Taj update

This is Shannon Haggard, Taj's teacher. He used to teach in Phuket, so he was a great help in planning our trip to Thailand - we are leaving tomorrow night!! Taj is lucky...Mr. Shannon is a great teacher and lots of fun. In fact, Taj's class is going ice skating at a local rink tomorrow, and they had popcorn and movie day today! So life is treating Taj well, as you can see!
I won't be blogging until we get back from our trip, but I hope to have lots of pictures and fun things to post after we have been in Thailand for 8 days! See you later!

Chinese Traditional Medicine

So, as I mentioned in the last post, we toured the Chinese traditional medicine district in Hong Kong Central. There was SO much we didn't recognize, and all of it was very intriguing. Here are some quick shots of a few of the items on sale:
The roadside store shrines were our favorite thing, though. We found the little cubbies filled with incense and calligraphy and offerings very charming and peaceful in the midst of this busy city.

Hong Kong!

Yesterday, we all made the trek in to Hong Kong! We left by ferry, just down the road from us; it takes about 45 minutes. We landed in Central, found our bearings, and then toured the area a bit. Our first locale was ALL shops full of Chinese medecine ingredients...more on that in another post.

After riding the double-decker cable car for a short distance, we found an Indian restaurant (priorities, you know!) where we pigged out!!

Next Mission: the metro across the bay to Kowloon to find the Toys-R-Us! After some sign-language and broken English with a cab driver we found it and the boys were VERY HAPPY...they'd really been wanting some Lego! Shopping in HK is a BIG DEAL - not really our thing, but it was an adventure.

(We found a book store, so that made it worthwhile for me!) Back to our ferry and home by 7:30 p.m. - we were tired but happy.

International Brunch

Today our school hosted the International Brunch, where everyone comes in their native dress and brings something good to eat from their culture. Our school has 46 countries represented, so there was such a variety of tasty dishes and wonderful outfits.

It was so much fun; the food was ridiculously good and, as you can see, the kids are so so cute. The teachers are cute too...

Dart made a great slide show on Facebook, so if you wanna see a few more shots, go to http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30138042&l=382e4&id=1023629318

Little Readers

The kids here are just so CUTE. They really love to read, even though for some of them to read in English is a real struggle. They really make it so easy to love my work here, even though some days by four o'clock I feel like I was hit by a large truck!!

Badminton, anyone?

Wednesday night is Badminton Night for the teachers at our school gym, and this was the first time I felt well enough to go. I LOVE badminton; I played throughout my childhood, so I am pretty excited to be able to do it on a regular basis!

David, Ivy, myself, and Wendy after a fabulous game of doubles!

Old and New

Dart has captured some snapshots in which the old ways of China bump into modern ways in this town. The area around Shenzhen (The Special Economic Zone) was created as an economic experiment in the late eighties, and whole cities were built on what had been fishing villages and shoreline. So it is particulary noticeable here how traditional China mingles with the new, Western ways.

Art-chitecture

This building is on the way to Shenzhen from Shekou (where we live).

Dart and I think it is one of the coolest pieces of architecture we've seen here or anywhere!

Him Again!

Okay, I waited a whole week before showing off the kitten some more! He's growing a ton and is full of mischief. I think he'll eat us out of house and home!! He does have a few cute-n-sleepy moments a day - thank goodness:

My Library!

When I first got here I was a bit afraid, because my library was shrink wrapped (there was construction done over the summer) and filled with dust! But we got it cleaned up, got rid of a lot of junk and now it is quite cheery. Still working on the smell, though! (it smells like new play-doh!)

There is a big dragon that wraps around my reading area, which I didn't get a picture of, but I'll get one soon. You can just see its tail in this shot.

I work with two lovely ladies, Maggie (on left) and Jane (on right). Jane is my full time assistant and Maggie works in Dart's library in the Middle School but comes over to help out here a lot. We are "Team Library!"

Here is one more view:
I teach 25 classes a week, so I am SWAMPED, but the kids are so much fun and are avid readers, so of course, I LOVE MY JOB!