I was planning on sleeping in today, enjoying my warm bed and maybe even read for a bit. I have a book that is just begging to be picked up and read. I was actually hoping to begin packing for our upcoming trip over the October holiday. I mean, it is Saturday. I should reasonably expect to be able to do all of those things on a Saturday, right?

Last week was Teacher’s Day and today in China we’re celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival Day. Yippee! The only real significance for us is two things: 1) we get Monday off from school, a major blessing considering it’s our busiest teaching day and 2) we get gifts.

To all you teachers out there reading this…Happy Teacher’s Day. I don’t think this is considered an official holiday in China although I do believe it lands on the same date every year. Altogether its a great idea and we’ve enjoyed each of the three we’ve been a part of, but I think it could use some tweaking.

Merry Christmas! We hope everyone had a wonderful holiday. We had the unique experience of celebrating it here in China. We missed all of our families and friends terribly but are thankful for our opportunity to be here. It was quite different celebrating the holidays where there is not much festivity. At least that is what we thought at first. While America starts Christmas right after you cut the Thanksgiving turkey, China seems to wait until the Eve or just before. We were …

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We hope that all of you had a great Thanksgiving! It has been a wonderful 4-day weekend for us and although it is coming to a close quickly, it has definitely given us the strength to continue on for the next 8 weeks that we have left in this semester. Most of the Chinese teachers were pretty jealous of our time off because such a holiday does not exist in China. We did our best …

Happy Halloween to everybody! Although there are parts of this holiday we aren’t particularly fond of (we love the season!), because we are English teachers we must make an acknowledgment of its existence. Thankfully, since nobody here is very familiar with the holiday we can spin things to the way we like them, and that’s exactly what we did! Today has been quite a fun day for everybody, from us to the students and even our teaching assistants. This entire day has basically been a game …

I’m not sure how familiar many of you are with Chinese history or holidays, but if you’re at all like us, you’re very much clueless. Well, as a teacher here, you learn to pay attention when a Chinese holiday allows you to take 7 straight days off from working! That’s right, we will be taking a week-long vacation after 4 weeks of working to travel all the way to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, another province close to the center of China.

First of all, we’re just now beginning …