June Update

Home » Urumqi June 23, 2008 No Comment
Hey everybody! It’s been a while since we’ve given you a more personal update of our lives here in China, so here we go:
  • Although school has been out for a while in America now, we’re just now coming to a close here in China. We gave our final tests the past two weeks and now the kids are taking all the rest of their finals before school officially ends at the end of this week. This semester flew by pretty fast!
  • We are now officially the only Americans here in Karamay! It seems as though our international body will be diversifying over the next couple of months. As it sits right now there are two Americans (us), four Filipinos, and two Australians. I think we’re expecting a man from Africa soon as well as one or two more not-yet-hired prospects from either Canada or America.
  • As a small celebration of school ending we decided to take a quick trip to Urumqi, the capital with our Filipino friends. There we enjoyed a little bit of shopping, eating at our favorite Tex-Mex restaurant, meeting up with both our Chinese and American friends there, and visiting “the good place” as it has been so fondly translated. “The Good Place”, in case you were wondering, is an officially-sanctioned gathering hall which hosts an English study on Saturdays. Here we were able to make contact with another young man who was able to share his story with us over dinner that night. Overall we had a wonderful visit and again proved to ourselves that Urumqi might not be all that bad (at least for short visits!).
  • This next week we have off due to finals being taken, but we dive in head-first next week for the beginning of a summer program (the kids don’t get a break!!). Tiff and I volunteered to help because the school was desperate for someone and our “boss” has unfortunately been unable to find people who want to fly out to this forsaken, remote part of the world to teach. Don’t quite understand why not. We’ll basically be teaching until July 10th, which is the day when we’ll be…
  • …Beginning our “Circumnavigate-the-Globe-Month”! It was a dream that was never meant to become reality and yet somehow has. We will be flying from Beijing to London to visit with Tom (and his wife Joanna), one of my best friends and an old college roommate, staying with him for about a week while touring the city and countryside. We’ll make a quick stop in Paris since we’re near before we fly out to Pennsylvania to enjoy a 5-day vacation with Megan, my sister. Finally we’ll make our way to Dallas where we can sit back and enjoy the pools in the backyards of both our family’s houses. We’ll complete our circumnavigation during the closing ceremonies of the Olympics when we’ll fly from Dallas westbound toward Beijing. Whew, that’s gonna be a lot of flying!!
So that about covers what’s been going on with us. Kindergarten graduation is coming up this week where Tiffany will again host so we’ll be posting pictures soon of that. We’ll also both be performing (guitar and flute) so maybe we’ll try to get a video up of that this time. Who knows. We still have two and a half more weeks here so we’re not done blogging about the new things that are happening. If you have any suggestions of places of interest in either London or Paris, let us know – we’re gonna be putting together our travel destinations soon. We hope all is well with everybody back at home. Take care!

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