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Long time no post…
It’s been a while… but this will be short. More commentary to come.
Even though the earthquake has changed plans, we have still been finishing up the school year and preparing to make the transition back to the States. So after our adjusted High School trip to areas affected by the earthquake, we have had:
- a music concert
- a student awards ceremony
- a staff banquet
- finals
- graduation
- movers come take much of our stuff
- sales to get rid of much of the rest
- and lots of goodbyes.
We have lots of pictues of many of the above mentioned activities; for now most of the pictures are in albums on Sarah’s facebook profile. We appreciate your thoughts as we prepare to leave China for the foreseeable future on Thursday. Thanks!
Spring Break
International Day has come and gone! Usually we have a day in the fall where we put on a show for the students during the school day and have some foods from different countries. This year the event was turned into an after school carnival, including games put together by high school students and booths from local restaurants, as well as performances from many different countries. It was an exciting time to celebrate the diversity in our school and in the world.
This being finished, We’re on our spring break! May 1st is Chinese Labor Day, and we have a week off. This is the last year the break will be so long; China is realized the issue of having the entire country’s population on a vacation at once (kinda like Christmas break - only with 1.3 billion people) and has now made other days official holidays: tomb sweeping day and the mid-autumn festival are two new celebrations.
But for now, we are enjoying our break - today we went to floraland, a recently built theme park outside of Chengdu that has taken some “creative license” with its design. In other words, Disney would be proud…if they could make royalties off the place. It was a nice day for the trip.
Tomorrow we are taking a few days away from Chengdu and heading to Chongqing, a trip by train of about 4 hours. I’m sure there will be stories to tell when we return!
International Students
We are going to have an international day carnival at school on Friday, and for some trivia, our vice-principal sent out some information regarding the nationalities of our students. We have many countries represented from outside of China:
| NATIONALITY | NUMBER |
| Australia | 1 |
| Canada | 10 |
| Federal Republic of Nigeria | 3 |
| Hong Kong | 4 |
| Japan | 5 |
| Malaysia | 11 |
| Republic of Korea | 114 |
| Republic of the Philippines | 3 |
| Singapore | 13 |
| Switzerland | 2 |
| Taiwan | 3 |
| Thailand | 1 |
| The Netherlands | 2 |
| United Kingdom | 2 |
| United States of America | 53 |
It makes for quite a diverse school! Pictures sure to follow after the international day festivities…
This is the final post…
…from our desktop computer. Don’t worry - we plan to keep updating this site for awhile!
We are currently in the middle of the transition process, which right now includes selling all unnecessary items. We bought this desktop computer when we came to China; though it is much newer than our laptop (5 years old, but still ticking! They’re both Dells, if you care), it is much larger as well. (I know - a desktop is bigger than a laptop. It suprised me too.) So, all of our music, pictures, and the rest are being transferred to a portable hard drive, and soon our computer will belong to someone else.
This sounds a bit like an eulogy. For a computer. Is that weird? I mean, I expect such fanatisim from an apple user, but maybe I’m going a little overboard. Anyway.
We had an absolutely beautiful weekend here. Sarah presided over the annual solo and ensemble competition, while I took a much needed weekend off. The sun was out in full force, which is an oddity for our cloudy city, so some students took advantage of the rays…for six hours. At least one didn’t come to school yesterday due to his sunburn.
Many more “moving” stories to come…
Well, our crazy-but-fun weekend has come to an end. We spent Saturday evening partying at the Crowne Plaza with our middle and high school students.
Leah and Kyla
some of my high school choir
Dan spoke at fellowship on Sunday, possible for the last time. It was a little overwhelming yesterday, hearing people sing and pray in different languages, and wondering when we’ll be part of such a vibrant and diverse community again. I suppose it’s just something we’ll have to seek out.
Choir Festival, Day 1
We’re in Tianjin, with one day of choir rehearsing down, and one day to go… it was a long day for Sarah, who spent most of her day at the pianoor conducting the women, while with a cold. (It’s her birthday today, by the way - she’s 26! And we had lemon cake from the cafeteria, a tradition for her. The lemon cake, that is; not the cafeteria.)
Another reason the day was long was the traffic: what was supposed to be a 20-minute bus ride from hotel to school took over an hour and included us walking several blocks. Apparently earlier in the day a decision was made to temporarily turn a two-way street (of 6 or 8 lanes, mind you) into a one way street. Combine this with all the pre-olympics renovation going on in the city, and you start to see the difficulty…
This evening we went to a shopping complex for dinner, and there saw the Chinese version of the American grocery store, Trader Joe’s:
Way to be original. More rehearsing and a concert to come tomorrow!