Sunday, December 28, 2008
Congrats Linds & Baz!!
It Arrived!
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!
Friday, December 26, 2008
Round Yon Virgin
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Special Feature: Shane & Bonnie Mowery
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Goodness from Home!
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!
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
The Latest...
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!