Dumpling Party!!

Sunday (yesterday) I had a few students/friends over to my apartment to make dumplings. Arwen, Winter, Max, Lance, Michael, Vince and CiCi all came over around 4:30...Meghan was there, too! It was a great time. However, during the process I learned that my apartment is way, way, way too small for that many people to try to cook something that has so many steps! It was very entertaining, and I have included a link to the photos later in this blog entry so you can enjoy those. One funny story that happened during the dumpling making...the students were giving each other instructions in Chinese. I told them that this is an English only apartment and that they needed to give the direction in English. So, everytime one of them would start to speak in Chinese, everyone would yell at them to speak in English. After one of the incidents where we had to remind someone to speak in English (in the tv room of my apartment) we heard Winter (from the kitchen) yell, "shit" really loud. It was awesome! Our students are now even using bad words in English (only in our apartments though...not on campus or in class!!). We kept making dumplings as we were eating them, and after about half of the ingredients had been used, we all realized how full we were. We didn't even get through half of the dumplings that were made. Not only that, we still had dough and fulling left to make more! So, we had Max take the left over dough and filling to his family's house (since they live here in Chengde), and then I froze the alread made dumplings in my freezer. It was ridiculious how many dumplings we made!

Here are the pictures of the dumpling party!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2053382&l=c724e&id=34000178

This week in my classes, we are doing something a little bit different. I am leaving for Beijing on Thursday, thus meaning that I have rescheduled my Thursday and Friday classes to Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. So, we continued on with tenses, becuase this is very confusing to my students. Then we played a game called, "To Tell The Truth". It was based off of the old TV show. I had my students write down on a sheet of paper a secret that no many people in the room would know about them. I also warned them that these should be secrets that they are comfortable sharing with the class. When they were finished writing their secrets, three volunteers were selected to come down to the front of the room. These volunteers gave me their secrets and I read one of them outloud. Then, the three students up front had to pretend that this was their secret while the class asked them questions. The students sitting in the class were to ask questions to try to figure out which student is telling the truth. It was a lot of fun and my students were really getting into it. I thought they were going to start throwing things at each other!! It was crazy!!

This weekend, Thursday through Monday morning, we are going to Beijing. It will be a good time, I hope. We are meeting up with some of the Drake teachers from the Shiz. It is alwasy fun to meet up with other Americans. I think that trips to Beijing are going to have to be a monthly tradition. We have already planned our first meal in Beijing. On Thursday we will arrive at approximately 11 am, and we will head straight to Papa Johns for some pizza! There are no places in Chengde to get pizza, so this is a treat for us! I don't care where we eat for the rest of the meals, as long as I get pizza at least once while in Beijing!

That's about it here. It is starting to get pretty cold. Today the wind was awful. The bad thing about Chengde is it gets biterly cold, but it doesn't snow very often. I wish that were not the case and it would so a little, but do it often. That way at least their seems to be a reason for it to be this cold! Oh well....