Team AC On The Go

Surfing & Work

2012-02-11T19:29:00.012-08:00

Hi Guys,

Another little update from Team AC in Australia:

We are loving living here SO much... we feel so blessed to wake up every morning to sunshine and ocean views!

A couple weeks ago, after a lot of research, we bought a surfboard, which was really exciting for us. We'd taken lessons here and there before so thought we had a general idea of how to surf, but now that we're trying it without a teacher by our side, we are sucking! It is a REALLY hard sport!

But we are determined to keep going with it. The other day we chucked it in our pool and did a few drills, just so we could learn how to stand up on it a bit better. It was helpful for the next time we went out in the ocean, and today I had a great little surf session!

By the way, thanks to Mom and Dad Hiller and Oma Hiller for the surfboard... the Christmas money we got from them went towards buying this new toy!

Workwise, Andrew is really enjoying his new job. He is teaching Math 8, 9, and 12, as well as Science and Careers. Between that and working on his masters at night, he is really busy. He is also playing music with some guys, so that keeps him extra busy!

I didn't have any teaching work for the first 2.5 weeks of school, although I'd emailed my resume to nearly all the schools on the coast. Andrew then suggested I make business cards and bring them around to the schools and personally introduce myself to the principals.

At first I didn't think that was such a good idea as I didn't want to pester them after just having emailed them my resume, but he kept encouraging me to do it, so I set out and hit up 37 schools in 4 days last week! A LOT of driving and navigating and getting lost and keeping at it!

It was funny because I put on my best teacher-wear, but I was driving around in our old rust-bucket of a car (the free one). I always tried to park far away from the office so they wouldn't see the car and have it contribute negatively to their first impression of me.

To give you an example of how dire it is, as I rolled into the grocery store parking lot last week, a staff member came running up to me as I got out of the car, and handed me my hubcap that had come off the wheel! The car is in quite good shape mechanically, but just doesn't look too slick. :)

Anyways, back to the point of the story, after going to all these schools, I did get work this past Thurs and Fri, and hopefully it'll keep coming this week. If not, I guess I'll just have to work on my surfing skills!

On another note, happy 55th birthday to my mom today, and a happy 65th birthday to Gill on the 26th! Can't wait for your visit in April.

Love, Corinna

ps- in case you missed the video of our place, here are a few pics:

The main view from our living room:

If you turn 90 degrees (or look out our bedroom window), you see this:

And if you're looking up from the direction of the ocean, this is the view of our entire building. It is terraced as it goes up the hill, so each unit is 3 steps higher than the neighbor in front of them, which gives everyone a really great view- no one ends up with a view of the parking lot!

We are the top left unit, and the pool is at the very front (behind the fence and retaining wall you can see from this angle).

pps- the top pic is of Andrew getting ready to hit the beach... I know it's a bit different than what you'd wear to the beach in Vancouver, but the sun here is really THAT strong that you do have to wear a big fat hat (and a sun shirt is a good idea too), or else you'll get burned to a crisp in 5 minutes flat!

Thailand Pics

2012-01-26T00:18:00.010-08:00

Hey Guys,

Here are the Thailand pics I promised you last month. You may have already seen heaps of them on Facebook, but if you don't have FB, this post is for you. I'll comment underneath each pic. They are in very random order.

Here's Andrew in our new house, setting up the lights we bought in Bangkok... you can see the final result in the top pic.

View from the deck of our guesthouse in Koh Lanta. Every day this big white ferry would pull up and let off a bunch of new tourists and take the old ones back to the mainland.

Fish that nibble the dead skin off your feet. You have to pay to stick your feet in here for 30 minutes, which is kinda ironic since you're basically paying to feed the fish! I did it and it really tickled and felt a bit eery, but after about 5 minutes you get used to it, and then you leave with really smooth feet.

Andrew in the pool on Klong Nin beach on the island of Koh Lanta. It was one of those infinity pools that looks like it doesn't have an edge... pretty neat!

Railay Beach in Krabi. Although this area is technically part of Thailand's mainland, it is only accessible by long-tail boat, which are these long fishing boats with a long motor sticking off the back. They just chuck your luggage in and the water sprays up into the boat if it's a wavy day. Best to pack light and not bring your laptop :)

Yummy Pad Thai... we had this almost every day, and tasted so many different varieties... love it!

Sipping coconut water at Karon Beach on Phuket... nice restaurant overlooking the ocean.

We rented this scooter a bunch of times to get around Phuket. In Bangkok it's easy to hop into a taxi since there are meters to charge your fare, but in a lot of other parts of Thailand (like Phuket) you and the driver have to negotiate a price before getting in. This means they usually charge you WAY more than the ride is worth, so it's a good idea to have your own wheels!

Going for an elephant ride, which was followed by lunch, a hike to a waterfall, and then white-water rafting... an all-day kind of tour in Chiang Mai (a couple hours north of Bangkok by plane).

Renting a kayak in Railay Beach... it was really cool b/c you could paddle through these narrow ocean tunnels which are part of the cliffs that go right into the ocean all around this area. I got Andrew to sit in the front so I could take a paddling break whenever I wanted without him noticing :)

Night market in Chiang Mai. Andrew always finds guitar stuff wherever he is, and this stall was full of little replicas and keychains. Look how happy he is!

This is at the end of our ziplining trip called "Jungle Flight," also in Chiang Mai. The guy in the green shirt was our guide and was really funny.

Jungle Flight included 22 different ziplines, suspension bridges, and abseils.... and lunch afterwards (and a free t-shirt). The first few zips were a bit scary, but after a while it was just fun! There were a few ziplines where Andrew and I got to go side-by-side. The guide called this "honeymoon style."

We also got to visit an orphanage near Bangkok. This is the one that Julia did her missions trip to last year. The houses that these orphans get to live in are brand new and look really North American... we were really impressed. The people who run the orphanage, Karen and Ricky Sanchez are from my old church in Abbotsford, and it was really great to see/hear everything they've been doing in Thailand since 2000.

At the beginning of the cooking school in Chiang Mai, they took us to the market to learn how to pick out the right ingredients for all the stuff we were going to be making. The guy teaching us was really funny with his descriptions of all the veggies... didn't know veggies could be so funny!

In Bangkok we did a big tour of the Grand Palace... really amazing grounds. Technically this is where the King and Queen live, but they actually only spend a night there once in a while, and then live somewhere else the rest of the time.

Andrew with a guard at the Grand Palace. We didn't know this, but you can't wear shorts into the Grand Palace, so he had to rent these ugly grey pants. (And I had to rent this pretty Thai skirt, which looked ridiculous with the runners I was wearing... so no pics of me, you'll see!)

At the Grand Palace... the only pic of us together where you can really tell we're in Thailand from the background.

Andrew ordering Pad Thai from a street food stand on KhaoSan Rd in Bangkok... this is the really touristy area and we were staying nearby. You could choose from a variety of toppings and noodle thicknesses... all for about $1. That's about 1/15th the price of ordering the same thing here in Australia!

Out for lunch with Ricky Sanchez, the orphanage guy. He took us out to eat at the local mall and introduced me to this really yummy "unripened papaya salad"... way better than it sounds!

Anyways, next time we see you we'll show you the rest of the pics, unless you've already seen them on FB.

We'll post a few pics of our new house soon too. I tried to take a video of it for you, but had plenty of trouble uploading it online... I think it had to do with our camera, so we're gonna borrow another one soon and try again. I'll send you the link if/when it works. If not, it'll just be good old pics!

Talk soon,

~Corinna for Team AC

Back Safe in Oz

2012-01-06T04:31:00.006-08:00

Cooking school in Chiang Mai, Thailand... I was cooking something (forget what) that caught on fire. It was meant to, and they told me it would flame, but I was NOT expecting that high a flame. It kinda freaked me out, as you can tell by my expression:

Hi Guys,

Just a quick update: we landed back in Brisbane 2 days ago, spent a night with our friends Dave and Niki (near Brisbane), and then drove 2 hours north to the Sunshine Coast yesterday morning to start looking for a place to live.

Yesterday we looked at 5 places, and today we looked at 5 more. Out of the 10 places, 2 looked nice-ish, so we have put in applications and hope to hear back really soon, because until then we are homeless!

We are spending 2 nights at a hotel right now, and then we'll crash at our friend Line's place for a few nights, but really don't want to overstay our welcome there.

The thing we are finding with the apartments we are looking at is they all have some (but not all) of the things we are looking for (near the beach, not on a main road, nice enough kitchen and bathroom, swimming pool, and generally not dingy and manky).

Like I said, 2 of the places look okay and they are both near the beach (and are just a block apart from each other actually). One has a pool and nice landscaping, a killer ocean view, but not that nice a kitchen and bathroom. The other one has a brand new kitchen, better bathroom, but no view or pool.

Decisions, decisions! We just need to narrow down what's really important to us. Also, there are other people who've applied for them too, so we might get neither of these places. We will look at 2-3 more places in the next couple of days, but that's all that's on the rental market in our price range and areas we'd like to live in.

Anyways, if you have any useful advice, please do let us know!

Hope you're all well. Stay tuned for more Thailand pics...

~Corinna for Team AC

Chillin' on Koh Lanta

2011-12-30T20:57:00.003-08:00

Hi Guys,

Last post of our holidays here... we are at our last stop right now, the southern island of Koh Lanta (Koh means island in Thai, so all the islands here are Koh-something).

This has definitely been the most relaxing stop so far as this island isn't quite as touristy, and the beaches are great. We are not doing much at the moment apart from relaxing... no more crazy tours or rafting, etc! Just writing a few postcards, swimming, suntanning, etc.

We are staying at a little guesthouse which is built on top of a pier, so if you look thru the cracks in the floorboards you can see the ocean right beneath you. Unfortunately we are not staying really near a beach, but if we rent a motorbike we can be there within 5 minutes.

Yesterday we found ourselves a nice beach, had lunch at a hotel restaurant right on the beach, and then swam in their infinity pool all afternoon... good deal!

In 2 days from now we head back to Phuket (2 hours by ferry), and spend one more night there before flying back to Brisbane late on Jan 3rd. We land at lunch time on the 4th, and will start looking for apartments right away. Our first appointments for viewings will be on the 5th and we've already looked everything up online and have shortlisted our apartment options.

So hopefully we'll have a nice place for you to stay when you come for a visit! :)

We will def be posting pics of our trip once we get back to our computers next month, so stay tuned...

Love you and miss you all, family. Happy New Year for 2012!

~Team AC

Thailand so far...

2011-12-15T04:16:00.002-08:00

Hi Guys,

Just a quick note to catch you all up:

We've been in Thailand for a week now and are having a great time. We started out in Bangkok for 6 nights (too long if you're ever thinking of going), and saw heaps of temples, markets, street vendors, massage places, etc. We also got to visit an orphanage that some friends from Abbotsford run there.

Yesterday we flew up to Chiang Mai (in the North). If you know anything about Andrew, you'll know that he likes to be at the airport VERY early... so we were there 3.5 hours early for a domestic flight... the check-in counter wasn't even open yet. That pretty much made for a full day of traveling by the time we got here.

Our hotel here in CM has a really nice (cold) pool with lots of trees around it. We spent most of today just swimming, reading and relaxing.

Today we booked the stuff we're gonna be doing for the next 3 days: a big ziplining thing, elephant riding, trekking, white-water rafting, and a cooking school. Really looking forward to all that.

Sorry there's no pictures with this post... we left all that stuff behind in Oz (the camera cables), so we'll post all those next month when we get back.

Hope you're all doing really well and getting ready for Christmas (and your 60th next week, Dad!).

Talk soon,

~Corinna for the Team

Thailand Plans

2011-11-27T22:51:00.002-08:00

As promised, here are the basics of our trip to Thailand, which is coming up in less than 2 weeks from now!

I've put shapes on the map of Thailand above (Thailand is the yellow country) so you can quickly find where we're going.

We arrive into Bangkok (star shape) on Dec 8th and stay for nearly a week. Then we fly up to Chiang Mai (paw shape) and spend about 5 days there. Then we fly down to Phuket (happy face) and spend the rest of our time there and the surrounding islands. In early January we fly back up to Bangkok, and then back to Oz on Jan 4th. So we'll be there for nearly a month... perfect!

At first we were only planning to go for about 2 weeks, but when we priced things out, it'll cost about the same amount to travel in Thailand as it would to live in Oz, so why not go for longer and have some more fun adventures??!

Some of the things we're looking forward to most are:

-ziplining
-surfing
-taking a 2-day kite-boarding course
-rock-climbing
-checking out the tropical islands and beaches
-Thai food
-elephant rides
-Thai massages
-taking a Thai cooking class

We will be going by ourselves... our friends Bonnie and Shane from China were planning to meet us there, but the plans fell through... so we're a bit sad about that, but will have a great vacation anyways. I'm sure we'll meet plenty of other travelers to hang out with!

We will try to keep in contact with you from time to time, but won't be bringing our computers with us, so don't worry if you don't hear from us for a bit.

We will also try to be in touch before moving to the coast and flying to Thailand, but be warned that this upcoming weekend will be SO busy that I'm not sure we'll have time to phone much, so it may just have to be a few emails here and there.

Alright, gotta go... have a good one!

~Corinna for Team AC

More November happenings

2011-11-27T22:30:00.005-08:00

Alrighty, so it's been another super busy week down here as we are winding down to the school holidays.

Last blog post I shared how Andrew was doing Movember, and this past Friday the kids got to shave off his "beautiful" mo in front of everyone at school. They also got to dye (hairspray) his hair white, which took about 3 washes to fully get the smell out. He was a great sport about it, and our school has raised just over $1000 for prostate cancer research now.

On Sat morning Andrew got up at 5am to join a bunch of other guys from school at 5:30am to hike up a nearby mountain. It's SO hot right now that if you want to do anything physical, you really have to do it before 8am, or after 6pm.

The other morning I woke up at 5am to hear Andrew taking an ice-cold shower... that's how hot it is in our room. Oh well, not complaining... it's just strange when normally we'd be freezing our pa-tooties off in November!

On Sat evening we had our friends Greg and Sunelle over for dinner, and then on Sunday we got up early-ish and went to the beach for a walk. Usually it's a bit breezy by the ocean, but not now... it's sooo hot, and the water isn't really refreshing either since it's bath-tub temperature. Beautiful scenery though.

After the beach we were invited for lunch at the family of one of my students (near the beach). We had a great time with them, and ended up riding various skateboards on their driveway afterwards.

You can see I'm not quite a pro-rider yet... but just you wait!!

Sunday evening we were on worship team at our church for the last time and said our good-byes there. Next weekend we will be busy packing and cleaning our rental house, as the movers are coming on Monday, so don't think we'll be going to church then.

We are now in our LAST week of school (yipppeeee), then Andrew has his final for his Masters course on Sat morning, and then we are gonna start to really hit it for the rest of the weekend with packing and cleaning... I think it'll be a big job, but at least we get a good reward at the end of it it all... a holiday!

I will do a quick post on that soon so you know where we're off to.

Mo-vember

2011-11-19T19:19:00.002-08:00

I forgot to mention something kinda important in yesterday's post: Andrew's new look. He's taking part in Movember, which is where you grow a mustache and raise money for prostate cancer research during the month of November. Men all over the world do it, and this is Andrew's first year.

I don't really know whether to be horrified or proud to be honest. To wake up every morning looking at this face....

Anyways, he has raised over $130 from his homeroom class at school so far, which is great. December 1st it all comes off though... just 10 days to go!

November in Rocky

2011-11-18T02:27:00.004-08:00

Hi Guys,

It's a been a couple weeks since a blog post from us, so here you go: The first pic above is from when we decided to have a picnic dinner on the top of Mt. Archer, the tallest mountain around here, which overlooks our town. We grabbed some pizza and drove up, but we kept being interrupted by these annoying magpie birds that were swooping in for our food... that's why Andrew looks so wary in this pic :) We soon gave up and went home.

The next couple pics (sorry, out of order), are from our church picnic which was held on someone's property in the outback. He had this massive lean-to where we all ate in, and then there were games outside, a giant waterslide down a hillside, and "bush-dancing" to end off the night. It was our first go at that, and it turned out to be a lot like square-dancing. We even did it in a empty field, so it was pretty authentic.

Last Sat Andrew and I had to re-certify our CPR certificates, so we spent the afternoon pumping the chests of dummies. The guy across from Andrew is our friend Will from work, who's a total legend... they were having a little too much fun together, but I think we all still passed anyways!

Last Sunday we went to the beach for the afternoon with our friend Chris from church... it was so great walking along the bathtub-temp water and just relaxing... life can be pretty hectic with work and stuff, so it's nice to just breathe in the ocean air and chill out once in a while :)

Later that evening Andrew and I were playing on the worship team at church... you can see him at the back left in the pic above playing his bass. It was really good night.

On Monday I took a few of my girls to the beach (same beach as the day before) for some beach volleyball and swimming. Our school is a bit budget on sports equipment, especially beach volleyball stuff, so we ended up having to take two high jump standards as our posts, and just tie a rope between them as a net. The girls had a blast anyways. I love it when girls this age get into sports... makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something :)

Lastly, we had some concreting going on in our Middle School area at school this week... the kids were running out of room to play handball at lunch (the most popular lunch-time game here), so they paved another area and are gonna paint the lines soon.

One of the yahoos in my class decided to write "I was here" in the concrete as it was drying. Big trouble for him.

Anyways, that's life this month. Two more weeks till we are done school, and then we'll be packing up, moving to the sunny coast, and flying to Thailand all in less than a week. Can't wait for the adventures!

Ciao for now...

~Corinna for Team AC

October

2011-10-29T22:29:00.002-07:00

Hey Guys,

Hope you're all doing well. October has been great for us, and things are really starting to heat up here. Today it's 30 degrees, and I'm sure we've each had 4 litres of water already... so hot!

Andrew is doing well with his Masters... working on courses #3 and 4 and getting A's on everything. In fact, he's sitting right next to me, typing up his midterm assignment, so we're side-by-side on our laptops... how romantic :)

Sometimes I find him sleeping (like above) when he's supposed to be reading... some of the stuff he has to read is pretty dry, so I don't blame him!

This has been an exciting month for me as I got my first cheque in the mail from Google. As you might know, I put up Google Ads on my website a few months ago, and every time you reach a certain income they pop your money in the mail to you. It took ages to come as it was from the States, but ordered in Ireland and mailed from Sweden to Australia... I thought for sure someone had robbed it out of our mailbox, but nope, just slow snail-mail.

Since it's getting hot out, I'm making more salady-stuff to eat. Somewhere in my subconscious memory I could "taste" this salad that my mom used to always make and take along on picnics with us to Cultus Lake when we were little, so I tried my best to remember what was in it and copy it, and it tastes great.

If you want to try it, it's just a can of chick peas (garbanzo beans), lentils, large can of tuna, about 30 green olives sliced into thirds, parsley, a bit of olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. It makes about 3 portions, and since Andrew won't go near it, I'm good to go for 3 days!

Last night we went to a 30th birthday party for our friend Monty, whom we work with. It was an 80's themed party and people did a great job dressing up. My favorite was Julian's purple mo-hawk (above) and Arno's Super Mario costume... didn't get a picture of that one.

Monty's father-in-law, Ron, did a great job BBQ'ing in a somewhat-80's chef outfit. There were about 30 people there, so he had a big job! The party was really well done with slinkys hanging from the walls, 80's expressions, rubix cubes, and a huge outdoor screen playing 80's music videos. We also had to do a quiz on Monty's life and the winners got goodie bags. Fun times!

Last but not least, our friend Steph from work had her second little baby girl this month, Penelope May, and I went to visit her in the hospital the next day... isn't she cute?! Andrew and I took a meal to her house a few days later and played with her other daughter, Lillian who's nearly 3, so we definitely got our fill of little kids for the week!

Penelope kept on crying whenever I held her, so I got lots of practice jiggling her up and down to quiet her down. I think I got the hang of it after a couple hours.

In other news, we've pretty much got our move organized for December, including a moving truck, carpet cleaner, etc. Hard to believe we'll be outta here in just over 5 weeks... can't wait for the next adventure!

Talk soon,

~Corinna for Team AC

Happy 1st Anniversary, Austin & Heather!

2011-10-08T22:31:00.005-07:00

First of all, we just want to congratulate Heather and Austin on their 1-year anniversary this weekend! Hope Year 2 is double as good as the first!

You can see I think of you guys all the time since your wedding picture is hanging on the side of our fridge. It's funny because you mailed us a thank-you card and pictures last year, and it arrived while were in Vancouver at Christmas. Well, somehow our mail got blown out of our mailbox, and since we had all that flooding, the photos and card were in pretty rough shape when we opened the envelope in January after we got back. I think we managed to save one pic though, and that's the one on the fridge (see above).

In other news, remember when we first moved to Rocky last year and I posted a picture of the neighbor's pool? It looked like this:

Crystal blue waters, inviting, wonderful. Well, fast-forward 15 months, and she hasn't used the pool ONCE! In fact, she's totally given up on even cleaning it, and it now looks like this:

Disgusting. There are pretty much lily-pads growing on top of it now, birds regularly wash/poop in it, and there are all types of insects doing breast-stroke across the water. Since our house is a couple feet higher than hers, I don't think she can see the water from her windows, but we have the perfect, un-appetizing few of it from our kitchen window. Gross. O well, only 8 weeks till we move out of here... shall not make a big deal out of it.

Speaking of our yard, here's Andrew enjoying lunch outside today on our patio (and yes, he is wearing pants, not just a necklace!):

This week it went from our winter weather (comfortably warm) to boiling hot almost overnight. We have officially removed the blanket from our bed for the rest of the year and are now just using a thin sheet at night. We're also wearing as little clothing as possible, and have the overhead fans on all the time to keep cool.

It's really nice to have warm temps as long as you don't have to do too much, otherwise you really start sweating. It's 31 today, and pretty much meant to stay like that for the foreseeable future on the forecast.

We haven't had ANY rain in about 2 months now... not that we miss it, but everything is super dry outside, and if even just one yahoo drops a match or cigarette outside we'll be having massive forest-fires. Surrounding towns have already started having them, so sometimes we get smoke blowing into Rocky, which can get pretty stinky.

With all the dryness, my skin is getting totally lizard-y, despite exfoliating and lotioning regularly. I've finally had to resort to rubbing Jojoba oil onto my legs because they looked so nasty. And it's not from being out in the sun too much... just from the dryness.

Finally, a couple pics from our soccer awards night last night. It was fun to get all dressed up with the girls on our team... funny because normally we just see each other in soccer gear, so this was a nice change.

It was basically a dinner (not so tasty, unfortunately) held in a big tent outside our soccer club, and then speeches and awards for best player, most improved, etc. A bit boring since there were a lot of teams there so I didn't know most of the people getting awards, but it as fun when it was our team's turn.

That's all for now, folks... talk soon! Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, and hope Mum & Dad have fun in Osoyoos, and Mom & Dad have a blast in Las Vegas! Woo hoo!

~Corinna for Team AC

Our Sept School Holidays

2011-09-29T19:43:00.005-07:00

We're just at the tail-end of our 2 weeks of Sept school holidays, which were very needed after an extremely busy 3rd term. We were both SO ready for some time off, and have spent the past couple weeks sleeping a lot, and also getting heaps of things done. I just looked at my to-do list yesterday and counted over 30 things I've accomplished over the past 2 weeks. I love ticking things off lists!

The first weekend of the holidays we drove down to the Sunshine Coast, which is where we'll be moving in a few months. We couldn't be more excited, as this has always been our "dream location" in Australia! To give you an idea, the Sunny Coast is about 100km north of Brisbane, and about 700km south of Rockhampton, so it took us most of the day to drive down.

The first night on the Sunny Coast we stayed in the prestigious "Palms Motor Inn," which would have been more accurately named the "Runway Motor Inn" as we soon discovered we were directly under the flight path for planes taking off from the small regional airport nearby. They were seriously about 20 feet overhead... slightly loud! Here are a few pics of our fancy accommodations :)

When we woke up on Mon morning we were in a rush to get to my interview at Coolum, and Andrew was preparing my breakfast... oatmeal and strawberries. He served me strawberries that looked like this:

... the tops were all bitten off. When I asked him what was up with that, he said there was no knife, so he had to bite off the green parts. I had to laugh... especially since there was a knife right under the sink!

This pic is of Andrew holding up our lunch which we purchased at IGA (behind him) on the drive down the coast. We tend to do things like lunch pretty simply and just get back on the road.

After the Runway Motor Inn, we spent the rest of the week at our friend Line's house on the Sunny Coast. Here's Andrew watching her kids, Max and Isobel, play computer games. They are great kids and we had a good time hanging out with them.

We also got to spend some time on the beach, and exploring the neighborhoods where we hope to be renting next year. We now have a much better feel for what we're looking for.

The beaches down there are SO beautiful! Fine white sand, blue waters, etc!

To give you a bit more information on what the deal is for next year, Andrew just got a job at a private school called Suncoast Christian College... you can check it out at http://www.suncoastcc.qld.edu.au/ He'll be starting in Jan and teaching Sr Math and Science.

I'm still looking for work in the area, and had an interview at Coolum Beach Christian College a couple weeks ago (that's why we drove down). It went well, but they don't have any positions available (it's a super small school). I asked them to keep me in mind in case anything opens up, which they said they'd do. If I really can't find a teaching position, I can always sub for a while. I'm really not too worried about it at this point.

One more pic that I recently came across: while I was in Canada at Em and Brendan's wedding in April, Andrew went camping to the beach with his friend Dave, and here was his message in the sand to the newlyweds:

More blogging to come in a couple weeks :)

~Corinna

Andrew's 35th Birthday

2011-09-29T19:21:00.005-07:00

A couple weeks ago Andrew celebrated his 35th birthday... fun times! It was a Wed morning so we had to go to work, but we started the day with a few presents and cards.

I did a travel theme and got him a carry-on suitcase, and filled it with little things he'll need for our upcoming trip to Thailand. I had a lot of fun planning it and putting it together, and he had a good time opening it and unwrapping all the little things inside.

On the Friday night we had a party at our place... it ended up being pretty tame as a lot of people couldn't make it due to leaving on holidays that night (it was the first night of our school holidays and I figured people wouldn't be leaving town till Sat or Sun, but I was wrong). Anyways, we still had about 10 people over for pizza and dessert.

The pic above is of our friends Sarah and Julian who are expecting their first baby in January. Julian was trying to feel the baby kick for the first time, but he kept missing it, so Sarah was trying really hard to get his hand in the right place... exciting times for them!

ps- if you sent a card, see if you can spot it in the pic above (on the windowsill in the background)... they're all there! Thanks so much to those of you who made Andrew's birthday special by calling and/or sending a card... he felt very loved and remembered!

Year 7 Camp, 2011

2011-09-03T03:55:00.006-07:00

Andrew and I just got back from our camps yesterday... it was a super full-on week, but the kids had a great time. Andrew went on the Year 10 camp to the Sunshine Coast where they did raft-building, zip-lining, and surfing... a very outdoorsy focus.

I went on the Year 7 camp to Brisbane where we did heaps of different activities. Andrew didn't take any pics this year, so all the pics on this post are from my camp. To start out with, one of our two buses broke down an hour out of Rocky (see above).

When it became evident that it couldn't be fixed on the spot, the other bus kept going with most of the kids, and a few of us stayed behind with the broken down one, waiting for a replacement bus to come pick us up. The only problem was that it was quite hot out (and the air conditioning wasn't working anymore), so they opened the luggage compartment underneath the bus for whoever wanted to sit in there to wait it out (see above).

One kid started having diarrhea around this time, so he's the one in the pic lying in the background, moaning and wanting to go home... I told him to suck it up, and he ended up having a great week!

Eventually we got a new bus and caught up to the first group. Altogether we spent about 9 hours on the bus that day.

Our first night was spent at "Underwater World" on the Sunshine Coast where we all got to sleep on the floor amongst the fish tanks, which was a cool experience for the kids (not so much for us teachers who are a bit past our sleeping-on-the-floor-is-fun days!).

They took us on a big tour of their facility, including a cool underwater tunnel (see above) that has a moving sidewalk. So you stand there, being moved throughout the tunnel, and watching all the fish, sharks, and stingrays swimming above and beside you. Most of the lights are turned off, so it's kind of dark, with a real blue, underwater feel. The kids also got to feed chunks of meat to the sharks from above the tunnel, which was really neat/freaky!

The next day we got on the bus again and went to the Abbey museum where there is a bunch of ancient stuff. I still think museums are boring, but I faked it for the kids since they were supposed to be interested in all that old stuff.

Outside the museum they gave us all archery lessons, which was fun. Us teachers also got to have a go for a while... we tried to see who could get the arrows the furthest. Thankfully all the arrows had rubber stoppers on the end (instead of the pointy tips)... always good when you're around 60 kids with bows and arrows!

From the museum we drove to our accommodation for the next 3 nights, which was a Baptist camp/conference center. After having dinner there, we got back on the bus and went ice skating. It's funny because ice skating is a normal thing for me, but for most of the kids it was their very first time, and they were pretty enamored by it. They all did well and there were thankfully no injuries. Didn't get any pics of it, unfortunately. I was too busy doing my triple axles. :)

The next morning we got back on that wretched bus and drove to CSIRO, which is a big science centre in Brisbane. They have a fantastic kids program where they have all these experiments set up for the kids to do. It is really well prepared, the kids have a great time, and the teachers get to sit back and watch for a little while. Good times.

Later that day we went for a tour of the Parliament House in Brisbane, which was very interesting. Similar system to ours in Canada. The kids had to wear their formal school uniform on this day of camp only, as parliament is a formal place.

They even got to go sit in the actual room where parliament is held (it wasn't in session that day). The kids all chose a seat to sit in, and then tour guide told them who usually sits in that seat. They all thought it was pretty funny when it was a man who usually sits in that seat, but a Year 7 girl was sitting in it right then (and vice versa). (See below)

That afternoon we also took the kids shopping to Indooroopilly, a huge shopping mall in Brisbane... the kids loved it and bought lots of presents for their families. In the evening we took the City Cat (like the SeaBus) up the Brisbane river so they could see all the city's sights lit up at night.

The next morning we got back on the bus (you guessed it!), and drove nearly 2 hours to Sea World on the Gold Coast. Here we got to watch the Sea Lion show, followed by the Dolphin Show, both of which were great. Then the kids had the rest of the afternoon to ride the roller coasters, see the displays, and eat cotton candy, etc.

At Sea World they have lots of different displays, but the new one this year was the Penguin Encounter... I'd never seen penguins so up close before... very neat. They have the prettiest color of yellow on their chests.

On Friday morning we got on the bus very early and headed back to Rocky. It was a 10.5 hour trip, and as soon as we got back I had to rush off to my soccer game. It was the semi-finals game, and we won 2-1, so now we are in the preliminaries game next Friday. If we lose we come 3rd overall. If we win, we play again the following week for 1st or 2nd place out of the 14 teams. Then it's all over after that. It's been a great season and I've learned a lot about soccer. Such a great game!

Regarding our job-search, it's in full swing. We've both applied for a number of positions, and hope to be interviewing during our school holidays in a couple weeks. That means another drive to the Brisbane area, but at least this time it'll be in our little blue hot-rod, not on that bus!

That's all for now... back in a week or two with another post hopefully.

~Corinna for Team AC

August in Oz

2011-08-20T20:27:00.003-07:00

Hi Everyone,

Just a few photos of our August here so far. It's been a lovely month, full of sunshine and blue skies. The picture above is a little gross, sorry, but at the start of the soccer season a few months ago, a couple fat chicks stepped on my feet as they were marking me. My big toenails have been getting darker and darker ever since... not so pretty, but playing is so much fun that I don't care that much.

A couple weekends ago our soccer team had a fundraiser called a "sausage sizzle," which is basically the same thing as a hot dog stand, except they serve them on slices of bread instead of buns... I guess it's the cheaper way of doing things, and a big Aussie tradition. We made lots of money for our team, so that was good.

And then last weekend our friend Chris from church had a "Where's Waldo?" themed birthday party. We all had to come dressed up like Waldo, and had a big scavenger hunt around town in teams of 4. It was all on foot, and we had to do things like count fence posts, find road-kill, bring home the largest branch, calculate random admission prices at the pool, buy the largest item we could find for under $2, etc.

Our team had a couple really fast running guys on it, so they ran ahead for lots of the answers, which helped us as there was a time limit of two hours to complete all 4 sheets. In the end our team won and got a couple boxes of chocolates as a prize... fun times!

That's all for now. This week will be a normal teaching week for us, and then next week we'll both be away on camps with our kids for the week. I'm going to Brisbane, and Andrew is going to the Sunshine Coast.

Talk soon,

~Corinna

Brissy Weekend

2011-08-06T05:24:00.008-07:00

Last weekend Andrew and I flew down to Brisbane to hang out with our good friends Erica & Alan for the weekend... these are some friends we met in China. She's Australian, and he's American, and they're trying to get citizenship in each others' countries, and therefore flying back and forth a lot. This has got them an over-abundance of frequent flyer points, which they are very generous with: they flew us down from Rocky on their points... all we had to pay for was the flight taxes not covered by the points... a very good price for us!

Our trip began with us driving to the Rocky airport where parking is $20 a day... so we conveniently parked our little car in a field near the airport... only in Rocky! (see pic above)

Once we arrived in Brisbane, we were supposed to drive up to a little seaside town called Noosa , but our accommodation there fell through (long story), so we just stayed with A&E at her uncle's big house in Brisbane. From there we drove down to the Gold Coast and hung out at the beach, ate ice cream, etc... good times! You can see from the picture that it's beautiful weather, but not quite real hot beach weather, especially as it was a bit breezy by the ocean.

The highlight of the trip was connecting A&E with our other good friends in Brisbane, Dave & Niki. Have you ever experienced that where you have some great friends who've never met each other, but you just know they'd get along so well? Well, this was the case for these 4 friends of ours, and it finally worked out to connect them all.

We all went out for dinner together to a restaurant called "Hog's Breath," (appetizing name, I know!), and everyone had a great time, just as we predicted. We hope to make this more of a usual event in the future... it is so nice to be around like-minded people where everyone has a great time together.

After dinner we went to "Cold Rock Ice Creamery"... this place where they make whatever flavor ice cream you want... delish!!

Here is Erica's uncle's house in Brisbane... it looks like a normal sized house from the front, but it goes WAY back from here. It has 8 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, and a huge kitchen and family room.

The downstairs bathroom is rather small though... check out the toilet: when you push the flusher, the sink automatically turns on (which is part of the top of the toilet... as you can see). Good idea, but kind of awkward to use, especially when you're trying to brush your teeth and have to lean over the toilet... hope you don't drop your toothbrush! :)

On our flight back to Rocky, we thought it was interesting how you check in at the airport. You know how when you fly, you can use the self check-in at computers in the terminal? Well, they used to just have one or two self check-in computers and heaps of real check-in staff at the counters, but now Qantas has the reverse: only two real check-in staff, and mostly self check-in computers. I guess they're trying to give you very little options but to use the automated systems. Bye bye jobs.

On another note, this past week I organized a huge field trip for all the Year 7s at our school. We are learning about the Great Barrier Reef, so our field trip went to a lot of related sites near the beach, which was cool...

...until one of our kids went wacko out-of-control and ran down the mountain we'd just hiked up. A slip and a collision with a tree caused him to cut his cheek open. Ron, (a teacher I work with), and I gave him a quick first-aid clean-up, but the cut looked rather deep and wouldn't stop bleeding, so it was off to the ER... me and the kid (while all the other kids went off to the next site).

The hospital I took him to near the beach had a quick look at him and confirmed that he needed stitches, but couldn't get to him for 1-2 hours they said, so we ended up taking him back to Rocky on the school bus with the rest of the kids... his mom picked him up from there and has hopefully got him all stitched up by now! I wouldn't know as he didn't appear at school the next day (Friday)... hope he's alright!

(Check out his sweet bandage-job I gave him on his right check... I almost taped his nostrils shut by accident, but adjusted the tape so he could actually breathe!):

Well, that's all our news for now... stay tuned for the next installment in a week or two.

~Corinna (for the Team)

A Birthday Party for Karen

2011-07-23T20:53:00.003-07:00

A few weeks ago we had our friends Karen and Paula (from work) over for dinner. It turned out to be Karen's birthday that day (we didn't know this when we invited her), so I decided we should do it up a little. A made a quick trip to the dollar store for some crazy streamers, balloons, hats, etc.

Karen and Paula are both originally from South Africa, so Andrew and I feel like we have a bit in common with them, being foreigners here. They have given us so many tips and bits of advice over the months... it's great.

After dinner, I had set up a treasure hunt for Karen to find her present from us. I wrote clues on sticky notes, and one clue led to the next. For example, one clue was "This sucks," so to find her next clue, she had to go the vacuum cleaner (but she had to figure out what I meant by the clue and where to look). Another clue was "Never mix your darks and lights," and she had to look in the washing machine for it. In the picture you can see her looking right past the clue, into the machine! ha ha!

I think there were about 6 or 7 clues in total around the house. In the end, the present was hidden in the shower... it was a few boxes of a soap that she really likes. All in all it was a really fun time.

Last night we went to our friend Hannah's birthday party... it was an outdoor party, which is funny b/c it's freezing at night right now. Thankfully, she had big outdoor heaters in the backyard which we all gathered around to keep warm. I'll try to post some pics of it next time.

Bye for now!

~Corinna

Lately...

2011-07-16T23:50:00.002-07:00

Check out the size bugs we get around our place! Wowzers! This one was outside our screen door, luckily, but just hung out there for a couple of days until Andrew flicked him away from the inside of the screen. (If you can't tell from the picture, he's almost as long as your hand...crazy!)

Thankfully we haven't seen any snakes around our place, but our neighbor said he saw a big black one a couple months ago outside his front door, so now I'm a bit paranoid about coming in/out our front door at night... I always keep the light on out there so I can see them.

In other news, this weekend has been pretty calm, apart from getting all our usual chores, groceries, etc done, which always seems to take a while. Next weekend we're both playing on worship team at church, and going to our friend Hannah's birthday party.

The weekend after that we're flying down to Brisbane to spend some time with our friends Erica & Alan (who we met in China). We'll be driving to Noosa with them and spending the night there at a hotel... fun times! Noosa is one of the BEST tourist spots in Queensland... it has beautiful beaches, good shopping, restaurants, etc. Think Robson St. beside a gorgeous beach!

That's about all for now. Hope you're doing well!

~Corinna

Our Cairns Trip

2011-07-07T00:57:00.013-07:00

We've just come back from a really nice trip to Cairns... it's the biggest city in northern Australia, and being closer to the equator, it's warm year-round. Actually, in the summer months (Nov-March) it's REALLY humid up there, so we thought we'd be timing it right by going in the cooler "dry season" (which is now). Our plan backfired on us a bit as we happened to have the ONE wet/windy/cooler week of the entire dry season, but we tried to make the best of it anyways.

Here are loads of pictures to show what we did (in random order)... I'll explain underneath each one.

We rented a car and drove up to Port Douglas one day (about 75 minutes north of Cairns)... it's a small town that kinda has a West Van feel to it... very nice. Here we are overlooking "4 Mile Beach." There are crocodile signs everywhere though, so we didn't swim here (plus the weather was cool and windy.) The next day we took the car up to a small mountain town called Kuranda, which is a little hippie place. They have a few little markets and restaurants, but it was pouring rain, so we didn't stay for long.

The reception area of our "resort."

The night markets in Cairns. Mom, remember the Pearl Market and the Fabric Market in Shanghai? This was kinda like it, but much smaller, cleaner, more civilized, and no bargaining! We got a nice Chinese massage here for $15.

This was a random guy we saw out in the street blowing his didgeridoo. He had all his worldly possessions tied to the roof of his filthy van, and seemed to not own a pair of shoes, but didn't care at all! Very amusing!

This is the esplanade that goes along the waterfront in Cairns... a nice place for a walk/run/rollerblade, etc. When the tide is out it looks like a giant mud flat for about a mile out, due to all the dredging they've done to keep the shipping lines open. Kind of a yucky view. But when the tide comes in, it looks like a normal ocean... you'd never know the water is only about 2 feet deep.

Along the water they have all these free exercise stations... kind of like a mini gym. So you can walk/run along the ocean path, and then stop at all these little stations for some extra exercise. A lot of kids use it for a playground though... guess it's still fun!

As you know, Andrew is guitar-crazy, which means we always seek out all guitar stores in whichever town we visit. This time it worked out perfectly since the weather was so shabby... I packed along a book so I wouldn't get bored. He had a great time and ended up buying a new pedal for his electric guitar (which is something you plug the guitar into to give it more "crunch.")

Here is our hotel room... we spent as little time here as possible since it didn't smell too good. I think it used to be a smoking room since that's what it smelled like. The smoking area was also directly outside our room, so we had some nice whiffs coming through. Luckily it had a TV, so we watched Wimbledon quite a bit at night.

Our hotel was quite a ways away from down town, so we usually rode the city bus ("Sunbus") into town... it was a great way to see more of the town and meet lots of interesting people to have conversations with. The only bad thing about it was that it took 30 minutes each way, when driving directly took about 8 minutes. We decided to skip the bus one day and walk into town, but that took 1.5 hours and took us down a busy highway, thru the industrial area, and also near the dump, so it stank. We stuck to Sunbus after that!

The skate-park along Esplanade... you can go skateboarding with an ocean-view! You can see the hospital right behind the skate-park, which I think is a very logical location. Also, there was this tree (on the left) that was full of old skate shoes and bike tires... kind of nice... new decorating idea!

All over town they were selling these didgeridoos (an Aboriginal instrument that you blow into and it makes this deep, interesting "woofing" sound)... I was gonna try it, but then thought that heaps of other tourists would have already done the same thing before me, so decided to keep my mouth off it and just pretend!

Lots of gelato in Cairns... yum, my fav!! I had it quite a few times since they don't have it in Rocky and I don't know when I'm gonna have it next!

Hands-down the BEST meal we had was at the Bavarian Beerhouse... authentic German food served by waiters in Lederhosen, and the whole place smelled like Oma's house before Sunday lunch! The German Lowenbrau beer was even served in nice Steins and tasted great with the food.

Another view of the Esplanade and mud flats at low tide. The big white building in the distance is the Shangri-La hotel, which is the place we used to relax (in the lobby) when we were tired of walking around in the rain, but didn't want to hop on Sunbus back to our place yet.

We checked out the big marina, full of nice boats. We didn't go on the boats out to the Great Barrier Reef though since the weather wasn't great.

In one of the music stores we met a salesgirl called Tiffany, who we started chatting with, and she ended up inviting us to her church called Freshwater Church. It took some figuring out how to get there on Sunbus (since it was a little ways out of town), but was really good. It reminded us of Hillsongs church in Sydney, but on a smaller scale.

One day we rented these yellow scooters (motorbikes) and toured ourselves around all the rain-forest attractions. One of the places was called "Crystal Cascades," which was a series of little waterfalls and swimming holes (minus the crocs!). If it had been warmer, it would have been a fabulous place for a dip! We settled for a walk along the the path beside the falls.

Here's us on the scooters. Behind us you can see the waterfall at the Barron Gorge. The scooters were SO much fun... I would definitely recommend them if you ever go to Cairns.

All in all it was a great trip. I know the weather wasn't awesome, but it was just so nice to get away together, to be out of Rocky for a bit and see something new. We didn't talk about work at ALL, and ate so much great food (Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, Mexican, Indian, German, Italian, and Thai).

It was also nice that Andrew finished his first masters course just in time for us to go away. While we were up in Cairns, he got an email from his prof saying he got an A on his course, so that was encouraging since he'd put SO much work into it.

Anyways, that's it for now! Hope you enjoyed!

Track & Field

2011-06-26T02:08:00.014-07:00

This past weekend I've been competing in a big track & field competition (they call it an "Athletics Carnival" in Australia) here in Rocky. Some of my students at school do track & field and invited me to come be in this competition. I didn't really want to at first, seeing as it took up the entire weekend, but then I realized it was on the first weekend of school holidays, so I've got two weeks to rest up after the competition.

Last week we had to "nominate" for events (that means "sign up" here)... since I haven't done most of these events this high school, I figured what the heck, I'll just sign up for pretty much every single event! It seemed like a good idea at the time (when I was checking off the little boxes on the paper), but after actually doing all 11 events this weekend (after my soccer game on Friday night), I'm a little sore.

I've never been that awesome at track & field, but since having my big birthday I'm officially in the "veterans" category now. The sad part about this is that it sounds like I'm old now, but the good part is that there's not as much competition in this category, meaning I can get medals more easily... woo hoo!

Overall it went really well. To put it plainly, the fat chicks were better than me at the throwing events (shot put, javelin, and discus), but I was better at the running and jumping events (60m, 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, long jump, triple jump, and high jump).

Actually, to be honest the high jump didn't work out so well for me. I was the only woman veteran who entered, but I managed to knock the bar off onto the flop mat a couple times (as I was jumping), and then landed directly on the bar! It KILLED!! I have some nice bruises on my bottom and back now to show for it.

Luckily I got some rewards for all my efforts this weekend though: a sweet sock-tan, and:

Andrew and I are really looking forward to our trip to Cairns... we leave tomorrow morning for the week, and will be checking out the Great Barrier Reef, etc. It'll be great to get away together, especially since Andrew's been working really hard on his masters and we haven't been able to spend as much time together as we usually do.

... so watch this space for a Cairns post in a couple weeks!

Becoming Citizens

2011-06-18T18:45:00.007-07:00

A few weeks ago, Andrew and I had the privilege of attending an Australian citizenship ceremony as our friend Karen and her family (from South Africa) were becoming citizens. They have been in Australia for 5.5 years now, and it was finally time for them to get it.

The ceremony was held outdoors at Rocky's "Heritage Village." The mayor and officials spoke from underneath the gazebo, alongside a huge cardboard cut-out of Queen Elizabeth... see if you can spot her above.

All the people becoming citizens (and us, the audience) sat underneath these huge tents facing the gazebo. The people becoming citizens were broken into two groups: those who had "under God" in their citizenship oath, and those who didn't.

It was interesting b/c many of the people becoming citizens wore clothing from their original countries (eg- see the guy in the yellow shirt above?... he's wearing this skirt/wrap... not sure where from). In the mayor's address, he made sure to say that becoming a citizen of Australia does not mean that you forget your original country, or that those memories are lost. I bet this was comforting for some of the people who came to Australia b/c of unsafe conditions in their home countries (as opposed to us who are here purely for the awesome warm weather!)

Here's Karen, her husband, and three boys getting their citizenship certificates and shaking the mayor's hand. It was a bit of an emotional experience.

Andrew works under Karen (she is the Math coordinator at our school) and she's been a great friend to us, so it was special for us to be there for her.

After the ceremony they had a "parade of nations" through Heritage Village... so many countries carrying their flags and dressed in their national dress.

All in all it was a great experience to witness!

This is Winter?

2011-06-18T18:33:00.002-07:00

A couple weeks ago Andrew and I went to the beach for the afternoon. We were just going to go to the main beach, but then we bumped into our friend, Therese, from work. She has a 4x4 and was just about to drive up the beach with her family, and invited us along.

Driving on sand feels similar to driving in snow... it skitters around a bit. We drove up about 8km to a place on the beach where there were hardly any other people and hung out there for a bit. We still can't get over the fact that "winter" here is about 23 degrees during the day. It's also the dry season, so almost every single day is sunny with blue skies... you can definitely get a good tan in this! (It does get quite a bit colder at night and in the early mornings, but that's okay).

We were trying to take a self-pic on the beach that day, but it's a bit tricky with the iPhone b/c you can't feel where the button is, so you don't always really know when it's gonna take the pic. I think Andrew wobbled the camera a bit here, so we ended up looking a bit weird:

And here's a pic of Therese, Alex, and baby Lily:

Yay for "winter"!!

Batching

2011-06-04T22:15:00.005-07:00

Andrew and I recently read this book called "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss. If you haven't already read it, I highly recommend it. I don't necessarily agree with everything in it, but he has some great ideas, one of them being "batching."

The idea behind this concept is to do certain things all at once in order to save time. For example, in the book Tim shares that he only does his laundry once every two weeks, deals with his mail once a week, and only checks his email twice a day.

I thought it was a good idea, but not all his examples would have worked for Andrew and I, so I started thinking about changes I could make to incorporate batching into my life to save time. One of the major things I thought of was making meals... I realized I was pulling the SAME things out of the fridge every night to make my lunch for work for the next day. So I thought, "why not do it all at once for the week?"...

... so I did. On Saturday afternoons I have started making 5 containers of veggie-styled lasagna (it keeps fine for Mon-Fri). I hard-boil and peel all the eggs I'll need for breakfast for the week. I bake all the muffins, granola bars, whatever and wrap them individually, I wash and cut up a huge ziploc bag of celery, etc.

Then I stick it all in our midget-sized fridge and just pull it out every morning before work. True, it makes Sat afternoons a bit annoying (when I'd rather be relaxing in the sun), but it is a big time-saver, and it makes me feel like I have some "time off" on weekday evenings after being at work all day already.

Good times!

My Birthday last month

2011-05-28T19:47:00.004-07:00

Last month I celebrated my 30th birthday... fun times. It was on a Sunday, so when Andrew woke me up I had some relaxing time to peruse the treats he had put on the table for me... flowers, a card, some chocolate, and a couple magazines I like. The card had a "coupon" in it for a kiteboarding lesson, which I'm so excited to use, but it hasn't been windy enough since my birthday to give it a try. It might take a couple more months for the wind to pick up, but I'll def be out there asap!

After reading my cards and opening presents, Andrew took me out for brunch at Ridges, the resort we used to go swimming at a lot. It also happened to be Mother's Day that day, so the whole place was full of moms and very loud kids, but that's okay. We all got a welcome drink (champagne) at the door, so that was nice. Any place that puts a drink directly in my hand upon entry is good! Nice and relaxing after a bit of a drive to get there.

Here's the view from our table... pretty nice!

And we were seated right next to the live entertainment... this guy was really good and I loved listening to him while we ate.

After brunch we took a stroll around the grounds of the resort and had little game of tetherball... with racquets. Not quite sure what it's called, but you can imagine how it works.

The next day at work I was called to the office to pick up a "package." Thinking it was the book I had ordered on Amazon for Andrew's masters, I wasn't too excited, but when I got to the office it was actually this amazing flower arrangement from our friends Dave and Nikki in Brisbane. It was SO nice of them to remember my birthday and think of me!

As more cards came in the mail that week, the table was getting pretty crowded with birthday stuff. If you sent a card, see if you can spot it above!

At the end of the day on my birthday, Andrew and I played on the worship team at our church (as we do every 2-4 weeks). Andrew usually plays bass, electric, or acoustic guitar, and I always play keys.

Overall it was a good birthday... probably a bit more low-key than if I'd turned 30 in Vancouver, but that's okay. Thank you so much to everyone who made the day special by calling and sending cards... very kind of you!

Getting Crafty

2011-05-21T09:14:00.001-07:00

For the past couple years I've been coveting these Havianas flip flops with a Swarovski crystal on them. I always promised myself that the day my old Roxy flip flops bit the dust, I'd go out and buy these.

The day finally came a few weeks ago where my Roxy ones broke, so I happily went off to the store to claim my new flip flops. But as I stood there in the store trying them on, I wondered if the $39 price tag was really worth it.

I tried to justify it by telling myself that I don't buy shoes that often, these ones were really cool, etc etc, but I just couldn't justify spending that much on two little pieces of rubber. So I decided to leave them there and think it over while I went grocery shopping.

At the grocery store, I happened to pass by a bin full of no-name flip flops for $1.99. Problem: no crystals! But I tried a pair on anyways, and they fit and were comfortable, so I bought them. On the way home, I stopped by the craft store and bought:

A pad of sticky crystals (not Swarovski, but whatever), and a bottle of crazy glue. When I got home, I did a quick glue job, resulting in:

Even better flip flops than the Havianas... I got TWO crystals on each foot... guess I one-upped them!

The Rocky Zoo

2011-05-15T04:50:00.006-07:00

Here I sit at 2:20am, unable to sleep after a busy day, so I shell tell you about our visit to the Rocky Zoo last weekend. It was our 2nd time going to this free zoo, and it's always a good time, especially the chimps, Cassius and Octavius ("Cassy" and "Ocky"), who are both around 40 years old.

At first Cassy was way up high in his cage... but this loud Philippino lady convinced him to come down to the observation window and give her some kisses thru the window (see first pic). I tried to copy her, but Cassy was not too keen on kissing me (see second pic)... but at least I got my pic taken with him.

The Rocky Zoo is a free zoo, and is linked with the Botanical Gardens beside it. Discovering this little gem in the midst of Rocky has made living here all the nicer. It's full of lush tropical trees and vines... a really nice place to go walk around and relax and see some interesting Australian animals. There's also a nice path along the river that's good for running on.

Here is one of the dingos... playing dead I guess.

Here is a freshwater crocodile... you can tell them apart from saltwater crocs b/c of their long, pointy snout. They usually don't feed on humans, but last time we were here this guy took a snap at a kid who stuck his fingers thru the fence (marked, "do not feed your fingers to the croc")... the kid pulled away just in time though! This pic is not too great b/c you couldn't really take a good pic thru the fence... Andrew was trying to hold the camera above the fence, without seeing the viewfinder.

Leaving the zoo... here is Andrew driving our little car (we call it the "Blue-Bottle")

Here I am trying to operate the canon-launcher. It was made in Germany, and used to fight in WWI in Turkey (Galipoli), where it was seized by the Aussies and brought back to Oz. Now it sits in the Botanical Gardens in Rocky (they traded it with Sydney for a big gun), next to the giant war memorial in the gardens. It blew my mind how such a heavy piece of equipment has traveled so far around the world. (By the way, this thing shot 15cm canons up to 8km!!)

This is an emu. It was making these strange noises... like a grunting pig. We seriously thought the zoo had wild pigs when we heard this noise from a distance... but when we got closer we noticed the noise was coming from an emu! This one was about as tall as me. An interesting thing about emus is that the male bird sits on the eggs, and then raises the young for the first couple years, not the mom.

More Vancouver Pics

2011-05-02T00:35:00.004-07:00

Here are a few more pictures of my recent trip to Vancouver for Em's wedding. The first one is of my friend Cathy, who is having her first baby in a couple months. It's funny b/c when I saw her at Christmas she was all excited about being pregnant, but you couldn't even tell she was pregnant at all, even when she pushed her belly out after eating a big lunch! A few months later, you can totally tell she's really pregnant! :)

I also got to hang out with my good friend, Alysa. Alysa and I have been great friends since doing our BEd together at UBC 6 years ago, and she's one of the funnest people I know. In April she and I went to her friend's Passover celebration meal, which was really interesting. At the front door there was this Jewish flamingo, complete with the Jewish hat and 2 curly locks... we nabbed him for a picture.

Part of the meal involved re-enacting the Israelites' escape from Egypt. We were all given roles to play, and Alysa was the Pharaoh (see above). We went thru all the plagues, including the plague of boils... the host put these little yellow circle-stickers all over us (boils), which you can (kind of) see in the picture.

One of the most creative parts of the meal was the dessert, which was the parting of the Red Sea made out of cupcakes (maybe the icing should have been red?!). Such a cool idea!

That's all for now... more to come!

~Corinna

Life in Rockhampton (Rocky)

2011-04-26T23:47:00.001-07:00

I thought you might like a little tour around Rocky, so we'll start with the best pics: the pools! The one above is the pool at the university near our house where we go to swim laps. It's a 25m pool with 8 lanes which are usually pretty busy with swim clubs, but we squeeze in there, and it's good times. This is also where our school had their "swimming carnival" which is like a big intramural swim competition day that ALL the kids get involved in. They dress up in their house colors and go all crazy... a very exhausting day!

The next pool is about 45 minutes from our house at a little resort near the beach called Zilzie. We were at a sport expo and were given free promo tickets for a day on their grounds, including the gym, tennis courts, and pool (of course they were hoping we'd join!). We lucked out and had a day where we had the place almost entirely to ourselves... a great little place, but we ended up not joining, as it was a bit too far to drive.

This last picture is of Andrew washing our windshield at the gas station. A funny thing here is that they don't call it "gas" since they say gas is really a vapor. They call it either fuel or petrol, and there's some kind of a difference between those two as well. Our car uses "fuel," and that's all I need to know! Since we walk to school and don't drive much, we only have to tank up about once a month anyways, which is nice seeing as gas prices are just going up and up. In the above pic we paid $149.5 a litre... ahhh!

That's all for now... more to come I'm sure!

~Corinna

Em and Brendan's Wedding

2011-04-26T23:25:00.002-07:00

As you know, I came home for Emily and Brendan's wedding last weekend, which was wonderful. It was so nice to see my family again and be part of such a wonderful day!

The bridesmaids dresses, which were a very beautiful color, were, shall we say, an interesting style (thanks to an interesting seamstress, as I hear). The dresses had big fold-out pleats in both the front and back, making us look like big-bummed pregnant ladies... see below for example!

The most eventful occurrence of my trip back to Oz happened at the Sydney airport security. I had checked two bags from Vancouver to Sydney, but on my next two flights home (on a smaller airline), I was only allowed to check one bag, so I took the second bag as a carry-on.

I should mention that this second bag, although brand-new, had never been traveled with- only used to store some clothes and stuff in (which all lives in the Nairns' basement). So I had unpacked the stored stuff, and put in the things I wanted to take back to Oz with me.

Fast forward to the security check. They put my bag through the x-ray, then stop it, have a closer look, etc. Next thing I know, this security guard (called "Muhammed"), is accusing me of packing knives in my carry-on. I was like, "Ummm, no, there are NO knives in there," thinking he must have seen wrong on the x-ray screen. He was like, "Yes there are, and I could call the police right now." I was like, "Well, even check for yourself."

So he starts going through my bag. No knives. YES! Then he opens the side pocket (which I hadn't checked), and pulls out two of Andrew's pocket knives. O ya.... oops. They were stored in there in the basement... guess I hadn't been thorough enough in cleaning the bag out!

So I went back out of security and checked the knives with the airline so I wouldn't have to throw them out. Luckily when I went back through security for the second time, I was directed to a different line-up and didn't have to face Muhammed again!

So here's to carefully checking ALL your pockets before you fly!

~C

Blogging Hiatus is OVER!!

2011-03-03T02:05:00.003-08:00

Hi Everyone,

Okay, I've decided to start blogging again... I really don't have any excuse not to anymore (like I did when we were living in China and they blocked blogger over there). But I've been inspired by some other really great blogs, and thought I should get back on it.

I realize that since we're living in Australia and are far from home, it might be interesting for my family to read what we're up to, even if these things seem a bit insignificant to us... like this picture (which I'm sorry is sideways):

This is our pantry. You know how you pray before meals and thank God for the food? Well, I always pray and thank God when I'm unpacking the groceries and filling up the pantry b/c I realize how blessed we are to have so much. How can you NOT realize it when there's SO much of it staring you in the face?!

Also, I love colorful things, so this was a fun picture for me to take.

K, gotta plan a lesson and then get ready for soccer practice tonight- fun times!... talk soon!

~Corinna

2010-02-10T20:04:00.002-08:00

Hi Everyone,

In case you are still checking this blog from time to time, here's a nice little post just for you! As you may or may not know, China has blocked the blogger site (along with facebook, youtube, twitter, etc), and that is why we haven't been able to update our blog at all.

We are now on holiday in Australia for a few weeks which means internet freedom!! So far our trip has been great... we've been staying with various friends (and friends of friends) along the Gold and Sunshine Coasts, have been surfing a couple times, and picked up my sister Emily from the Brisbane airport this past Monday. She is travelling with us for a week, then heading farther up north towards Cairns where she'll be joining up with a Contiki tour and heading back down the coast to Sydney. We've loved hanging out with her so far and have been having loads of fun.

We will def be posting pictures of our trip somewhere at some point... so keep tuned. Also, please don't give up on our blog completely as we anticipate our emancipation from China at the end of June to some more internet-friendly place where we will keep blogging from!

C-ya!!

~Corinna for Team AC (and Em!)

Andrew's 33rd Birthday

2009-09-20T06:29:00.002-07:00

Okay, while Blogger is in the mood, I figured I should post a few more recent pics, even though I REALLY need to get to bed now and will pay for it tomorrow... o well... just a few more minutes. Anyways, as some of you know, Andrew celebrated his 33rd birthday last week, so here are a few pics of the day (sorry they're a bit out of order):

Big dinner in the evening with the principals and all the foreign staff at a steak restaurant. It was a super-great coincidence that it was planned for the same day as Andrew's b-day as he LOVES steak!

Crazy dry-ice drinks after dinner... not that we were drinking the dry ice, but they were served with dry ice all around and came to the table steaming (or whatever it is that dry ice does)... fabulous presentation!

My drink, also presented with dry ice... it was "rose juice" which I chose off the menu just b/c I'd never tried it before (and had never even heard of it), so I figured "what the heck, why not?!" It was SO delicious! I think I'm hooked.

At the end we turned out all the lights and brought Andrew cakes and sang Happy Birthday to him... I hope he was surprised. Notice the Canadian and Chinese flags on the table? Nice touch.

A full picture of the 14 dinner guests... all the Chinese people on one side; us whiteys on the other. Seating is VERY important to the Chinese and there's usually a big (LOUD) discussion about who sits where, and then we're assigned our seats.

At the end of the evening, the restaurant gave us all a present: half of us got tea towels with the restaurant's name embroidered on it ("Wang Steak"), and the others got a pair of slippers, again with Wang Steak on them. Random!

Birthday table for Andrew before breakfast... I got him a few gifts (that I'd brought from Canada) and his parents had sent along a card too... he was very happy with it all!

New addy

2009-09-20T06:28:00.002-07:00

A few peeps have been asking about our new home mailing address, so here it is:

Andrew & Corinna Nairn

Room 11B, No. 20

Lane 99 East Nandan Road

Shanghai, 200030

CHINA

Can't wait for the mail to start pouring in!

New School Pics

2009-09-20T05:56:00.005-07:00

Hi Guys,

Alright, as promised, here are some pics of our school's new campus where we have the pleasure and privlege of working this year. The skies are sunny again in blogger-land, permitting me to post pics today; tomorrow I might not be so lucky... so better get 'er done now! Enjoy:

An overview of our office. There are 12 desks/teachers in here and it's lots of fun!

A close-up of our area. Andrew's desk is on the left (where he's sitting), and mine is on the right (the empty chair). We are desk-mates and it is so nice! We even share a stapler!

Our wing of the building... we are on the 4th floor.

The open-concept hallways. This is right outside our teachers' office. Looks nice, eh?!

In the school cafeteria. Ash couldn't manage to eat with chopsticks at first, so he used one of our carrot-sticks as a spoon... it was pretty funny!

The very front of the school (the administration building)... this is the very first thing you see when you come thru the school gates. I hope they're gonna put some sort of sign in that big empty space, b/c it looks a bit weird I think.

A few interesting facts about our school:

-teachers get free breakfasts and lunches in the caf every day... we haven't ventured to try the conchee (watery rice porridge) in the morning, but lunches are okay... beggars can't be choosers!

-b/c the principals are SO freaked out about the kids and staff getting swine flu, they've decided to issue ALL staff a daily vitamin C pill, plus all-you-can-drink milk all year long... very nice of them!

-the school is right across the street from a few different hospitals

-the guy who hands out the PE equipment (yes, that's a job here) is a chain-smoker. He gives the kids basketballs while a smouldering cigarette is dangling from his lips... gross!

-every morning as we come thru the school gates we get our temperature taken by a student moniter who holds this gun-type-thing up to our forehead. Not sure if they let you in if you have a temp, but so far we haven't had to find out! Again, it's a swine-flu thing.

That's it for now...

~Ciao

3 Steps to a Clean Body

2009-09-04T21:54:00.002-07:00

As I'm writing this, Andrew is jamming on his guitar... which he's been doing for the past hour. I am SO lucky to have such a musical husband... in-house entertainment (literally!) all the time!

As I think I wrote before, I'm teaching Planning 10 and PE 11 this year. The Planning course is old news as I did that last year already, but the PE thing is all new; I haven't taught full-time PE in 4 years now, so I'm super pumped about it. My first lesson with the kids was this past Thursday, and I thought I'd start out with some basics.

You see, some of these kids' personal hygiene could more accurately be described as "low-giene"... especially the boys. For example, they'll go out and play basketball at lunch for an hour (in the 30-degree heat) and get so sweaty that their shirts are see-through and their hair is dripping wet. Then they'll come back in and sit in class like that for 4 more classes in the afternoon. GROSS! I told them no more of that and had a whole object lesson of what a PE strip looks like, which is news to them! Seriously! And these kids are in grade 11!

What I did was have a big collection of "supplies" in a bag and pulled them out one by one and explained what they were for and how to use them. The kids were captivated! Amongst these items were a washcloth, a towel, deodorant, and a fresh t-shirt. I demonstrated how one would wet a washcloth and wash the face, neck, body, and armpits (in that order!), then towel-dry them, apply deodorant (not to be shared with classmates!), and put on a clean shirt. (Obviously I didn't strip down in front of them to show all this, but they go the idea). In the end they all thought it was a good plan and agreed to bring the suggested items next week! Sorry I don't have any pictures of all this.

In other news... Andrew and I (along with our friend Garrett from San Diego) are playing a show tonight at a little lounge/bar here in Shanghai, which should be fun. Andrew and Garrett both play accoustic guitar, and I'm the back-up singer. Shame I don't have my keyboard here, but it was too heavy to pack and is nestled comfortably in Tony and Gill's basement in North Van. Anyways, the show will be good I think. The only thing that discourages us from doing more of them is that ALL the bars here are super-smokey so you come home absolutely REEKING.

Also, we got gym memberships at a new gym yesterday, which is a 10-minute walk from our house. We are so happy b/c the gym we went to last year is now too far away for us (after the move). Plus, we got our Chinese secretary at school to do the groundwork on gym research for us (she's a STAR!), and she somehow bargained them down from 2800 RMB to 1500 RMB for the year. What a deal! Moreover, 6 of us Canadians joined at once, so we'll all be able to hold each other accountable for working out. It also has a bigger swimming pool than last year, so we'll hopefully be able to swim proper laps without having to negotiate around Chinese "waders".

Alright, that's all for now... have a great weekend!

~Team AC

Pictures

2009-09-04T21:30:00.009-07:00

Hip hip hurray... today seems to be our lucky day as blogger is in the mood to post pictures! Enjoy!Our good friend Alysa was a super-star and drove us to the airport EARLY in the morning in Vancouver. (Notice her sad face b/c we're leaving!). There is a bit of a story here as she came with me to buy the infamous pink suitcases way back in 2005 when I went to England for the year. She's a GREAT friend!

Andrew patiently waiting for our flight in the beautiful Vancouver airport. Seriously, in which other airport in the WORLD could you quietly wait beside a creek, amongst greenery and totem poles?

Here begins our house tour: this is the kitchen... literally TWICE the size of last year's. Please notice my 4.5 feet of counter space on the right side! Twice as much as last year! Yippee! Andrew and I can happily co-exist in the kitchen without having to do the Tango to get around each other.

This is the guest room/office where you can sleep when you come to visit. The bed is considered a "double" by Chinese standards, but everything is a bit smaller in this country (as per the size of most Chinese people I guess).

Our bathroom: about the same size as the kitchen... it's so big you'd think you were in a real house, not an apartment. For the first time in about 5 years we have a bathroom counter complete with DRAWERS! The laundry washing machine is also in the bathroom. Like our grandma-motif shower curtain? That'll soon be changed!

The master bedroom. If you look closely you can see my stuffed monkey on the left side. Andrew likes to put it into funny positions every day... here he's doing a handstand I think. It makes me laugh. Also attached to our bedroom, we have a big enclosed balcony where we can hang our clothes to dry. Much better than last year where we had so little space in our house that we had to stand the drying rack on TOP of the guest bed to conserve floor space!

Our living room: it has 10-foot ceilings and crown moulding... FANCY! The leather couches are an awkward-mustard color, but very comfy! We have tons of space in here and plan to have plenty of parties.

So as you can see, we are really really happy with our new joint. The only two complaints we have are that it still smells a bit smokey (from previous renters I think) and the fact that it backs out onto a busy main road, which makes it a bit noisy. We'll get used to it though.

Hopefully we'll be able to post pics of the new school soon... it's a beauty!

~Team AC

Back in China

2009-08-30T23:05:00.003-07:00

Hi Guys,

Well, here is our first official post of the 2009-2010 school year in Shanghai, China. Sorry it's taken a little while, but after arriving here we found, to our chagrin, that tons of sites have been blocked in China: blogger, twitter, you tube, facebook... to name a few. We felt completely cut off from the world! But now thanks to the computer expertise of friends of friends, we've hacked thru that firewall and are back in business!

So... updates: We've been here for a week now and it's taken that long to settle in, get groceries, do an Ikea-run for missing household items, unpack boxes and suitcases, etc. We are still not completely over our jet-lag yet which is strange, especially for me, b/c I usually don't struggle with it much at all. I'm still waking up around 4am though and getting really tired by 8pm. I'm sure it'll all sort itself out soon enough though.

As most of you know, the reason we had to move apartments is b/c the school has built a new campus in another part of the city and we wanted to be within walking distance to it. We had a tour of the new campus a couple days ago and it's like a RESORT!! It is seriously SOOO nice! I'm trying to attach pics here as I write this, but sadly it doesn't seem to be happening... another time.

In addition to a new school, we also have new staff from Canada. Last year was the first year of our program so we only had grade 10s and therefore only had 48 students and 4 Canadian staff. This year we have 121 kids in grades 10 and 11, and 7 Canadian staff. Two of the new staff (Ash and Erika) are about the same age as Andrew and I and we've been having loads of fun together already. Ash just finished up with being a semi-pro tennis player so he has tons of knowledge in fitness and training. The 4 of us have already been down at the track a couple times doing interval training... trying to increase our fitness... lots of fun!

Some of you have been asking about our new apartment: it's way nicer and way bigger than last year's. The outside hallway area looks kinda ghetto, but once you get inside it's all good. It has 2 bedrooms, a huge bathroom, and the kitchen is twice the size of our one last year.... yippeee! It was such a pain last year, but no more of that now. Our living room is as big as a dance hall, so I'm gonna have to sign Andrew and I up for ballroom dancing or something... we definitely have the room to practice! Again, I'll try to attach the pics soon... it's just soooo slow right now.

As for school, it starts tomorrow (Sept 1st) so this is our last day "off"... I'm gonna try to brush up on my Chinese online today as it's slipped a bit over the summer. Andrew is busy practicing guitar at the moment... he's keen to play more shows this year. We are also doing the worship music for a friend's wedding at our church in 3 weeks... will be fun!

For those of you who would like to call us, our phone number again is 604.248.5191 but for some reason it's not working yet... we're still trying to iron out the wrinkles on that.

Okay, I will try again later to post the pictures of our apartment and our school. If it doesn't work, you'll just have to come see it yourself in person!

Back to China We Go!

2009-08-21T16:55:00.002-07:00

Hi Everyone,

This is a quickie last-minute post to say good-bye and thanks for a great summer! It's now Friday afternoon and we have just returned to North Van from a great week at Barnabas Family Camp on Keats Island with my (Corinna's) family. It was a total blast and very relaxing as we played tennis, went waterskiing, wakeboarding, kayaking, sailing, and spent lots of time with my family. Plus we had awesome sunny weather, which is useful when sleeping in a tent.

We are flying back to Shanghai this Sunday morning (August 24th). Our boss booked us on Air Canada, which I'm a wee bit nervous about after hearing plenty of horror stories about their service, etc recently. O well... it's only a 12-hour flight... what can go that wrong?

The picture above is from earlier this month when we went to Andrew's cousin's wedding in Iowa. It was such a great time, and nice for me to meet all the extended Nairns from South Africa whom I'd never met before.

Just a heads up that Blogger is still blocked in China (so my sources tell me), so this blog may not be updated all that often. If that's the case, I'll try to send email updates instead, or look for another free blog provider that's NOT blocked there. I will keep you posted.

Summer 2009 Update

2009-07-16T16:34:00.006-07:00

Hello Everyone,

Just checking in to write a quick blog post here. Summer has been terrific so far. We have fit so much in already: mini golfing, swimming, eating amazing food that our moms have made, hiking, haircuts, etc. It's been so nice to be with our families and see some friends.

We've also been taking care of loads of stuff that just "needs to get done". For example, we recently found out that our renters are moving back to Australia, so we need to find new tenants for Sept 1st. It sounds simple but there lots of little things that need to be done for that to happen. Lots of running around.

We also have a long list of things to buy that you can't get in China. It's ironic b/c lots of these things say "Made in China" on them, but you can't get them there. I guess they're made especially for North America and get shipped straight over. We brought an empty suitcase along just for this and it's filling up nicely. Our Visa cards, which have been resting peacefully in our wallets for most of the year in China, have definitely gotten a work-out in the past couple weeks!

One thing we hadn't counted on is how busy our "holiday" would be. I feel like I've just been running around from place to place, seeing people, buying things, taking care of stuff like renters, Dr's appointments, the seamstress, getting the car back on the road, etc... not a lot of down time. We've had a few days of rest, but not many... I guess that's what Osoyoos will be for next week!

Also, I had this vision before coming back to Canada that this summer would be spent seeing all of our friends multiple times... but in actuality it's turing out that it's a tight squeeze just to fit each friend in ONCE... can you believe it??! I guess we could do more, but our families are most important to us, so we want to "charge up" on plenty of time with them.

One weird thing about this summer so far has been NOT having cel phones. We've had them for SO many years now that I feel like a bit of an amputee not having one. It makes us really have to plan things well and stick to meeting someone at "Davie and Denman at 3pm" and not be able to call and say we're running late, lost, canceling, etc! It's working for now.

The other strange thing is that this is the FIRST summer in probably 12 years that both Andrew and I haven't had summer jobs... and it's very nice! We're total slackers as you can see!

Lunch with the Rhodes

At Molsen Lake with Julia and Nicola

Mini-golfing at Castle Fun Park with Julia and Nicola

At the Mission Abbey with my parents... a view of the Valley and Fraser River behind us

Making lunch at Oma Hiller's last week

Playing on the Worship Team at our church again- we missed it this past year!

Biking at Spanish Banks on Canada Day with the Nairn Crew! Fun times!

We're Back!!

2009-06-30T18:29:00.002-07:00

Hi Everyone,

Just to let you all know (if you didn't already), that we are back in Vancouver... and if you also didn't know, that we have signed a contract to go back to China for another year at the end of August. Also, the reason for the lengthy blog hiatus is that China has blocked the blogger website for the past couple months (due to the 20-year anniversary of the Tianamen Square incident), so I couldn't post anything (or read anyone else's blogs which I was almost more upset about!) during that time. I sure don't like being cut off from home in any way!

Anyways, enough about that... now onto our summer so far (if you're at all interested). We got back two days ago (June 28th) and went straight from the airport to the Nairn's (Andrew's parents) for a big welcome home BBQ... my family was also there, along with my grandparents, which was great... SOOO nice to see everyone. It was so kind of everyone to make such an effort on our behalves and we really felt welcomed home!

Since Monday we have been super busy getting our life back on track... things like getting our car started again (which proved to be NO simple task), Andrew's passport renewed, checking on our tenants, etc. We have a LONGGGG list of stuff that needs to get done before we can really relax for the summer.

Being back in Canada has been fantastic so far! I think the biggest "adjustment" I've had to make so far is that of being able to drink water from the taps again. In China I was so incredibly careful to NEVER drink from the tap (b/c you'd end up in hospital!), and now I find myself instinctively looking around for the jug of filtered water every time I'm thirsty, or even just to brush my teeth. It almost feels "sinful" to drink from the tap here! But I'll get used to it I'm sure. It's a good adjustment to have to make.

The other thing is that I've been going for runs every morning here in North Vancouver... if anyone knows North Van they'll know that it is ALL hills... and steep ones at that. Although I've been working out at the gym all year in China, I guess it's still not the same as the real hills. Anyways, I am limping around town like an old grandma now... especially whenever I go down stairs or hills. I think I'll give the running a rest tomorrow to let my muscles chill out.

Alrighty... we are being summoned for dinner now so I must go (nice to be living with Andrew's mum... a super cook!).

Hopefully I'll be able to keep you updated on our summer as we go along, and even more hopefully China will have un-blocked blogger by the time we get back so this blog doesn't have to die!

~Corinna

Starving Students?

2009-05-06T17:16:00.002-07:00

The past couple nights Andrew and I have had Parent Teacher Interviews at school... 4 hours on both Tues and Wed AFTER teaching all day... needless to say, we are VERY glad that they're done with for now!!

The cool thing about it was that almost 100% of the parents came out, which would NEVER happen in Canada. Also, the students came along with their parents, so they could hear exactly what was being said about them. Here are some of the highlights:

The funniest quote came from a mother, who when she found out that her son was getting a B in my class, turned to him, gave him a little smack on the head with his report card, and threatened him with "No A, no food for you!" I tried to keep a straight face, but just couldn't pull it off... I burst out laughing. I'm not sure if she was serious or not, but the kid looked a little scared!

As most of the parents don't speak English, the interviews were all done through a translator (which takes a little getting used to- you have to remember to keep your sentances short and pause every couple sentances to make sure that everything you just said actually makes it into the translation). Anyways, one dad told me that he thought his son's English was very poor. So I asked him "Do you speak any English?" (of course he didn't understand this so it went thru the translator). "No" was the answer to my question (surprise, surprise). Most of the parents are pretty quick on the draw, but this man didn't seem to see the blatant irony in his statement!

6 more weeks of classes before exams, and 7.5 weeks till we fly home for the summer. Can't wait!

Winner!

2009-05-03T04:50:00.003-07:00

Those of you who read this blog regularily will remember my post from a couple weeks ago... the one where I bought the moldy feta cheese and then put my receipt in the draw box for chocolates.

Well, last week I got a phone call with very happy news: I was one of the winners! They told me in broken English where I could go to claim my prize, so this weekend Andrew and I set out to do that... getting there was an adventure, as we communicating to the "customer service" people that I had won chocolates. After quite some time of miming a draw box and getting out translating books, they finally worked out why I was there and happily gave me a big gift-wrapped box of chocolates... turns out they were all individually flavoured bars with cool names (see the pic above)... so delicious. Now I just have to make sure I don't eat them all at once!

Crazy School Trip

2009-04-30T04:34:00.004-07:00

Yesterday we had the joy/frustration of going on another trip with our school. I say "joy" b/c it was nice being away from our regular teaching schedule, but "frustration" b/c we spent 6 hours on the bus getting there and back thru Shanghai rush-hour. Man, we might as well have flown back to Bali in that time!

The trip was to a town a couple hours out of Shanghai called Suzhou (pronounced "Soo-jo")-first to a famous mountain (more of a hill if you're from BC!), and then to an amusement park. It was incredible how clean the air seemed for only being a couple hours away from the Shanger. It was so nice and refreshing (literally!). Also, it was one of the rare times we've seen trees, leaves, and grass in the past 8 months, so definitely a big treat!

The amusement park was kinda like Disneyland, but since it was a Wednesday it was SO empty... just our 9 busloads of school kids were there... all the kids were let loose and were just told when to be back at the buses... the whole thing was super organized by the Chinese staff with kids marching to busses with corresponding numbers in their hands, a megaphone-man leading the whole procession. Once at the park, the kids were in groups with student-leaders who had to text their teachers every couple of hours and account for everyone in their group... no one was left behind this way. Very efficient... another thing that would NEVER happen in a Canadian high school!

This is the front of the park... lion-riding, our new favorite.

Water feature at the entrance. You could walk underneath the spray but the water was all manky so I came back out.

This was some random dive-display... like something you'd see at the PNE... all these divers jumped off very scary heights and did cool tricks. Check out how high the middle ladder goes.

Super cool rollercoaster... I totally wanted to go on it but it cost almost 8 bucks for 1.5 minutes of fun, plus the ticket lady was on her lunch break so I couldn't buy one.

See what I mean when I said it looks like Disneyland? Kind of...

Terry and I with Minnie Mouse and some other creature- we couldn't quite figure out who he was... maybe a knock-off version of Hello Kitty?

And the final picture... for those of you who have never travelled to Asia, let me enlighten you about the squatty potty. It's a cheap toilet in the ground. You squat above it (facing the door), and do your thing. Then you step on the pedal behind it and it flushes... clean and simple. Oh, and they don't supply toilet paper... it's always assumed on this side of the world that you'll bring your own... don't leave home without it! I'm serious! By the way, this is one of the cleaner versions... I've used MUCH worse here (sorry, no pics of that... don't want to scare you!)

In other news... the weather here has been amazing since about a week or two ago. It's been about 20-22 degrees every day... warm enough for shorts or capris and a short-sleeved shirt, but not so hot and humid that you're sweating like a pig 24/7 (like it was in Sept/Oct). Very comfortable. I had some new clothes made at the fabric market (that's a whole other post!), for warmer weather, so I'm happy to be wearing those... again, pics to come.

This weekend is a long weekend here in China (Chinese Labour Day)... we get Fri, Sat, and Sun off (and don't even have to make it up by working next weekend... wow, they're getting generous!). We have a bunch of errands to run tomorrow, plus our cel group. On Sat we're gonna be going to the X-Games. Sunday is church and relaxing...

Hope you're all well. Only 8.5 weeks till we're home for the summer- YESSSS!

A Reminder

2009-04-26T17:32:00.003-07:00

Hi Everyone,

Just a reminder that we LOVE it when you call (604.248.5191), but please remember we are FIFTEEN hours ahead of Vancouver time (PST).

We have had some yahoo calling us at 6:30am on weekend mornings (can't figure out who it is), and a friend (who shall remain nameless) who called us at 1am a couple days ago.... not cool at ALL people... we NEED our sleep!

We will try to remember to turn our ringer off before bed, but please remember the time difference. An easy way to remember it is for you to change your am to pm (or vice versa), and add 3 hours. For example, if it's 6pm your Friday night, turn that into 6am, then add 3 hours, so that would be our 9am. That would be an okay time to call most weekend mornings. Andrew might be up (I won't!be!).

Thanks.

Scammed Again!

2009-04-21T20:04:00.003-07:00

China just isn't too trust-worthy a place. I can't figure it out b/c in school they are taught really good morals, like honesty, kindness, respect, etc. This is all fine and dandy inside the school, but the minute you step out of the school gates, these morals just don't seem to be present in society. I guess in a country of 2 billion people everyone has to fight tooth and nail just to scrape by. There seems to be this mentality of "try to be #1... otherwise you'll end up being # 2,904,078"... this comes out in all kinds of facets: budging in lines at the supermarket checkout, bank, etc, pickpocketing, not stepping out of the way when you're clearly in someone's path, ripping people off, etc.

This came across yesterday again when I discovered I'd been duped by the grocery store. We are very fortunate to live close to an import grocery store where we can get lots of nice things... I try not to buy too much here b/c the prices of some of the things are WAY too crazy (eg- $12 Can for a box of cereal!). Once in a while it's a nice treat though... such it was recently with feta cheese (which costs about $10 Can for a small block). I LOVE feta cheese but never buy it here b/c of the absorbant price. However, last week I noticed there was a 2-for1 sale on feta cheese... I checked it out and noticed that the two packs of cheese were taped back-to-back with clear duct-tape... I tried to peel it off in the store so I could check the expiry dates on the back, but the tape was too strong. Seeing as this is an upscale kind of store, I decided in good faith that they wouldn't try to rip me off by selling me expired cheese (the package wasn't transparent, so I couldn't see the cheese).

So anyways, last night I was cooking and planning to use the feta cheese (very exciting... sad, I know!). I sliced thru the tape with a knife and opened the first pack... the cheese was beige, slimy, and stinky and the expiry date on the back read Feb 7th, 2009 (more than 2 months ago)!! I was so mad! Fortunately, the second pack I opened was fine. So I guess they decided to tape an old pack to cheese to a fresh pack of cheese and promote it using a 2-for-1 deal.

I know some of you will say "just take it back with your receipt", but the dumb thing is that I left the receipt at the store that day. You see, there was a draw for chocolates... all you had to do was write your name and phone # on your receipt and put it in the box and you could win a box of delicious-ness. I totally put my receipt in that box!

O well... it's only 10 bucks, but it's the trickery that makes me mad... you just don't know who you can trust around here.

Love

2009-04-20T05:41:00.001-07:00

Look what my nice husband got for me: roses and my favorite flowers (freesias)... just because!

I love him! He's the best!

Easter

2009-04-20T05:36:00.007-07:00

Alright... a little late on this post here, but I wanted to put up pics from our Easter. We were invited for a potluck lunch at our friend Anna's place (she's from the US). It was so much fun. We had lunch, dyed eggs (see the finished products above), then played a series of games including "draw an Easter bunny that represents you", 3-in-a-hat, and tossing the sticky Easter-egg-jelly-cut-outs onto the window to see if we could match up a whole Easter egg... sorry if that makes no sense- better explained in person.

Before lunch... not sure of the boys' names, but the girls from L-R are Bonnie, Anna, and Rachel

Dying Easter eggs... again, not sure of the boys' in the middle names, but Andrew and Bonnie L-R

The last game was tossing eggs off the 13th floor balcony, trying to land them on the neighboring building's rooftop (across the street)... Andrew and Bonnie were both successful!

At the end, we all piled into a cab and went to the Easter service at church... as you can tell from the picture, it was PACKED!! There were so many people that we could only get standing room at the back... guess that's a good problem!

Soccer!

2009-04-19T22:03:00.002-07:00

A few weeks ago Ron (our principal) found out that there was gonna be a soccer tournament for BC Offshore Schools this past weekend, and that we were invited. Problem: we didn't have a soccer team! No problem- we created one! The tourney was on a Sat (this past one), and I was asked to coach the team (yay!)... however, I couldn't attend the tourney b/c of Alpha being on Saturdays... so I coached them for the past few weeks, and then Ron did the honors of actually taking them to the tournament.

There are a few boys in our class who are really into soccer, but we don't have a soccer pitch (or any grass for that matter) on our school's campus to practice on... the whole thing is one big concrete mass. Therefore, finding a place to practice was a challenge, but we managed. For starters, we found a park nearby with a semi-flat area to practice (but no real pitch or nets)... this worked until one of our guys took out an old man in a wheelchair (by accident)... that's when I figured we should move on. Next on the hit-list was the university across the street from our high school. Although the soccer pitch there is for students only, we decided to take our chances. Lunch time practices were great; afterschool practices were shut down by the guard, but we got enough play-time in.

The results from the tourney were 1-1, 2-0, and 7-0. So they kinda got smoked, but apparently all the guys they played against were older and bigger... they'll have to try again next year.

As you can see from the pics, this was not too professional... no shinguards, no soccer socks, no cleats... just runners and whatever shorts they had. Good thing we had matching tops made for them! The boys are keen to try again next year when they're older and bigger.

The past 2 weeks

2009-04-15T17:43:00.003-07:00

Hey Guys,

First of all, sorry for my 2-week hiatus from blogger-land. Things have been hectic... mainly I've been sick-ish... same old cold/cough kicking my but that I've been stuggling with off and on for at least the past 4 years (thought I had it beat this year, but it just came later in the year instead). So I've been trying to get extra rest. Then we've been super busy with cel group, leading Alpha, church, Easter, friends, work, and the usual busy-ness of laundy, groceries, cleaning, etc. On top of that, both Andrew and I were being evaluated at work for the past few weeks, so I had to eliminate some distractions and make sure my lessons were bang-on (not that I usually do a crappy job, it's just when you know you're being watched you want to be a shining star!).

Okay, so enough with the excuses. Today I wanted to blog about an experience I've had over the past month or so. As many of you know, this year was my first time teaching sex ed (last semester). I went with the approach of teaching abstinence (not having sex before marriage), but also doing a safe sex lesson in conjunction with it. The reason is that I thought it's naive to think all kids are going to wait to have sex before marriage, and if they don't wait, I want them to be safe, seeing as there are SO many scary and disgusting STIs out there these days. I would hate to think that any of my students contracted an STI just b/c I was negligent as a teacher and didn't teach them about how to lower the risk. That being said, I did the full condom-on-the-banana demo. I've never had such a captive audience of students in 4 years... it was pretty funny!

Anyways, my "philosophy" on all this was recently challenged when I met another expat lady who was organizing a facilitator training course to teach a course called "No Apologies" which teaches abstinence to teens. She encouraged me to sign up and I said I'd look into it. Thinking I could use this course to supplement my current teaching model (abstinence PLUS safe sex), I was in the middle of registering for the facilitator training, when I noticed that I had to sign a pledge that I would teach ONLY abstinence and NOT the "plus safe sex" part. According to my "philosophy" (see above paragraph) I had a genuine problem with this, so I emailed the lady, explained my issue, and told her I wouldn't be enrolling in the facilitator training for this reason.

Thinking that was the end of it, I was surprised when she emailed me back a few days later, telling me she had emailed the organization who puts on the course (Focus on the Family) and forwarded my issue. They had replied with a lot attachments they recommended I read. Here is the excerpt that "got me":

"Many educators and organizations have ignored or soft-pedaled the idea of remaining sexually absitent until marriage because they feel that is is unrealistic. They assume that sexual activity among teenagers is inevitable, and that the most reasonable approach is to help them minimize its consequences. But this approach downgrades adolescents to the status of animals who cannot control their primal urges. Furthermore, the same assumption is never made by programs striving to eliminate tobacco, alcohol and drug use among young people." (eg- you don't tell a kid not to drink & drive, unless they're wearing a helmet which will make much safer!).

After thinking about all this, I decided to sign up for the facilitator training after all. It was pretty intense... 19 hours over 2 days (plus 4 hours commuting), but it was totally worth it. (The reason I had to take the training was that you're not really allowed to use the program unless you've been trained and certified in it). I came away with a much better understanding of the course, plus LOADS of resources, including a full curriculum book and workbooks for the students, plus a great Powerpoint presentation, plus a huge props list (lots of object lessons are done).

So the next hoop to jump thru was to get it approved by our school so that I could actually teach it here (assuming that we're staying on for another year in China which we're not 100% sure about yet, but are leaning towards). The course had to be approved by our Canadian principal, as well as the head of the international department, plus the Chinese principal... thankfully I got the green light yesterday, so I'm pretty happy! I'm excited to impact the lives in a super important and meaningful way next year!

Okay, just looking back over this I see it's become a novel of a post. That's enough for now... I'll try to post again soon with a bunch of recent pics... lots of those on our camera.

Hope you're all well.

By the way...

2009-04-01T01:03:00.002-07:00

April Fool's!! I was totally just kidding; I am NOT pregnant!

Hope I gotcha!

Best Kept Secret in Shanghai

2009-03-31T06:16:00.004-07:00

Guess what everyone? I'm pregnant! That's right... about 5 months along we figure. We'll be going to the doctor soon to find out for sure and get an estimated due date. Hopefully we'll be able to have Baby Nairn in Canada this summer and then bring her/him back to the Shanger with us next year... childcare is super cheap here, and we think it'll be good for him/her to learn Chinese off the nanny for a few years until we can afford to come home for good.

Sorry to be so informal about it and only tell everyone via our blog... we just couldn't decide who to tell first- Andrew's parents or mine, so we decided to just make it a race... whoever checks their email first will know first.

ACE: Arts Charity Extravaganza

2009-03-29T03:10:00.007-07:00

Last weekend Andrew and I had the pleasure of helping out with a huge event here in Shanghai called ACE (Arts Charity Extravaganza). It was an event put on entirely by youth (mainly from the many international schools in the area) to raise money for a charity of their choice. This year the chosen charity was Shanghai Healing Home, which is a new orphange that will be offering pre- and post-surgical care for orphaned Chinese infants with cleft lip. (If you want to find out more, you can check out the website: http://shanghaihealinghome.com/)

This picture if of James and Christina Weidner... they are the ones opening the SHH and were giving an info-speech at ACE about it. What's crazy is that they have 4 kids (7, 4,2, and 9 months) of their own, the youngest of which was born in China last summer. They are from New Orleans but have a real heart for China so plan to be here for the rest of their lives. We've been getting to know them; they're a great family!

Anyways, the ACE event was held in a huge loft and featured a fashion show, art gallery (with silent auction), food, live music, dancing, etc. I've been trying to teach my own students about serving, and thought this would be a great way for them to get involved. (Okay, they also need 30 volunteer hours to graduate from the BC program, so I think that might have been a pretty big motivator for a lot of them to sign up). I was expecting maybe 5-10 kids to sign up as volunteers, but was really surprised when nearly all of our 48 students volunteered- isn't that fantastic?! Some of them were even there 2 days before the event, setting up chairs, cleaning the floors, doing silly meaneal tasks that just needed to be done. On the day of, they had a great time though.

Here's Henry, Jay, and Kerry serving drinks.

Marvin and Linda serving food.

Justin, David, Jim, and Greg handing out programs at the door.

A dance performed by some international school students. The boy at the very front of the V was Korean and the CRAZIEST dancer I'd ever seen. He was so good I thought he was a girl (he looked pretty girly too!). He was like Gumby bustin' it out. I took a video and will show you guys when we're home this summer... this is something everyone has to see... all the girls in the audience were screaming like they were at a JT concert or something... you can hear that on the video too.

Tim, Terry, and Frank setting up a sign for the silent auction.

And this little sweetheart is Abby, the 4-year-old daughter of James and Christina. I had just french-braided her hair before ACE started and she wanted me to take a picture of her... one of many, but this is the cutest one to show you guys. She didn't want to wear her sweater (like her mom had asked her to), so I convinced her that it would look pretty cool if I tied it around her neck like a cape. She thought she was super-woman after that!

On the following Monday I asked my students what they had thought of ACE. One boy responded, "There were many beautiful girls there." When I asked them what the best part of the whole event was, they ALL replied, "The pizza and the nuts." Ha ha, not what I was expecting!

Music nights

2009-03-29T03:07:00.006-07:00

Anyone who knows Andrew knows that he LOVES playing music. Luckily we packed lightly enough when coming to China last year that he was able to bring along one of his guitars, and recently he started trying to start up another band, which is always a bit tricky, but he stuck with it until he found 2 great guys to play with (Garrett from California and Tyler from Quebec).

Last weekend the 3 of them were practicing at a jam-space close to our house, but apparently the accoustics were pretty bad, so they came up with the idea of going to play in the metro (subway). Andrew called me at this point and invited me along, which was great.

The 4 of us took off for the metro and then set up right where all the people were coming out. It was already 10:30pm, so we didn't think there'd be much traffic, and we also didn't think we'd make any money, but we opened up the guitar case for cash, just to see.

Tyler (the drummer) had found a solid bucket out on the street, which he was pounding with his drumsticks. Andrew and Garrett were playing guitar and singing, and I was the back-up singer. No sooner had we started with Bob Marley's "One Love", then a security guard came along, motioning for us to leave. So we moved about 20 feet down the hall, set up again, and kept playing.

What was really funny was that a whole bunch of Chinese people put money into the case, and every time one of them would, everyone else around them would start clapping. SO many people whipped out their camera phones and were taking pictures and videos of us and seemed SO happy to hear some live Western music. We ended up making almost $10 (Can) in only 30 minutes, which we totally weren't expecting.

Hopefully we'll go to another metro station soon (at rush hour) and see what happens there.

Then this past Sat night we played again at a little expat bar called BeeDee's. Just one set of cover songs, but the crowd loved it. The owner wants Andrew to do regular Sat nights now (3 sets of 10!), but we're not sure b/c it was SO smokey in there, and we don't love that! We came home just REEKING of smoke, and it irritates my throat a lot too. China is SUCH a smokey place... one of the major downfalls of being here.

There were only 2 mics, so Garrett had to share one... a bit awkward seeing as he's way taller then me, but we made do. Next time they'll arrange for 3. You can't see Tyler in this pic, but he'd behind us all on the drums (not a bucket this time)!

2 Year Anniversary

2009-03-24T05:55:00.002-07:00

Look what my wonderful husband got me for our 2-year anniversary! My faves: yellow freesias, lilies, and gerbera daisies... they smell so nice and I'm so happy he thought of me in this special way.

Of course I wasn't the only one on the receiving end... I got him a cool little cactus garden (he loves house plants)... don't know what's wrong with Blogger- why I can't post vertical pics properly, but you get the idea.

Thanks also to our families for their nice cards in the mail, treats, and facebook wishes. Meant a lot to us!

The past 2 years have been great- so great that we're shooting for 62!

Busted!

2009-03-23T17:18:00.002-07:00

I normally try not to grumble too much, but lately it seems like our apartment is falling apart! For those of you who don't know, our apartment is rented for us by our boss, so it's not ours, but it's tricky to get things fixed when you don't speak the language.

First we somehow blew a circuit that shattered a lightbulb all around our house and left us sitting in the dark. We search all over for the circuit board with no luck so we had to call the maintainance guy up... he quickly located the board behind a picture and we were back in business.

Then our water cooler erupted, leaving us with a flooded kitchen (and no mop to clean it up with). That took the landlord almost a week to attend to, leaving us with finding rather creative ways to get clean drinking water.

Then we were without internet for 6 days... that also took the agent about 4 days to get on.

Then the DVD player busted. Long story there, but basically the audio won't work on it. The background noises play, but the main characters' voices don't. The DVDs play fine on our laptop, so we know it's not the DVDs themselves that are broken. This has taken the landlord the past 5 WEEKS to get on top of! He's had it "fixed" twice and each time it comes back even worse than before. The last time he still DROPPED it on the floor so now it looks like it's been thru a battle and makes this loud noise like and airplane taking off. Still, he swears up and down (in Chinese) that it's not broken and refuses to replace it. Cheapskate. We're pretty mad about this. Correction- I'm pretty mad. Andrew told me to just get over it already- we're not getting a new DVD player.

Finally, last night, just as we were about to go to bed Andrew noticed a strange noise coming from the washing machine. We had a closer look and discovered that the faucet connecting the water supply from the wall had sprung a leak and was spraying water all over. The wall was completely soaked and the drywall was peeling down the wall. So that was another call to our agent and the maintainance man who had to come have a look, leave to buy a part (good thing the shops are open late here), come back, hammer around and finally get it all fixed and turn the water back on so that we could brush our teeth in the morning.

Anyways... there's my little rant. I know all houses have things go wrong with them, but sometimes it seems like a LOT in a very short time. Thankfully we'll be out of our place in about 3 months, but I still kinda wonder what will be the next thing to go?

Talent Show & Science Museum

2009-03-17T07:12:00.008-07:00

We've had quite the week already, despite the fact that it's only Wed morning for us here. As I mentioned before, we have about 14 exchange students here from Vancouver, and it's been great having them around. Of course, in an effort to be a good host, the Chinese school we work in arranged all kinds of trips and outings for these kids, and also put US in charge of entertaining them somehow for Monday afternoon. We came up with the idea of having a big talent show. It was so great to see how many of our students took part in performing something, and it was also interesting to note the correlation between fantastic musical talent and high academic achievement among some of our students. I tried posting a video I took of one boy playing piano, but it wouldn't load for some reason... I'll show you on my laptop when I get home this summer.

The Canadian kids also took part and did a really funny skit of their time in China so far. I don't think our Chinese students really got it, but it was SUPER funny for Andrew and I b/c we could totally identify with their scenes about the traffic, riding the metro, Chinese morning exercises & eye massages (see above pic!).

Then on Tues we all went to the Shanghai Science & Technology Museum which is kinda like Science World in Vancouver but a lot more grand. The building is really new and the architecture is amazing. A couple funny things happened, one being that one of the most "interesting" (read weird) kids we teach called Jet, randomly bought a wooden hand (of all things!) from the gift shop. Of course it was nabbed from him right away by his classmates, and put in all kinds of interesting positions (see above pic). We never stop laughing at Frank and David's antics!

Then we busted 4 of our boys playing cards while they were supposed to be looking at the science exhibits. We spotted them from a balcony 3 floors up playing cards below, and decided to freak them out a little. Andrew started making paper balls out of the museum map/brochure (see above) and chucking them down at the guys, landing them all around them, and finally right on their laps...
I had the camera zoomed in and ready to catch their surprised looks (see above)... too funny!

Finally, here we are on our 2nd anniversary in the museum. We held the camera down below us so we could get the cool glass globe building in above/behind us.

Thanks so much everyone for all your good wishes and congrats on our anniversary- it was a great day!

Packed Weekend

2009-03-15T06:26:00.002-07:00

Hello hello, just a quick report on our weekend for your reading pleasure. On Sat we played tennis with our good friends Shane and Bonnie (they have a court at their building- lucky!), and then went out with them to their friends' place in the evening. Like I've mentioned before, the expat community here is SO friendly... these people welcomed us into their home even though they'd never met us before and didn't know we were coming along. Andrew was in heaven as there were loads of guitars there and a big jam session going on. I had a great time chatting with a bunch of new girls... it's SO interesting to hear what people are doing here in Shanghai. I met one girl who is starting a company that manufactures environmentally-friendly cleaning tools- like bamboo dish scrubbies, etc. Another girl is starting her own yoga-wear line from the ground-up, and another couple of girls were volunteering tons with an organization that provides surgeries to orphan babies. SO cool to hear everyone's stories.

On Sunday morning I took a group of Canadian exchange students to the massage/manicure place across the street from our house to get beautified. These kids were grade 10/11s from Vancouver and were so much fun. The funny part was this: I was just having a quicky manicure done, but they were all in there for numerous treatments, so I was done first. I didn't want to just sit there watching them, so I took off for half an hour to grab groceries. I came back afterwards to check on them and found a bunch of them sitting there, getting their toenails painted and sipping BEER that they bought in the manicure shop. Can you believe it?? I was supposed to be quasi-responsible for them, and here they are DRINKING on my watch? Ahhh! But what can you do? It's not like they were hammered or anything. Right away they were like "shhh, don't tell our teachers".... and I won't! What a bunch of monkeys!

Last night we had the celebration/kick-off dinner for the Alpha course we're gonna be helping out with from our church. For those of you who don't know, Alpha is a 10-week course that goes over the basics of Christianity. People are welcome to join if they have questions, doubts, or curiousities. It's once a week, 3 hour sessions (including a free meal), for 10 weeks and Andrew and I will be leaders for one of the Sat afternoon groups. It's a big committment, but we really believe in this and want to help people either come to faith or strengthen their faith. There is a huge hunger for this here in China, although local Chinese people are not allowed to join Alpha, so it's for foreign passport-holders only. The reason you see so many Chinese-look-alikes in the above pic is that they come from Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, etc.

Also, in 2 days from now it's Andrew's and my 2-year anniversary (on St. Patrick's Day). Crazy that it's been 2 years! In a way it seems like it's so much shorter, but on the other hand it's not hard to believe it's been two years as we've packed SO much stuff into that time. We are still SO happy together and thankful for each other, and are committed to working out the kinks that every marriage has, and are looking forward to having even MORE fun together this year. Yay!

Pam's Party

2009-03-10T21:13:00.002-07:00

Yesterday my friend Pam, who I met at church back in Sept, turned 29 and had a big girls-only party at a really nice Thai restaurant in Shanghai called Coconut Paradise. There were about 14 girls there, mainly from the US and Canada, and it was SUCH a good night... so nice to be out with just a bunch of girls.

To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to going that much b/c by the time the evening rolled around, I had a wicked headache and just didn't feel like being very social and putting my best foot forward while meeting a lot of new people. But I got on with it and it was great- I love meeting new people with interesting life stories as to why they're in Shanghai.

Pam is a true inspiration to many b/c she has a ton of energy and direction. She came to Shanghai to work as a teacher 6 months ago and had a ton of issues (won't get into it all here obviously), but in the past couple months she's made a lot of big decisions and changes that have resulted in her having a lot more joy and freedom, which really shows when you hang out with her. She is now applying to do her Master's degree in international relations in Australia, coaching volleyball, volunteering at a bunch of places, and getting super involved in our church. She's also working on getting certified to become a personal trainer which is something she's really passionate about - a workout nut! I wish her all the best in all these things.

3 Canadians: Pam (the b-day girl) from Winnipeg, me, and Nadia from Montreal.

Paper Mache Goodness

2009-03-05T16:22:00.003-08:00

Coming up with creative teaching ideas is always a trick. Social Studies can be dry and boring, or a little more fun, and of course I'm all for the fun side of life! Whenever I'm planning my lessons I try to work from a list of activity ideas that I can apply to various topics, but last week when I came across the topic of rock layers in the textbook, I was stumped; how was I gonna make igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks relevant to grade 10s without putting them to sleep? Then I realized that they'd probably NEVER experienced the glorious wonders of paper mache in their past traditional Chinese schooling and decided to see if it would work with them.

And work it did! The assignment was, in groups of 4, to build and paint a paper mache model of the topography of Western Canada (using the digram in the textbook) and to label all the rock layers down the side, plus the mountain regions, ocean, and lakes. For 3 days they worked away and had a total blast!

Here you can see Beryl (in the pink shirt... easy name to remember for us b/c her body is kinda shaped like a barrel), holding up a lumpy mess which are really Canadian mountains! It looked a lot better after it was painted! The kids got SO dirty... they didn't all listen when I recommended they bring aprons. O well.

And here we have Jack who won one of the student awards for February. At the end of each month all the teachers vote for one student from each class who has worked really hard, gotten good results, spoken English a lot, helped others, etc and present them with this award. Then we take a picture by the BC flag and post the picture in the hallway. It's a really big deal for the kids to win one of these and it's always tough to decide who to vote for. Jack totally deserved it more than anyone else this month though- he's a real joy to teach!

This weekend we're heading out with a bunch of friends, which will be great. Also, Andrew is trying to start up a band again and meeting with lots of other expat guys to play guitar, so he's happy doing that.

K, gotta get back to work... hope you all have a good weekend!

Shoe Dilemma!

2009-02-26T05:32:00.003-08:00

Every girl will, at some point in her life, have issues with shoes, and I'm no exception. Here's the deal: I usually like to look nice when going to work, including wearing nice shoes. This has all changed since moving to Shanghai. As soon as sandle-season was over in early November, I busted out my cute little black ballet-flats, but realized within about 2 days that these were never gonna cut it here. You see, these shoes are quite open on top and there's NO central heating in the school, plus walking to work thru all kinds of weather (while dodging hork, dog crap, massive puddles, and crazy motorbikes on the sidewalk), my feet both freeze and just aren't protected.

Seeing as this was the only pair of nice shoes I'd brought along (due to trying to pack light when we moved here), the next pair of shoes in line for "work duty" were my black Gallaz skate shoes, which match and blend in with everything. I know they're a little less dressy, but o well, they did the job. The only problem was that I've worn these shoes for the past 4 years STRAIGHT and I've pretty much worn them into the ground. I thought they'd last until the summer when I could replace them at home, but last week the heels cracked- you know that part of the heel of the shoe where there's hard plastic under the inner lining? Well, the plastic on both shoes started cracking, cut thru the lining, and was cutting my heels... they were literally drawing blood! So it was high time for new shoes.

I looked everywhere in Shanghai last weekend for a new pair of black skate shoes (since we walk everywhere in this city, it's important to have comfy shoes), but they only had mens. Then I looked online and found a sweet pair, but they only ship to the States. I felt like all my options just weren't working out. When I thought about it though, there's only really about one more month till sandal-season again here, so I decided to go with my gut and just get the shoes I'd had my eye on for the past few months: bubble-gum pink high-top Converse All-Stars. Why not? These would be the perfect funky solution.

So I bought them and left the rotting, cracking, blood-drawing Gallaz in the shoe store, wearing my new pink Converse shoes out on the street. This was perfect for about half an hour, until I realized how narrow they are in the front... both my baby toes started to get mad blisters on the side. Arrrghhh! This only left me with one option: wearing my bright yellow running shoes to work. Terrible, I know, but I'm not about to go buy some geeky-looking Chinese shoes here just to wear to work. I really don't need Mickey Mouse on my shoes, now do I?

So... this summer back in Vancouver it'll be shoe-shopping all the way until I find something cool and comfy again.

My Mind: The Whiz-a-Whirl

2009-02-22T17:17:00.005-08:00

I remember about a year and a half ago while Andrew and I were on a walk in Vancouver and I told him how I was feeling bored in life: all the excitement from our engagement, wedding, and honeymoon was over, we had no trips planned for the near future, work was boring, it was constantly raining... everything just seemed blah and my mind felt stagnant. Andrew reminded me that there are seasons for everything in life, and suggested that we plan a big party to liven things up. We did that, it was great, but then that too was over.

What a contrast to what's going on now! Life is NOT boring, things are changing all the time, and most of all my mind is spinning like CRAZY all the time. It's like it never stops learning and absorbing and processing new things, be that from the internet, books I've been reading, meeting new people, travelling, or teaching.

One of the coolest things about meeting other expats here in China has been to hear about their jobs. At home I'm used to meeting people with "normal" jobs... things I can fit into my schema, like nurses, teachers, pilots, etc. I have a basic understanding of what all those jobs entail. Here I have met all kinds of people with jobs like flying spy planes for the army, consulting engineering for major industrial accidents, world expo planners, stainless steel pipe-builders, toy designers, and the list goes on and on. The conversations with these people are never boring... I learn so much as I try to envision what they do on a typical day, and I think it's keeping my mind "fit" as well.

Below I've pasted part of a blog entry from a cool blog I've just started reading. Although the list of 5 things is not rocket-science, I wanted to share it with you b/c it's a good reminder for daily life. Check out the whole blog at http://www.freshmd.com/

A few months ago the UK government's science and technology think tank Foresight concluded its Project on Mental Capital and Wellbeing.

The report includes an evidence-based list of five simple daily habits for mental wellbeing. These activities, which are likened to five daily servings of fruits and vegetables, are recommended to every person in the UK:

1. Connect with other people, be they family, friends, colleagues or neighbours.

2. Be active. Go for a run, walk around the block after dinner, putter in the garden or take the kids sledding.

3. Take notice. Be aware of the details of daily life - the beautiful, the humorous, the surprising. Be conscious of the world around you and your reactions to it.

4. Keep learning. Take a photography course. Learn to knit. Tackle a work problem in a different way.

5. Give. Show kindness to others. Volunteer. Support a charity. Donate blood.

Our Holiday!

2009-02-12T04:30:00.029-08:00

Hi Everyone,

Sorry this post is so overdue... we got home a week ago, but you know how it is when you get back from holiday and need to be at work a day later... all the unpacking, laundry, groceries, etc. Nevermind uploading the pics to the computer, and then getting them online... the internet is pretty slow around here so it takes literally AGES to get pics onto the blog and facebook, especially when we want to load a whole bunch at a time... sucks, but we live with it. So I've put the best pics on this post (with mega narratives), but if you want to see them ALL, check on facebook under my profile. I've put up 2 of the intended 4 albums so far (one album for each place we visited). If you're not a facebook user (ie- parents), get one of your kids to let you on their facebook and have a look from there.

So here's the overview of our holiday:

Jan 19-23 in Singapore: VERY HOT, great city that was green & clean and quite unlike China, took a double-decker bus tour, ate lots of Indian food as we were staying in Little India, had a job interview that went well but they told us they're not hiring b/c of the financial crisis, went to Sentosa Island which is a man-made beach area, met up with friends (see pics of all this below).

Jan 23-27 in Bali: went surfing right away and loved it- we had a great instructor who showed us the ropes again, walked around the town tons, ate good food, shopped, swam in the hotel pool, watched movies on TV, totally relaxed

Jan 27-Feb 1 on Gili Trawangan: very tiny tropical island with no cars, trucks, motorbikes, or dogs allowed (only horse-drawn buggies and cats!), we snorkelled, swam in the ocean, ate so much yummy food (great restaurant selection there), made new friends from Canada and Slovenia, slept a lot, read books, suntanned (but not too much b/c it was SO hot that we stayed in the shade a lot)

Feb 1-Feb 6 back in Bali: tried to go surfing some more but the weather had turned... it rained every day so hard that we couldn't see (bad for surfing!), shopped a bit more, swam in the pool whenever it wasn't raining, I got a bit sick for a few days so had to lay low, got suckered into going to a timeshare presentation which was WAY too long but o well

Feb 6-7 in Hong Kong: we totally had to Amazing Race it thru HK as we only had one day... we saw what we wanted to, but really, it just seemed like another big Asian City which we already experience daily in Shanghai, so not that big a deal for us... the good part was the weather which was in the low 20's... very nice

And now for the pics...

The "Singapore Flyer"... a ferris wheel kinda like the London Eye, except even bigger.

The Sinapore Museum... looked pretty interesting, but the beach was beckoning!

A big Hindu temple... it's supposed to look really old, but they actually just built it a couple years ago

The older Hindu temple... look closely to see all the neat carvings on top- very intricate and colorful

View of China-town from the top of the double-decker bus... I think this was the back end of it... the front looked much nicer... just like China, but with a bit more polish

Andrew manages to find a guitar to play no matter what country we're in. He was debating taking his own guitar along on the trip, but we figured it would be too much to lug around. This pic is in our tiny Singapore hostel where he entertained the owners with his tunes!

The aformentioned Singapore Hostel... this is our room which was teeny tiny, but did the trick. It was so hot that they only gave us towels as blankets, which we barely even needed

The hallway outside our room at the hostel... see how narrow it was? Plus the walls were made of this cardboard-type stuff... not too sturdy

Our friend Peter and his girlfriend Meggy took us out for dinner to a "hawker" which is like a huge local food court. We tried lots of interesting stuff, the tastiest of which was the BBQ'd stingray... it was really really good!

Sentosa Island- when we'd had enough of the city we escaped to this little jewel of a place

Top of the Luge run at Sentosa... this was super duper fun! It was like go carts without motors- they just ran on gravity. We took a chairlift up the mountain, and then luged down it. They even gave you a "driver's license" stamp on your hand once they thought you were a qualified luger!

Andrew on the luge at the end of the run

Okay, now we're in Bali. This is the Ground Zero monument where the bomb went off in 2002 at O'Riley's pub, killing hundreds of people, mainly Aussies... very sad

Me and Hulio the plastic surfer dude on the streets of Kuta (main tourist city in Bali where the "beginner surfing" is)

Our room at the Vilarisi Hotel in Bali... quite the step up from the Singapore Hostel (and for way cheaper!)

Andrew with Johnny, our surfing teacher. We think he was stoned most of the time (he even wanted to sell us pot on a few occasions!) The orange board was mine, and the American-colored one was Andrew's... I like this board way better than the real long-boards I'd used in Tofino and Morroco... this board is called a "Gun"

We went on a tour of some villas that were being built, mainly b/c our friend Peter (from the Sinapore pic) is having one built that'll look similar to this one. They were amazing! If any of you are interested in renting one ever, let us know- we have the contact details (good for 1-4 families at once- includes a kitchen with a cook, a gardener, a pool boy, etc!)

Andrew with Wendy, a beach seller. Beaches in Bali are NORTORIUS for pesky hawkers trying to sell you anything and everything, and they WON'T let up! Bracelets, necklaces, massages, sunglasses, watches, etc... you name it, they'll sell it to you. If you say no, they just keep following you and lowering the price. If you still say no, they start BEGGING you and asking you to buy it "for good luck" or "to support my business". They are SO annoying, but Andrew was very friendly to them and we ended up having a good chat with this lady. It's always interesting to find out about the lives of the locals.

Okay, now we're on Gili Trawangan island (Gili T for short). Everything on this island has to get shipped in. Here's a boat FULL of floor tiles that's just arrived and being unloaded. Even though you can't tell from this pic, it's mainly the women who do the heavy lifting and carrying, and the men who do the work after that

Want to take a taxi? Sorry, you can't. These cidomos (horse-drawn buggies) are the only way to get you and your heavy tourist suitcase around the island to your hotel/hut. You end up feeling really bad for the poor horse who has to cart several people and ALL their stuff around at once

Our hut didn't have a pool, so we found the nicest pool on the island and set up shop every day... the owner didn't mind as long as we bought lunch there

Some friends we made on the trip. From L-R: Primoz & Azra from Slovenia, and Ted & Brenda from Sarnia (Ontario, Canada). Here we are having a nice Italian dinner, run by a one-man-show called Nino. He was Italian (obviously!) who had married an Indonesian chick and was running a hotel/restaurant there now

This is the boat we took from Bali to Gili T. It travelled at 30 knots an hour and went over some REALLY rough waters. We sat on the very top, bouncing around like yo-yos (there were no real seats up there), wind in our hair, loving life!

We were told that it only takes 1 hour to bike around Gili T, so we rented bikes in the heat of the day for

This is the gazebo-hut where we ate our breakfast every morning... overlooking the clear blue water and the next island over (Gili Meno)

Where we stayed... very cute bungalows. Not sure what they mean by "luxary rooms" on the sign as they were pretty plain, but perfect for beachy accomodations

The garden in front of our place... very tropical

Our little hut- so cute and beachy!

The beach in Kuta, Bali. It's so sad how trashy it is- the reason is that the locals throw their garbage in the river which then washes out to sea, and then washes back up on the beach for a few weeks a year (depending on the ocean currents). It's really gross to swim in the ocean and get all these tiny bits of plastic wrapped around you

The Vilarisi Hotel from the outside. The second time we stayed there our room was on the very left, 3 floors up

Okay, now we're in Hong Kong. We stayed in the Kowloon area at a pretty cruddy little hostel... you just never know when you're booking them online ahead of time. As you can see the room is tiny (and it was way more expensive than the nice Bali hotel we stayed at)

I couldn't get this pic to turn around, but it's the outside courtyard of our HK hostel... pretty icky!

Alright, same thing here with not being able to turn it around, but this is the entrance to the HK hostel, downstairs. The hostel owner took us thru this area at break-neck speed the night we arrived... our neon pink suitcase was flailing behind us all the way

Victoria Harbour area of HK. The skyline you can see in the distance is HK island. We were gonna take a harbour tour in one of the green & white boats you can see in the water, but the tour wasn't gonna get back in time for us to catch our flight back to the Shang, so we just walked around the harbour instead

And here we are, relaxed, tanned, and happy at the end of a fabulous holiday! We've gone a bit overboard lately with the Asian peace sign in pics... we'll have to tone that down a LOT before we come back to Canada this summer!

So there you have it! Congrats if you've made it this far in the post... sorry it's so long, but I wanted to get it all out. I think this is about my 3rd or 4th day working on this one post alone... blogger keeps messing things up and I have to go back, fix things, re-format them, etc... big hassle!

After a brief Team AC conference, Andrew and I have come up with the best parts of the trip: being together, the sunshine, the relaxation, and the SURFING!!!!! We def loved that part.

Till next time, I'm finally signing off!

You gotta give him credit...

2009-01-19T16:26:00.002-08:00

Anyone who's travelled with me knows that I am extremely weak of the stomach when it comes to any jostling-activities such as car, plane, boat, or train rides. Unfortunately, yesterday's flights from Shanghai to Singapore were no exception. But whereas some husbands would turn away in disgust, mine was a star. He had my sicky-bags all lined up for me before take-off, and when the time came for my lunch to make its second appearance, he held back my hair and gently stroked my back until the ordeal was over. What a guy!

We're now staying at a little youth hostel in the part of Singapore called "Little India"... and it's just like India but way cleaner. If anyone wants to buy a sari, some Bangara cd's, or some authentic curry powder, just let me know... they're all available on my street! I drank WAY too much chai tea last night (delicious), but forgot how much caffeine was in there... I was up with the jitters most of the night and I still feel all nervous. Weird. Lesson learned though: no chai before bed!

Today will be day #1 of sight-seeing... I'm just about to do a little research online here to see what there is to do in these parts. Hope you're all well...

On Mystery Meat & Being Frozen

2009-01-12T20:54:00.002-08:00

If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that Andrew and I, along with the entire staff of this massive school we work in, have received very random gifts about once a month. We have NO idea why the school keeps dumping on us... for some reason we always think it's the last time and are surprised when there is another announcement to go down to the nurse's room and pick up our loot. This time it was a giant box of fresh vegetables each, and a mystery bag. I pulled two smaller, shrink-wrapped-ish bags out of my big bag and couldn't identify exactly what the contents were... the Chinese writing was of no assistance! I asked one of my students who was standing nearby what it was- she took it in her hands, turned it over, examined it, and finally handed it back to me saying, "It is the leg of a lamb". Oh. MMmmmmm... can hardly wait for that one! Looks like our security guards will be getting another gift (a re-gift, but they're none-the-wiser!).

In other news, Andrew and I are nearly dead from being frozen. Despite sleeping with 3 blankets, 2 hot water bottles, and 2 magic (hot) socks, we wake up chattering every morning (no central heating). Only 6 days now till we head to Singapore and Bali for our much-warmer holiday. We are SO excited for this and I've been busy online checking out which surf schools will be best for us in Bali. Can't wait to improve and ride the waves again! Woot woot!

Page 420

2009-01-05T18:09:00.005-08:00

Some things about China continue to amaze me (and not always in a good way). One of these things is censorship. Yes, China has dirt and baggage in their past, but what country doesn't? I seem to remember a rather large "incident" in Canada having to do with the Komagata Maru, for example, but rather than covering it up, it is taught about in Canadian schools and we're supposed to learn from it. Not so here in China.

I just started teaching Socials 10 here last week. The textbooks have been here since September, but were awaiting censorship before students would be allowed to use them. When I asked my colleagues for the books last week they told me there was a problem and I wouldn't be allowed to use them for the course. "What's wrong, and why has this taken 4 months to tell me?" I asked. Well, the problem was that on ONE page there was mention and pictures of the Chinese "Tianamen Square" situation in 1989 (if you're not familiar with it, just do a Google search... quicker than me explaining it all here). "Why can't we use the book if only ONE page is bad?" I asked. "Because we'd get in trouble if school officials found out" was the reply. In the end I negotiated to just have that one page removed (actually they glued it to the next page in all 48 textbooks) and the kids are now using the books. One of my students told me last week "Something's wrong with my book- this page won't open." I told her not to worry about it- that it was supposed to be like that (much to my chagrin).

If any of you are teaching or taking SS10 at the moment and are interested, it's page 420 in the Horizons- Canada Moves West textbook. Have a look.

The next blow came when I wanted to roll out the class set of shiny new atlases I'd ordered for the kids to learn about Canada thru maps (which had also been here since Sept). I asked the guys in charge for those, and was met with GRAVE concern. This time there was no gluing pages together before handing them out- they were simply denied altogether. Why? Because of all the pictures of Taiwan (of course!). For those of you who don't know, Taiwan is a seperate country in some peoples' minds, but is a part of China in the mind of the Chinese people. I guess in the atlas it's shown as a seperate country, and that wasn't cool with the book-censorship peeps. Although I only wanted the Atlas for all the various Canadian maps, the fact that many of the world maps depicted Taiwan as explained above, prevented the use of all the atlases. I got to keep ONE on my desk which I can make photocopies from, and the rest we are trying to ship back. Sad.

By the way, my blog might get shut down by the Chinese government for writing all this, but I'm willing to take my chances... if there's no more posts after this, you'll know why!

Congrats Linds & Baz!!

2008-12-28T03:02:00.003-08:00

I would like to congratulate my friend Lindsey and her now-fiance Barrie ("Baz") on their recent engagement! Linds and I have been friends since grade 8, and we all met Baz when our friends Tanessa and Denise met him randomly while traveling in England about 10 years ago. After striking up a friendship, Baz came out to Canada at least once a year to visit them and to snowboard. That's when we all met him and became friends with him. A couple years ago, Lindsey and Tanessa were traveling in Europe, met up with Baz again, and that's when things started happening with the Lindsey-and-Baz saga. Baz (who is an engineer), then decided to come to Canada for a year (this past year), mainly to snowboard and be with Linds.

Dec. 24th was Lindsey's 27th birthday, and Baz completely surprised her with an early morning proposal on the snowy shores of Spanish Banks beach in Vancouver. A treasure map and shovel were involved, I'm told.

Linds and Baz are both super excited, and a June wedding is being planned. Congrats guys!

It Arrived!

2008-12-28T02:30:00.005-08:00

Hi Everybody,

You might remember (or look back to) a few posts ago when I said that my mom, sisters, and Oma had sent us a sweet Christmas parcel as a surprise. Well, Andrew's mum did too! It was on it's way over on a boat so it took a wee bit longer to arrive, but that it did today, just 3 days after Christmas, which was perfect timing as we were still on our 4-day "Christmas holidays"... we opened it right after church and found SO much stuff inside... again, I couldn't believe how one box could hold so much stuff. All of it was individually wrapped in little pieces of Christmas wrapping paper, so we had lots of fun ripping it all open.

Here's me modeling the nice turquoise silk scarf and underwear... woot woot!

Andrew unwrapping a little Santa ornament.

Andrew holding his gift bag, which was full of wrapped pressies.

This is me, looking like I'm high on drugs (I wasn't!) cutting the box open. Sorry these pics are a little backwards in order... it takes like a year to move them around on this program, so I'll just let you use your backwards imagination!

Altogether, the package contained: socks & underwear, some chocolate bars, soap, hot chocolate powder, mittens, photos, a Christmas CD, little ornaments, Christmas napkins, etc. Aunty Margaret and Uncle Charlie were also very kind to send Andrew a really nice collared shirt (which I'm sure will look ever so dashing on him) and a really nice set of PJs for me, which I can totally use here as it's SOOOOO freezing! I've been sleeping in sweats for the past week b/c of the temp, but that just feels like I'm camping in our tent all over again, so real PJs will be a nice change tonight.

Thanks SOOOO much to the Nairns for this wonderful present of "Christmas in a Box"... we really appreciated it and felt the love.

This last pic is of ALL the cards peeps have sent us here. If you sent us a card, look closely to see if you can spot yours... I promise they're all up there, but some might be hidden. They are standing atop our oh-so-massive oven... that's what I baked the C-mas cookies in... I forgot to mention there's only room to bake 6 cookies at a time, so it's an enormous undertaking to do any baking b/c you have to sit there and wait and wait and wait... it's a 3-hour commitment!

All right, thanks again Nairns, and Merry Christmas again everyone!

Round Yon Virgin

2008-12-26T22:03:00.006-08:00

Well, needless to say, this has probably been our most "different" Christmas yet! While we've both been away from our families several times over Christmas in past years, living in China definitely tops them all for being completely different to a Western Christmas.

Most Chinese don't celebrate Christmas; instead they're super big on Chinese New Years which will be starting in about 4 weeks from now. However, they still decorate the malls with lights and pictures of Santa and play Christmas music, although I don't think they understand the background as to why Christmas is celebrated in the first place. In any case, it's nice to be around a bit of "Christmasy stuff".

At our school, our program being Canadian, us 4 teachers decided we'd totally celebrate Christmas, just like we went big with Halloween a couple months ago. We encouraged our kids to decorate their classrooms, which they did with huge initiative... the classes looked GREAT! Some of our kids even managed to get fake Christmas trees from somewhere... one for each classroom. There were sparkly garlands, snowflakes, ornaments, lights, and artwork hanging from every wall, bulletin board, ceiling, and fan... so nice!

On Dec 23rd we had a big C-mas party at school. There were games like "Pin the nose on Rudolph" and the "Rudolph Dash", a big gift exchange, a visit from Santa Clause (our principal, Ron), skits and presentations, and lots of caroling that Andrew led on his guitar. The kids were so enthusiastic... they're just fantastic to plan stuff for b/c they love whatever we do. There are no bad-attitude-kids sulking in the back saying "this sucks"... which is so refreshing for us!

In the week leading up to the Christmas party, I took some time during my classes to teach the kids some C-mas carols so they'd be primed for the carols during the party. I did this by looking up the carols online in the classroom, putting the lyrics on the overhead, and having them sing along with the computer. Of course they'd heard of songs like Rudolph and Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and Frosty, but when we'd gone thru all those "kid-friendly" songs, one kid requested Silent Night. So I looked it up online and put the words up for them. Being the obedient little Chinese kids that they are, they sang along as best they could, but I noticed some very puzzled looks on their faces when we got to parts in the song like "Round yon virgin, mother and child". I'm sure they were wondering "what the heck is a round yon virgin?". Now remember that most of these kids have grown up with zero religion, China being a communist country. In fact, we're not supposed to be saying anything about religion while teaching these kids, least of all Christianity I'm sure, but given the circumstances I couldn't really skip over it.

Terry, the English teacher, had already told them the Christmas story during her ESL lesson earlier that week, so they knew about baby Jesus, but I guess she hadn't gone into detail about how Mary had gotten pregnant with Jesus. Anyways, back to the song, the kids were very curious about this line, so we started talking about it. I tried to explain it to them by saying "well, you all know what a virgin is right? We talked about it during sex ed last month". Yes, they all remembered. "Well, Mary was a virgin when she was pregnant with Jesus". "But Mrs. Nairn, you told us you have to have sex to get pregnant". Shoot! "Yes, but Mary got pregnant because God made her pregnant without having sex". This was met with looks of disbelief from the kids, and was only exacerbated by me going on to tell about the angels in the sky singing to the shepherds below. I'm sure they were thinking "ya right, teacher" in their heads, but again, being Chinese, they would never challenge a teacher out loud like that (they believe this shows disrespect). So I said to them "Hmm, this might sound a little strange and far-fetched to you right now, eh?", to which one of our more mature kids responded, "Yes, but I'm sure you have a hard time believing all our old Chinese legends too." Touche! I really couldn't argue with him on this one.

Jay the Santa Clause in "Twas' the Night Before Christmas" presentation

Siare & Monica in a Starbucks skit

Jay, Monica, and Siare in the Starbucks skit

More Decorations... this one took 2 boys about 2 hours to tape to the wall- dedication!

Special Feature: Shane & Bonnie Mowery

2008-12-25T18:04:00.002-08:00

While living in Shanghai we've had the opportunity to meet loads of other expats, which has been great. The couple in the picture above are Shane and Bonnie from Alabama. Shane is a pilot and Bonnie's a flight attendant (that's how they met in the States). After they got married, Shane's airline went under, and he was then hired by a Chinese airline and arrived in China around the same time as us (we met them at our cell group). Here's the crazy thing: the Chinese airline hasn't had the time to train him on their planes yet, so they're paying him full-time wages and he's just hanging out here in Shanghai, waiting for their call! This is super nice for him and Bonnie b/c they have LOADS of time to do whatever they want. It's also really nice for us b/c they have become our "most available" friends. There's always a 100% guarantee that if we call them to see if they want to hang out, they'll say yes and be there within 20 minutes! We love it! Shane and Bonnie are great for playing games with, and are quite similar to us in a lot of ways, so we get on great. Bonnie and I are like two peas in a pod, and Shane is really intelligent and plays guitar, so Andrew loves being around him too... it's a good mix and is something we have been praying for (to meet a couple where both of us really like both of them, and live nearby enough to hang out with). We're looking forward to their "after-Christmas Christmas-party" on Sat night... Italian theme!

Goodness from Home!

2008-12-17T04:55:00.003-08:00

Let me begin this post by explaining that a couple months ago when our families asked what we wanted for Christmas this year we said "NOTHING!" Reason being that a)we have everything we could ever want, b)shipping is super expensive, c)almost everything is made in China anyways, so why send it back to the motherland from Canada?, and d)it would be hard for us to reciprocate and send pressies back for everyone in our families as we'd be a bit embarrassed to do that b/c the quality of many things here is a bit on the junky side. That being said, we all agreed that we'd just send each other cards this year and that would be it.
But dear Carmen (my Mom) couldn't help herself! She decided to surprise us and send us a box of Christmas goodies... mainly baking and the good old German treats I can't seem to live without at Christmas-time. She actually told me about the parcel once it was in the mail and said it was "just small"... but it sure didn't look all that small when we received it.
Moreover, it was PACKED full of amazing stuff... it must have been like putting a puzzle together b/c every square inch was stuffed full of stuff... nuts, chocolates, cookies, marzipan, German honeycake... even some Life cereal on the very top (for those of you who don't know, that's Andrew's favorite cereal in the world but it's super duper expensive here in China... for only a tiny box too, so we almost never buy it). My mom told me that she was at the post office filling Life cereal into little Ziploc bags, trying to stay within a certain weight limit... I think she must have been getting some amused looks! Also, there was a super nice card from my parents inside, plus cards from Emily, an Archie comic for Andrew from my sister Sylvia, and a box of baking and a card from my Oma Bohl... everyone was in on this! Woo hoo!
This last picture is of me first attempting to break into the parcel. My mom always wraps these Houdini-proof packages. I'm pretty sure that the delivery plane could get shot out of the sky, sink to the bottom of the ocean, sit there for 30 years, and the contents of my mom's packages would be warm, dry, and in one piece upon discovery! I'm not kidding... it took me about 10 minutes just to get into the box itself, using various cutting tools...
It's been so nice having all these wonderful Christmas treats in the house, and we are SO thankful to everyone who contributed... thanks guys! It was really unexpected!

I wasn't planning on doing any C-mas baking myself this year, mainly b/c our kitchen counter space here in China is no bigger than 2ft x 2ft. I'm not kidding... it's smaller than the top of an elementary school kid's desk, if that helps you visualize it. It's so frustrating trying to make anything, including meals b/c there's no place to put anything... I end up standing things on the gas stove, inside the sink, and in the tiny little dish-drying basket. Sometimes I even have to balance things on the top of the fridge. I won't complain any further here b/c I know we still have a lot more than most people in the world do. It's just a lot less space than I'm used to in a kitchen.

Anyways, all that being said, our cell group is have an outreach-type Christmas party this Friday night, and I was asked to coordinate all the food. It's just finger-food and desserts (not a big meal), so that's fine, but I figured I should bake something Christmasy instead of copping out and buying gross Chinese-y fried things in bags... that's like bringing chips and pop instead of nice stuff for C-mas. So I got a recipe for sugar cookies online and have been working on them the past 2 nights. They turned out okay, but taste a little funny b/c I had to use Chinese dumpling-flour to make them... that's the only kind of flour they have here... unless you want to pay around $10 for a little bag of the imported Rogers flour, which is crazy! Anyways, the point is, our apartment is warm and cozy and smells like Christmas cookies. While I was doing this, Andrew was practicing C-mas carols on the guitar as he's playing for the cell-group party's caroling part, and for our students' C-mas party next week. The music sounds great!

While I was writing this post, Andrew was just watching CNN and we caught the part about the Whistler gondola-post snapping in half... freaky!! You gotta think that those kinds of things are always on peoples' minds as they ride up the lifts on ski mountains... at least I always think of that "what if" scenario whenever I'm riding up. I always end up convincing myself that these things never happen in developed countries like Canada, and that they would only ever happen in new little ski-countries like Latvia or Slovenia or whatever... guess not! The snow at Whistler looked nice on TV though... kind of wish I were there (just not on that gondola!).

K, gotta go... hope you're all having a great time getting ready for C-mas. To those of you in our immediate family: watch for your C-mas cards in the mail... they should arrive soon!

The Latest...

2008-12-09T19:08:00.004-08:00

Hi Guys,

Well, we're coming up to Christmas and are as busy as ever. Last week our school was inspected by some Ministry of Education inspectors from Victoria, BC... thankfully we passed the inspection, but it was a lot of work and stress.

Although Chinese people don't traditionally celebrate Christmas, they have definitely hopped on the bandwagon of decorating their main mall/shopping areas really nicely with lights, Santa Clauses, and Rudolphs. There's even some fake snow (white pebbles) for Santa to drive his sleigh over!

As we are teaching at a Chinese school (as opposed to an international school), we don't get the traditional 2-week Christmas holidays off (but we do get Dec 25-26 off). Instead of that 2-week C-mas holiday, we get 3 weeks off for Chinese New Year from Jan 17-Feb8. The great part about this is that we can go on a really nice holiday, which we booked flights for a few weeks ago and are now booking accomodations for. We were originally hoping to go to Thailand and Vietnam, but as it turns out, they are on the same "lunar calendar" as China, meaning that they also have holidays during Chinese New Year. This means that prices to fly and stay there are higher, and the areas will be crazier than usual... not our bag! Our travel agent here did manage to snag us some good prices to Bali (in Indonesia) though, so that's where we're headed! The cool thing is that on the way there we'll get to spend 4 days in Singapore, and on the way back we're gonna spend some time in Hong Kong. So really, we get to see 3 places.

Not only that, but once we're in Bali, we're gonna go island-hopping around the area. I've been doing a bunch of research and there are a few tiny tropical islands nearby (that you have to take a ferry to from Bali). These islands are so small that there are no cars, motorbikes, etc allowed on them... the only transportation is bikes or horses! Isn't that cool? We're gonna be staying in little huts right on the beach... cheap & cheerful! Because these little islands are very close together, we'll spend a few days on each, taking a little boat between them whenever we've had enough of one and need a change of scenery. These islands boast white sandy beaches, blue waters, and amazing diving and snorkling. When we're in Bali we hope to do some surfing, check out the monkey forest, and see some little villages which manufacture silver and wooden things. We are super excited for all of this!

The 3 tiny Tropical Islands (called the "Gili Islands")

Map of Bali (in Indonesia). We'll be staying in the south (town of Kuta).

Beach huts on one of the Gili Islands... I think this is the deluxe model though... we'll be roughing it!

On a sour note, our computer has gone belly-up... strange b/c it's a Mac and I thought they were supposed to be unbreakable... I guess not. What happened is that when I tried to turn it on this past weekend, the screen lit up with the Apple sign (like normal), but it didn't load beyond that to the normal user screen, even after many hours. Andrew got up early this morning to call the Mac store in Vancouver to see what the problem might be, and it seems that it's either a "corrupt operating system" or a failed hard drive. Anyways, they advised him to insert the "start-up disk" that came with the computer... guess where that is? It's in Gill & Tony's basement (Andrew's parents) somewhere in the depths of one of our many boxes that are all unmarked (b/c we didn't have time to organize all our junk while moving). There's no way I'm gonna ask Gill or Tony to go digging thru all our stuff, so we're just gonna have to figure this one out. If any of you computer experts have any bright ideas, please let us know! I'm pretty worried about it b/c ALL our stuff is on that computer, including all our photos from the past 3.5 years and a ton of coursework that I've prepared. We're gonna try to get it fixed this weekend here in Shanghai, but I'm concerned about losing all our files.

Anyways, that's all of our latest and greatest... hope you're all doing well!

PTIs and Adult Sports Day

2008-11-30T22:30:00.002-08:00

Hi Everyone,

I feel like I haven't posted anything on the blog for a while as Andrew was up for "blog duty" last weekend... I think he did a great job by the way!

I wish I'd had my camera with me last week, but I didn't, so you'll have to settle for a little post without pics- sorry.

Last Thursday was had our first Parent-Teacher Interviews. Of our 48 students, 44 parents came out, which is a SUPER high percentage compared to what we're used to in Canada. Usually at home it's also the parents who don't really need to come, who are the ones that show up. Ie- it's the parents of the well-behaved A-students who show up, when the peeps you really need to see are the parents of the maniac ADHD F-students. So these Chinese parents came for the interviews last Thurs and all were super concerned about their kids... it was funny b/c since my course (Planning 10) isn't that hard, many kids are getting somewhere in the 90s. Many of the parents wanted to know how their child could improve on their mark. I was like "Ummmm, well, little Mei-Ling here is getting 96% already... I'd say that's pretty good for now!" Parents were also super interested in what kind of university their kid would be able to get into, (based on their Term 1 mark from grade 10). Again, we were like "well... it's great that you're concerned about that now, but you really don't need to worry about that quite yet." The other thing that they ALL asked was where their child ranked in the class. Middle of the pack (in the 80s) wasn't good enough, and many kids got dirty looks from their parents. I guess it's just really different here in China where each couple is only allowed to have one child... it's their one big investment and they don't want it to get messed up. Also, in China there aren't enough seats in the universities for everyone to get in, so it's extremely competitive... much moreso than at home. The kids are in school every day from 7:30am to 4:30pm, then have about an hour off for dinner, and then have a mandatory 3-hour study period in the evenings (those who live in the dorms). It's CRAZY!!

The other event that we had last Friday after school was Teacher's Sports Day. It was held out on the school field, and all the staff (0ver 100 of us) took part in a bunch of games... all these crazy things like sack-hopping, 3-legged jump-rope running, picking up ping pong balls with chopsticks, the tennis-ball shuffle relay, etc. My favorite one was where we had to tie a garbage can to our back (with big elastic bands, like a backpack), and catch badminton birdies that were served to us by our teammate from the other side of the net... it was really challenging. At the end of it all each teacher received a big cheesecake to take home. Yup, another random present from the Teacher's Union. I told the Chinese teachers that in Canada we have to pay dues to our union... here they give us cheesecake... works for me! For those of you who have been keeping up with our blog, you'll know that this isn't the first random present to be bestowed upon us this year... we've had boxes of pear-apples, big bottles of cooking oil, gift certificates to the hair salon, boxes of mandarin oranges, etc... they just keep the goods coming... each time more random than the next! We're very thankful though.

Alright, hope you're all well and enjoying getting ready for Christmas. Even here in Shanghai there are lights and trees going up all over the place, which is nice. The Chinese don't celebrate Christmas, but there are so many foreigners here, I guess it's caught on. The bigger reason is probably so they can rake in more cash... who knows.

Bye!

Weekend Trip

2008-11-21T21:26:00.009-08:00

Hey, it's Andrew with more news. Last weekend (Nov. 15/16) we went on a guided tour of a small city called Suzhou (Soo-jo) that is about 2 hours outside Shanghai. We left on Saturday morning from our school at around 8 am. There were about 10 of us who went, including the principle of our school, other school admin, and us four Canadians. We visited several great historic sites, such as a Buddhist temple that was built at the top of a mountain, and a tea house that was also on a mountain, both of which we had to hike up to. They took us out for meals at nice restaurants, and the food was "interesting", but not by Canadian standards. It is difficult to keep an appetite, when each meal has at least one plate with a bird or fish looking up you! We stayed at a decent hotel on Sat. night (think Ramada Inn), and then did some shopping at a huge market on Sunday. Then it was back in our large passenger van, and we returned home by Sunday evening. Good times! Hope you like the pics.

Cheers, Andrew

Shanghai Master's Tennis Tournament

2008-11-21T21:04:00.005-08:00

Hey everyone, it's Andrew. On Nov. 13th, Corinna and I went to see the Master's Tennis tournament that was held in Shanghai. It's a bit like Wimbledon, but on a smaller scale, and only men's tennis. We went out the the stadium, which is about an hour and a half bus ride from where we are, and arrived at around 2 pm. It is a very nice facility, which holds approx. 5,000 fans, and is probably less than 5 years old. The roof even opens up for summer events.

As for the matches, we saw a two men's doubles matches, and two men's singles. The most exciting one was between the number 3 ranked in the world Djokovic and the number 6 Tsonga. It was a great tennis, with lot's of amazing net play, and in the end, the "underdog" Tsonga came out victorious. However, at the end of the week, Djokovic was declared the overall winner of the tournament, after beating Roger Federrer a few days later. Here are some pics of the event, and the winner Tsonga signing the camera lens after the game.

Fire Drill

2008-11-10T21:00:00.002-08:00

This morning we had a fire drill at school. In Canada a fire drill is like a big free-for-all... an event that usually takes up most of a class, and therefore is pretty popular.

In China, of course you wouldn't want to take away any time away from the Math lesson, so the fire drill is held before school (instead of the daily morning exercise session). In Canada, everyone knows it's just a drill and therefore it can be a bit rowdy... here in China however, we had the firetruck come out for the event, smoke bombs detonated in hallways, and all students jogging in and out of the buildings in perfect single-file lines. Then the head fireman got up on stage and gave a speech to the students while they were standing out on the track... the whole event was videotaped, photographed, and had it's own special banner going across the outdoor stage. It took less than 15 minutes. Very impressive!

Teaching Sex Ed in China!

2008-10-31T22:34:00.002-07:00

That's right, I was the lucky person who got to teach a bunch of Chinese grade 10's sex-ed!

Here's the deal: this semester I'm teaching a Canadian course called "Planning 10". This is the same course as "Guidance" or "CAPP" or "Personal Planning"... it varies in name from place to place, country to country. The course covers lots of useful life stuff, such as healthy living, education & careers, finances, etc. In the healthy living unit, sex ed was one of the things I was supposed to teach, but I wasn't sure if I should actually do it as it's a bit of a taboo subject in China. I decided to go ahead with it b/c I think kids need to know about it. I totally thought the kids would be really shy and nervous to talk about it, but from the time I walked into the classroom and wrote "SEX" on the board in big letters, they were hooked!! They got kind of giggly but settled down well. We did a lot of brainstorming as a class, which is normally a risky thing to do as these kids are so shy and afraid of giving wrong answers that class discussions usually don't fly. However, on this topic almost everyone had things to contribute!!

The height of excitement was at the end of the week when I pulled out "Mr. Banana" and did the condom demo. The guys sitting at the back of the classroom put up their hands and asked if they could move their chairs up closer for a better view! Never have I seen students SO interested in learning anything before! Of course I was a little nervous doing this too, and really hoped nobody would be walking by the classroom and looking thru the windows in the hallway!

Of course I told the kids that it's best to wait until you're married to have sex, but I think it's very naive to assume that ALL the kids would actually adhere to this advice, and given all the nasty STD's out there (which the students studied in detail), I thought it would be best that they know how to better protect themselves.

Overall, a very successful set of lessons... don't think they'll ever forget it, nor will I!

Halloween '08

2008-10-31T22:10:00.004-07:00

Yesterday we had a big Halloween party for our kids here. It was funny b/c Halloween isn't really that big here in China, so this was the kids' first time dressing up for it... they were as excited as 5-year-olds, which was great to see! We'd been prepping them and teaching them a little about Halloween for the past week, so they were clued in. We decided we would skip the afternoon classes on Friday and a have a bunch of games for them.

The 48 students were divided into 8 teams of 6 and were competing against each other in all the games, of which we kept a grand tally so that one team won the grand prize (ice cream) at the end. As always, our students were totally into it! We had pumpkin bowling, apple bobbing, the mummy wrap (with a mummy dance!), a string weave, and a candy-guessing-jar.
Andrew and I went to Toys R Us here in Shanghai to get our costumes. Sadly, they didn't have a very good selection, and the only adult costume they had was Dracula, so that's what Andrew was. I opted for the fairy costume, but had to settle for the 2-6 year-old version of it... tiny wings, hairband, wand, and a tutu that looked more like a little ruffle on me!
The best reaction of the day was when Andrew walked into the classroom dressed as Dracula. As you can see from the picture above, it was like the Chinese Paparazzi... they all rushed up to him and started taking his picture and saying "Ohhhhhh Mista Nay-rayn..." Very funny!

Even the Principal and Vice Principal of the big Chinese school we work in came up to be part of the party... various kids donated parts of their costumes for a bit so they could feel included in the dressing up... at one point the principal was wearing a big black witch's hat with long neon-green hair attached... he was lovin' it!

I am so happy with our students... they really took the initiative to make this party even better. Without being asked, they somehow came up with tons of decorations for the rooms, painted artwork for the walls, etc. What a great memory!

Congratulations!

2008-10-31T21:57:00.002-07:00

We would like to publicly congratulate Andrew's cousin Ange and her husband Ian on the birth of their twins, Ella Campbell and Riley Rowan Van Schoor (in South Africa). The twins were born last week and weighed just over 2kg each... tiny little things and SO cute! This has been a very long awaited birth, and we are incredibly thrilled for this new little family of four. Congratulations Ange and Ian!

A Quick Update

2008-10-31T21:25:00.003-07:00

Hi Everyone,

Hope you're all well. Sorry I haven't posted anything for a couple weeks. The reason is this: I'm on my computer SO much at work that by the time I get home in the evening I have absolutely NO interest in sitting down at the computer again. And on the weekends... well, last weekend we spent about 4 hours talking to friends and family on the phone. As nice as it was, after sitting for that long I again had no interest in sitting any longer in order to type type type. So I hope you will understand the infrequency of these posts from time to time!

That being said, we are doing really really well here in Shanghai. We've been here for 2 months now and are definitely feeling a little more settled in than we were last month. We're really enjoying our church and home group, as well as our jobs. Our students continue to be excellent (most of them anyways!). They are so hardworking, respectful, friendly, co-operative, etc. I always look forward to teaching them, which is more than I can say for teaching in Canada! Honestly, for the first time in years I am really enjoying my teaching job... I just hope this lasts! I feel like we've hit the jackpot of jobs here: great job that pays well, nice apartment (which we don't have to pay for), lively city, the chance for Andrew and I to be together more than we were in Vancouver, cheap manicures and massages right across the street, good food, etc.

October has been a really nice month in terms of weather here. When we first arrived here at the end of August it was SO hot and humid... just standing outside would cause us to sweat in buckets, nevermind walking anywhere! (We just got used changing our clothes all the time and doing TONS of laundry). September was much the same as August. Anyways, October has been mostly sunny (only 2 or 3 days of rain) with temperatures in the low-mid 20's (celcius). Still warm enough to wear shorts and a t-shirt with maybe a light sweater in the evenings, but not sticky-sweaty-hot. Today is November 1st and you can definitely notice that it's cooling off, but it's still no colder than 15 degrees ever so far. Very comfortable.

We're also making friends here, slowly but surely. It's funny b/c apparently there are thousands of ex-pats here in Shanghai, but they're all mixed in with the other 18 million Chinese people, so you have to hunt for the white people... kinda like doing a "where's Waldo?" picture. We've met quite a few cool people thru our church and home group, and then last Sat we went to a volleyball night. It's a group of expats that play v-ball every Sat night at a local high school gym. We weren't quite sure what to expect but decided to give it a go. It turned out to be a way higher level than we're used to with a lot of intense players, but everyone was really friendly and we had a great time. Don't think we'll make it a regular thing, but def once in a while.

As for missing home, it's not too bad. I know Andrew is wishing he could be in Whistler in a few weeks from now (when the mountains open), and I'm def missing playing soccer with my team in Vancouver. I feel so sad for my poor little cleats, sitting there all alone in my cleat-bag in our shoe closet here. I brought them along in hopes of finding a team to play with here, but so far I haven't been able to find anything suitable, despite having searched tons since we arrived. O well, maybe something will still come up.

Our church is great and we are continually challenged by the messages, and thus we are growing, which is great! At our home group we are doing a multi-week study on serving others, which has spawned a lot of good discussions among the group. Andrew and I usually continue these discussions afterwards as it's about a 30-min walk back home. So we're learning and growing a lot together.

Next weekend (Nov 7-9) Andrew and I are going to a marriage conference. We heard it being advertised at our church so decided to sign up. It's being held at the Ramada hotel across town and I'm SO excited to sleep in a big soft comfy hotel bed!! I've heard that the conference part is also super and will bring your marriage to a whole new level. So we'll see how it goes... def looking forward to it.

Alrighty, that's about it in terms of an update. I really hope you're all doing well!

Congratulations!

2008-10-31T00:00:00.002-07:00

We would like to publicly congratulate Andrew's cousin Ange and her husband Ian (in South Africa) on the birth of their twins, Ella Campbell and Riley Rowan Van Schoor. The twins were born last week and weighed just over 2 kg each... tiny! This has been a long-awaited birth and we are so incredibly thrilled for this new little family of four!

On Being Together 20/7

2008-10-19T05:29:00.002-07:00

Some of you may be wondering if Andrew and I are driving each other crazy after being together SO much all the time. It's true, we are together about 20 hours every day, more on the weekends. Pretty much the only time we are ever apart is when we are teaching (but even then, our classrooms are right next to each other!). Otherwise we eat, sleep, sing, pray, work out, shop, walk, clean, swim, and brush our teeth together, side by side. I thought we might get on each others' nerves, but so far so good. Of course I'd be lying if I said that we're always happy with each other 100% of the time... there are times when that's NOT the case. But another benefit of being together so much is that we can't hide it or walk away from each other... nope, we've got to sort it out and work it thru on the spot. We both agree that we've grown a bit in our marriage since arriving here, even though it's only been 7 weeks, which is great! Thank you again to all of you who are praying for, keeping us in your thoughts, and encouraging us with phone calls, emails, etc. You mean tons to us!!

Thanksgiving '08

2008-10-18T18:40:00.002-07:00

Ammar with the 25 lb turkey!

The HUGE turkey!

The 28 guests packed into Ammar's living room

Many of you have been asking us if we celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving over here last weekend, and yes we did! We recently met a couple at church called Pam and Ammar. Pam is from Manitoba and her boyfriend Ammar is from Oregon & Kuwait. Anyways, we started hanging out with them and really enjoy their company... they are both really into working out, being outside, travelling, etc... much the same as us. They invited us to their feast and we were thrilled... we actually looked forward to it ALL week long b/c we're getting a bit tired of just eating rice and noodles over here and were stoked for some proper Western food. Ammar hosted it at his house as it's huge, and it was pot-luck style, so everyone brought a dish. Team AC did it's typical mondo-salad!! Loads of people from their schools, work, and church were invited and it was a great opportunity to meet more expats our age. Ammar's apartment was also incredible... he is on the 18th floor with windows all over it, looking out over a man-made lake in his complex (where you can rent kayaks), the city, and farmland WAY off in the distance. He is actually paying more rent there than we are renting our place out for in Vancouver... o ya, China can be expensive if you want it to be. This place was like the Hilton! We will be happy to go visit him again!

The only lousy thing that happened that night was that my mobile phone was stolen out of my purse on the subway trip on the way over to Ammar's house. I was SO careful to keep my purse in front of me the whole time b/c it was super duper crowded in the subway, but then moved it behind me for only about one minute while walking over to the doors right before we got off. I guess that's when it must have been stolen. To be fair, it was kinda my fault b/c it wasn't zipped deep into my purse like it should have been to make it more secure. But still, someone lifted the flap-pocket of my purse, found the phone, and took it. Arggh! The funny thing is that everyone I've told over here in Shanghai has had absolutely no sympathy for me... they all say stuff like "well you really should have been more careful" or "ya, that's happened to me 3 times on the subway already, be careful!".... so I guess I learned my lesson the hard way. The good news is that I bought a way cooler phone yesterday that I like even better than the stolen one... so it's all good!

Anyways, that's last week's update... sorry for the delay! Hope you're all well.