we're in love with Jessie

We love having a pet to come home to and are so glad we rescued her. We found a vet that takes care of cats. It's about 45 minutes away and they will give us a free check up since she is a rescued pet:)







Our new kitty can be ridiculously precious or ridiculously creepy. It's hard to believe that is the same cat. You can see that she is mad at us. She sulks for 5 hours after we give her a bath.

Picture Day

We had picture day a few days ago here at school. One of the marketing guys took pictures of all of the staff individually and as a group to use for the English and Chinese websites.

Here's one of the poses that they had Daniel and I do...they really love open mouth smiles here.

We found out we are teaching as "core teachers" which means we are teaching 4 mornings a week (Wednesdays off) and will have the same class of students all semester. We like that we will be teaching at the same time and can possibly share lesson plans if there are a lot of students falling into level 2. Level 2 basically means we will have students that know enough English to be dangerous but they still need to learn and practice basic conversational skills.


We are working on getting a skype name, but so far gchat (through gmail) and ichat (on any mac) has been working well to see people face to face and talk. Let us know if you want to set up a time. We are thankful for our computer because it makes the missing home part not so bad.

love and miss you,

corrie

a ride thru the village

grilled cheese in a wok: our first ten days in china

now that our jet lag is (i think) officially gone, we're ready to start talking about what's going on in our new home...

no, this isn't a girl's bike.
all the really manly dudes in china have bikes like this.

the school that we're teaching at is doing a really good job of helping the new teachers get accustomed not only to the school, but to chinese culture. we're in meetings pretty much all day learning about the new community in which we live. (i know what you're thinking, "wow, he knows the rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition, but he's not capitalizing anything." that's just how i roll.) what we're learning about the organization we're with which encompasses a manufacturing company, foster home, and school, is that it's a pretty unique and incredible place to work. the people who work with the various parts of our organization make up a community that's very beneficial to corrie and me, but also very beneficial to the people who live around it.

we live in an apartment complex that is part of a farming village, which has a name i don't know yet because i don't speak chinese or pay enough attention. but i do know that our village is really old, and is renowned for its watermelons, so much so that it used to supply them to the emperors. we're about fifty minutes outside of downtown beijing, and we're in an area that is rapidly expanding. basically, the suburbs of beijing are growing towards us, an area called the beijing developing area, or bda.

we bike to and from our school daily, and we're starting to get into the routine of shopping, cooking, etc. in our new culture. we cooked our first chinese meal the other night, and had a chinese guy tell us what the buttons on our washing machine mean. and there was one button he didn't know what did. we get stared at a lot, but it's just because they're curious we've been told. i think i got stared at a lot in the states anyways.

stir fried peppers and we think pork

oh and we found a stray kitten. she was outside of our apartment, and was way mangy and feral. we've taken her in, bathed her, and now we're adjusting to being foster parents. we're not sure if we're ready to be considered "cat people" just yet, so we're looking for a permanent home for jessie. but we're also not ready to put her back on the street if no one wants to adopt her. and we found out you can't adopt a baby in china until your thirty, so we figure this is a good dry run for us in case we want to adopt in a few years...

jessie pre-bath

be looking for corrie's thoughts on life in china soon, and the next clear day we get we're gonna take a ride through the village and film it.

thanks for your thoughts! - daniel

we've been in china now for a couple of days, and we wanted to show everyone our apartment! it's a two bedroom apartment on the 4th floor, with a view on both sides. we are about a 5 minute bike ride from our village, and 10 minute bike ride away from the school.



here's corrie in front of our building with her new bike :)
we're in building 41, to give you an idea of how huge our complex is.



our front door.
we have no idea what this means.



come on in!























our coat and shoe rack



the dining room



the kitchen.
wait, are we in beijing, or miami?
















our living room.
we love our teal pleather couch,
and it looks like the dining room is glowing...
















our desk.
corrie's going to be an awesome english teacher!























our bathroom.
see the shower curtain and the toilet?
there's literally nothing in between...















the view from our apartment
















the guest bedroom.
we're getting a bunk bed,
so come stay with us if you're in the neighborhood!















our bedroom

we hope you enjoyed the tour! coming up next, we're going to take a ride through the village, so stay tuned for the footage :)