Advertisement
Published: December 7th 2011
Edit Blog Post
Today, we have been in China for 3 months and sometimes I wonder where the time has gone and other days it seems to not go by quick enough.
This last month, we lost my Grandma Mosher at the grand age of 95. She was quite the woman and it brings tears to my eyes as I type this. I have so many great memories of her as she only lived 5 minutes away from us as I grew up. Every time I came home from China, CA or NIU I would go visit her to say hi and catch up on her stories. I learned so much about our family history from her. Grandma loved playing cards, gardening, knitting and making warm blankets for us all. When we were kids we would dress up in her clothes, put on her jewelry and makeup and play for hours at her house. I will greatly miss seeing her on our next trip to IL but I know she is enjoying being in Heaven with Grandpa and my uncle Lyle.
What else have we been up to? Here are a few quick things that come to mind. We found two bowling
alleys in Hangzhou with the most recent one being the more updated bowling alley. We have had 3 bowling nights out with George, a foreign teacher, who we found to replace us at our old school when we left a year ago this weekend. We went to a KTV Birthday party with a Chinese friend, Andy, who teaches at our old school. Enjoyed a great meal with Andy at this restaurant where the menu was an IPAD. Most recently, we had dinner with Ms Gao, English Department Head, and Millie, another English teacher from our old school.
School wise, one of the foreign teachers flew back to the US without advising anyone and quit. With this happening it left 7 classes now without a foreign teacher. Unfortunately, for me I had a day off when he taught 3 classes and had another opening during his time slots. Now I teach 4 of his 7 classes. Two other foreign teachers also got his other 3 classes added to their schedule. So instead of working 3 days a week, I am working 4 and have 26.5 hrs of teaching time plus 8 hours of bus riding time (2 hrs each day
of work= 1 hr there and 1 hr back). I should be getting a decent overtime check for December but OT doesn’t work the same in China as the US.
Our contract states 16 teaching hours a week and any hours over that we get paid our regular pay, not time and a half. I am just crossing my fingers that the school doesn’t try to pull a fast one on me and not pay me correctly. Otherwise when we return from our vacation I will be fighting for my pay.
We celebrated Thanksgiving by working on Thursday and Friday but on Friday evening we made a nice Thanksgiving meal. This was our 3
rd Thanksgiving in China but our 1
st Thanksgiving with just us. It was nice and we had lots to be thankful for. Next year, we hope to be celebrating in Las Vegas with the Winter/Merriam Family.
Today, we bought a little Christmas tree and have decorated our apartment. Thanks to Aunt Rita who made our stockings we have them hung proudly in our apartment. There is no chimney for Santa to come down but they are hung right by the door so it will
be easy access for him to put something nice in them while we are celebrating Christmas in Shanghai with Laura and Laurence.
We are busy trying to get situated for our first guests in China, wrap up the final 3 weeks of this term, head to Hong Kong for New Year’s Eve with Laura and then on to India. We both are looking forward to December 23
rd when we meet Laura and Laurence in Shanghai. We wish everyone a Merry Christmas as I know the next 3 weeks will go by quickly or at least I hope they do.
Sending All our Love from China!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.375s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 20; qc: 84; dbt: 0.2389s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb