Spring Festival

Soooo I'm not sure what's going on with my job right now, the school is having problems hiring me through the University (Beijing Foreign Studies University). If worse comes to worst I'll go home when my visa expires in April, but that probably won't happen. I'm applying for more positions, but it's a little hard since everyone is on vacation. I have a month to find something though. Last time I was able to find something in a week. I'm not too worried about it for some reason.

I had winter camp last week (7 days). It was 10 10-12 year olds who were practicing for a speech competition. It was extremely exhausting and I'm so glad it's over but it had its small amounts of fun. I feel like I'm being a little biased, but if I was judging a speech competition on a favorite book (written in English) I would choose Uncle Tom's Cabin over a Garfield comic book. Just saying.

A couple weeks ago I went to a tv station and helped them translate the Golden Globes. It was a lot of fun, I think it was the first time I watched more than 15 minutes of the Golden Globes. I translated 5 awards; just basically helped a Chinese person with very good English understand some things that he doesn't understand. It makes so much sense that they need help when you have to explain why people are using the words insemination, gesticulation, and birth to explain how a movie was made and how to translate it into Chinese.

Spring Festival is coming up. There are random fireworks/firecrackers going off multiple times a day. It stinks cause the fireworks aren't very high, so whenever I hear something I rush to the window but I've only ever seen them once. I think Dan is getting annoyed with me. You can buy fireworks on the street, but Dan doesn't want me to. I think it would probably be a disaster if I tried to set some off anyway.

The new year is the year of the rabbit. Apparently that means that everyone is buying a rabbit as a pet...and having them shipped to their homes in boxes...and the rabbits are dying on the way there...it's a little sad.

Dan just started his two week break for Spring Festival. I have some tutoring that I'll be doing during it, nothing too hard or stressful or anything. The 13 year old girl I've been tutoring got into an international school!

I can't remember what else is going on with my life. The Superbowl is coming up! It will be our first football game here, so we're excited. Dan should be hearing back from grad schools soon, which will help determine the rest of our life...for the next couple years anyway, so you can pray that at least one comes back positive (I'm rooting for the East Coast).

I always remember my funny stories after I publish my blog, so I'm sorry if my blogs are boring.


Random Stories:



I composed my own Chinese sentence a couple weeks ago. I was buying something and realized I had one more yuan than I thought I did and the lady realized that and tried to sell me some coffee and I said "wo yi ding you" and I was really proud of myself and she laughed at me and repeated what I said. I said yi ding instead of yi jing so instead of saying I already have one I said I certainly have one. Oh well, it could have been worse.

I had a demo class with this 17 year old guy whose English wasn't really good. At the end I told him he should watch English movies to improve his English but not listen to music, because people use words improperly sometimes in music and he started talking about black people English and started saying "wassup".

I was talking about music with a 13 year old girl I tutor and I asked her what her favorite band was so I could find it on the internet. She said it was a Russian band (she's half Ukrainian) and told me the name of the band. I wrote it down (she pronounces it like Spanish) and saw that I wrote down Viagra. I felt bad that I didn't like the band, but it's hard to like something when it has that name and a 13 year old girl likes something with that name. In its defense, it's actually Via Gra, but still.

OH! And my English is getting worse. I pronounced Haiti with the last I being long a couple times one day, and my grammar is pretty bad. I can't spell anymore either. It's because the majority of the people I talk to don't speak English well, so it's making mine worse. 

We're doing well, we're having a nice break. I still need to publish my ranting post sometime.

*Yawns*

Sorry, again, I would usually write blog posts at work during my crazy long breaks, but I'm not working there until March so my schedule's been all thrown off.

Dan and I had a nice relaxing Christmas. We ended up with three new movies so we watched some of those. We now have a kindle and a spiffy case which is useful when you're on the subway or a bus for awhile, which is pretty much every day for me. You can't get to very many parts of Beijing without taking a bus or the subway, and buses take a little while because there's almost always traffic, so the kindle is amazing. Dan's Mom also sent us lots and lots of food, which is not gone yet and it's tasted amazing. Mint brownies, shortbread, cheese, fudge, maple syrup, and some candy. I didn't think it was possible to send home-made stuff overseas, but I guess it is. I'm looking forward to making my Mom send us stuff *cough cough*.

We're the type of people who would rather stay home and watch tv than go out on new years, so on new years we DID stay up until midnight (two hours later than usual) and toasted the new year...and then went to bed...Someone was also setting off fireworks around 11 Saturday morning which didn't make much sense to me.

Right now I'm tutoring a 13 year old half Ukrainian half Chinese girl every weekday for two hours so she can get into an International school. She speaks really good English, but just has trouble with some grammar. I tutor two Chinese kids on Sunday afternoons, and a girl during the week and I'm doing a Saturday class one more time this Saturday. I'm also going to be doing a winter camp and help primary school students write speeches for a competition. So I'm a lot less busy than when I was teaching, but I feel like I'm traveling a lot more. I was really worried about work before but God has completely blessed us and worked everything out (in a matter of days). Basically every place I applied to did nothing, (I was also telling people during this time that God wanted me to chill, but I guess I didn't want to) besides the winter camp. I got all my jobs from this other place that has Americans (and they're also Christians) working there.

Dan has a week off because it's in between semesters. We decided to compromise and play a computer game together instead of fighting over the computer, so that will probably be a lot of our week next week.

It's also FREEZING over here. I can't wait for spring. It's also really really dry, 0% chance of precipitation. every day.

I want to write a blog post about random things about China, but I'm sure if it'll be a good post, or just me ranting about random things.