week was May Holiday, which is the equivalent of Spring Break in the US. However, it's a National Holiday and is the worst time of the year to travel in China. So I opted to spend most of it at SIAS - away from the pushing, shoving and madness that generally accompanies traveling in China. The exception was my one day trip to Zhengzhou (see below) and on Monday when I went to the Shizu (pronounced kind of like "sure zoo" except there is a d sound in front of the z) Mountain with two friends and students of mine - JoJo and Laurie. Its not a very tall mountain - we were down and up within 2.5 hours. It was good to spend time with them, they are cool people. After we got back from the mountain, they took me to the burial place of Huang Di, who is supposedly like the founder of China or something like that. Although Xinzheng (the city I live in) is fairly small by China standards, its actually very important in Chinese history - its considered to be the birthplace of China - because this is where Huang Di was from.

Monkey Street Show

Here was an interesting sight we saw yesterday. Random Chinese dude with 3 monkeys. We didn't see them perform, but one of the girls I was with said she has seen them do a little show before. Maybe I'll get to see them do it another time!

Spidey Let Down

Yesterday some of my friends and I went to Zhengzhou in hopes of seeing Spiderman 3 on the Big Screen. But, unfortunately they did not have an English showing of it. We went because we had received a tip from a Chinese man who thought they might be showing it in English...but it didn't work out. Guess now I'll just have to wait a week for it to come out on DVD.

Thunderstorm

I took this the other day before it started pouring. The picture doesn't really capture how strange the sky looked before it began raining. It looked really cool!

SIAS Wedding

Two staff members at SIAS, both Chinese, got married the other day on campus. It was a neat, beautiful, worshipful wedding. I don't know Shawn-Michael and Coco extremely well, but I've talked to them a few times and they are a solid couple, so I am happy for them.

Afterwords they had a reception at SIAS Cafe, here are a few pictures from there:

A non-wasted life

I asked my students to answer, "How do I not waste my life?" for creative roll call a few weeks ago and these were some of their answers:

Study all the time
Have goals
Try our best in everything
Work hard
Be happy everyday
Do what you like
Don't let yourself feel lonely

I hate that. That's not how you don't waste your life, but they've been told their whole lives by parents and teachers that "if you try hard you can do anything" and while they'll tell you that's not really true, they still live as if it is true.