New Year's Eve

We're seeing red... everywhere!  Apparently, it is the color of all festive occasions here in China, symbolizing joy and good fortune.

Pictured are the brand-new display at "Carrefour" (the supermarket nearest our apartment), and my own favorite red-head deep-in-thought!

We'd like to wish our friends and family all over the world a most-blessed new year!

December 28th

Gotta say... (in a wild-and-crazy sort-of-way) there was something extra-special about that snowy, mile-long bike ride back to our apartment on the other end of campus after teaching a full-load of classes December 28th...


Hard to explain, other than to say we must be right where we are supposed to be!

Christmas Eve Lunch

We feel very blessed in that there are TEN Chinese teachers in the English Department at the two campuses of Beijing Institute of Technology who celebrate Christmas for the same reason we do... These four insisted on hosting this feast for us to remember Immanuel together at this special time of the year!

December Coffee House

Greg's 8:30 Table-Mates: Oliver, David, Constance, Rebecca, Vanessa

There is definitely something extra special about explaining the true meaning of Christmas to people who've never been told and really want to know!

Grace and Meshea mid-sentence!

Visitors

Angela, Mandy, Sure, Melissa & Grace

The three on the left are actually from a college that does not have "foreign experts", so through their friend Melissa they arranged to interview Grace and me on our 18th monthiversary (yesterday)... there is a fascination with Christmas on this side of the globe, and it is really fun getting to share with people who've never really heard what it is all about!

Life on a College Campus

Grace and I eat five or six meals a week in one of the six dining halls on campus... this photo shows her in the ground floor option of what is referred to by students as the "North Canteen" (the one nearest our classrooms)...




...on this particular evening, we were greeted by the following message taped to the floor in the lobby of our apartment building:

Decking the Apartment for Christmas

These five from my Friday afternoon Conversational English class offered to help set up our Christmas tree. L2R: G&G, Sandy, Andrew, Wayne, Shelley & Danie. Nice of them to pass on other options for a Friday evening to hang out with their English teachers!

The guys did a great job... Grace is shown adding a few finishing touches!

Christmas came early when we received this box of goodies from our Chets Creek family in Jacksonville!!

Say: "茄子!"

I tried asking these guys to say "cheese" since it is my Tuesday 10 a.m. freshman Oral English class, but the result was not pretty... so I broke the "no Chinese rule" on this occasion and asked them to say "eggplant" ("Qiézi") in their native tongue. That brought out the pearly-whites! (though they may have been laughing at my attempt at speaking Chinese)

November Coffee House

This one was given a "Thanksgiving Theme". In the sharing portion, students were asked to share the five things they were most thankful for... their answers? #1-Parents #2-Grandparents #3-Teachers ...wonder how many college students on the other side of the planet would've had those three at the top of their list?

Missin' Fam

Grace and I know we are where we are supposed to be at this point of our lives; there is great comfort in that... which is not to say that we don't miss family, particularly when special events are happening in our more familiar home-away-from-home!
Thankful that Tim was able to fly down from Montana to "represent" at last Friday's big event in Orlando... Cousin Jason's marriage to his high school sweetheart, Lauren Parrish.

P.S. On that same note: Happy Birthday to my brother Steve (whose youngest two represented him and appear next to our "little" brother Mike in the photo below)!

L2R: Mike, Jordan, Caitlyn & G-Mom Kynast, the parents of the bride (my sister Susie & her husband Jay), Kailey, Nicholas and TK

English Corner

Affectionately dubbed "Corner the Foreigner" by some of my colleagues, this is a regular event sponsored by a variety of organizations on many of the campuses in China to give students a place to practice their second language with a native speaker in the room. It is fun to hear the varied perspectives on the topic chosen by the organizers, and to be asked to comment at the end of each 30-minute segment.

Thursday 2:00 Class

All five of my Freshman Conversation classes have 40 students in them... this one meets Thursday afternoons at 2:00. Majors range from Automation to Computer Science to Electrical/Mechanical/Industrial/Optical/Communication/Software Engineering. Their favorite sports are badminton and basketball, with the ladies favoring the former and gents, the latter.

1.33333333333

Grace and I celebrate our 16th monthiversary today... I mentioned in an earlier post how guilty we've been feeling about having all the fun we're having "out east"... we'll be celebrating this occasion by teaching a full load of classes and hosting the first of our monthly Friday night socials along with 8 of our Beijing colleagues (pictured). "Coffee House" is a chance to spend a little time with 80 or so of our students in a less-formal setting... probably not the way we imagined celebrating special occasions 16 months ago, but fun nonetheless!

Connecting More Dots

Hwa Mok "Mark" Kim is a 2010 graduate of NCA (the school where I served as Director 1996-2005); he and Tim were soccer teammates! His parents moved to Nicaragua from South Korea, built a community center and church in a crime-ridden sector of Ciudad Sandino that continues to be a beacon of hope for those who live there. Tim was his little brother Hwa Rang's reading buddy in 2004 (the latter graduates from NCA in 2014)... Hard to convey what a blessing it was for Grace and me to spend our Sunday in Beijing with this young man... In the words of the 'beloved disciple': "I have no greater joy..."

International Trade and Economics

This is the delightful group I am privileged to teach in the 4:00-6:00 slot Friday afternoons... unlike my other four Freshman Conversational English classes, the students in this one do not have a variety of majors... "International Trade and Economics" is the unanimous pursuit of this bunch! (left-clicking on the picture should enlarge it ;-)

Dinner with a Colleague

Got to have dinner at the home of Ya Ping (a Chinese English Department colleague and sister) and her precious daughter "Missy"... curry chicken, rice, fresh fruit... Delicious meal; tremendous fellowship!

Office Hours

These students (and two others who had to leave before the photo) came by during my office hours to practice their English... half of them are students of mine, the rest have Grace or another member of ELIC team. Their English names are L2R (Yr., major): Draco (Jr., Accounting); GK; June (So., English); Michael (Fr., Electrical Engineering); Maria (So., Optical Electronics); Ben (So., Math); Kim (Fr., Software Engineering); Michael (Fr., Software Engineering); Ted (Fr., Computer Science); Harry (Fr., Computer Science); Amber (So., English)... it was a terrific two-and-a-half hours!

October Holidays in Shanghai

Grace and I have been feeling a wee bit guilty about all the fun we've been having... our crazy teaching schedule has been front-loaded with vacation/prep time... that all ends tomorrow! Perhaps we'll feel a little less guilty when we are teaching on Thanksgiving Day and through the Christmas Holidays ;-)

National Holidays

We don't get Christmas and New Year's off, but we do get a week off to celebrate National Day (October 1st). That day in 1949, in front of 300,000 people during a ceremony in Tian'anmen Square, Chairman Mao declared the founding of the People's Republic and waved the first five-star PRC flag. Grace and I are celebrating by going to Shanghai to see my sister Betsy and her family... travel books generally have this to say about the idea:

"Traveling during National Holidays" With a week off, many Chinese travel domestically and internationally. Travel fares double and triple and advance bookings must be made weeks, even months ahead for international travel. Hoards of tour groups flock to the major tourist destinations of China, so you can forget having a quiet moment to ponder how the Great Wall was built. If you can avoid it, it's advisable not to travel domestically during the week around October 1st. The latest statistics released publicly are from 2000 but according to these, 59.82 million people traveled during National Day holidays that year.

We're new here and still willing to see for ourselves... and we won't need a hotel room!

English Majors

Grace and I are teaching six classes of English majors between us. BIT's student body is about 80% male; English is the only subject area with a female majority, and those six classes are about 90% women! The young lady pictured, "Emma", chose it because she likes the language and wants to study abroad after graduation. She is from Lanzhou, the capital city of the province of Gansu, which is in the north-central part of the country, bordering on the north with Mongolia. Unlike most of her classmates, she has traveled outside China, spending a month in Canada at a summer camp during her high school years. She lists as her hobbies: "reading, watching movies, traveling and playing a Chinese musical instrument"

Our First Classes

Grace and I have thoroughly enjoyed teaching our introductory units, each of which have had 33-45 students. The young man pictured is representative of my Freshman Oral classes; he is from Liaoning, a province in northeast China bordering on North Korea; he has studied English since middle school and is majoring in Computer Science and Technology. He has 14 classes this semester and although Oral English is not at the top of his priority list, he is hoping to become more conversant and to go to graduate school in either the US or Hong Kong. He says he loves sports, especially basketball, soccer, tennis and ping-pong... "Ted" is his English name, which he chose at some point in one of his previous English classes, in part because it sounds a little like the first syllable of his Chinese given name: "Tianhong"

Figuring Things Out

With the nearest English language service two hours north of us, we've decided our best option for Sunday mornings is the 3-self church in LX. Fangshan Christian is very traditional... choir, hymns, an hour-long sermon... We've been able to join in when the hymns are familiar and by identifying the Scripture passages with the help of the index in our Chinese-English Bible. The one in the picture is Romans 3:23... Providentially for us, the speakers use lots of Scripture... Today we went from 2 Samuel-Genesis-Job-Acts-John-Romans-Luke-Romans-Job ending with Psalm 90:12

Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom

We're most likely getting a completely different sermon than everyone else, but it's where we're supposed to be for now!

Our classroom

Classes begin Monday... strangely enough, we both teach our first class (at a different hour) in this classroom 1-309... it seats 100, but English classes are capped at 45. Grace has 3 AV (at two different levels), 3 Sophomore Conversational English; I have 3 Reading classes (at two different levels) and 5 Freshman Oral classes... Three preps apiece... should be enough of a challenge for us as veteran Math and Spanish teachers!

First Haircut

It had been almost two months since my last one, so it was time to do my best to try to communicate what I want in a haircut to someone local...

I played the "cup bearer" on this one and Grace must've liked what she saw because she's pledging to get hers cut there next week...

...at 30 Yuan (roughly $4.90) for a shampoo and cut it's hard to complain.

Spanish Class in China!

Beth allowed me to field questions from her second-year Spanish students in this afternoon's class...






Terrific group of 32 Spanish majors! There are like-sized groups of students majoring in Russian, Arabic, French, German, Japanese and Korean

BeiDaiHe

Made it! the 180-mile trip to the coast took roughly 8 hours and involved a bike ride, 4 subways, two buses and 110 miles on the D-train (fast). The coastal resort town of BeiDaiHe is beautiful... a little like being back in Jax!

Primary among the purposes of this trip is the opportunity to observe a few classes... the group pictured is the girls'-side of one of Beth Bergstrom's Oral English classes at Hebei Vocational School of Foreign Languages...

Beth is the only ELIC team member currently teaching Spanish in China... tomorrow we get to observe one of those classes!

Flexible Plans

One of the things on our to-do list is a trip out to Qinhuangdao to see the only Spanish program currently up-and-running...

When told last night that fixing our "plumbing issues" would require shutting down our restroom for four days, we began looking into the possibility of making the train trip out east an immediate reality... things are falling into place; we hope to pull off the multiple train and bus transfers to arrive at our destination around 5:00 this afternoon... Should be fun!

Beijing Institute of Technology

It has been entirely too long since my last entry... much has happened, and we are still trying to get settled into our new home base, thankful for the fact that we don't actually begin teaching until the 24th... Freshmen and Sophomores at BIT are required to do three weeks of military training at the beginning of each school year... they are shown here drilling Sunday evening of week one!

再见, RuYi!

One month to the day since we bid adieu to our home in Jacksonville; tomorrow we get to unpack our suitcases for the first time in our new base of operations... Apartment A311 on the Liang Xiang campus of Beijing Institute of Technology!


Florida-family may recognize the young mother in the picture below...

Grace and I worked with Erin's brother, Mark Smith, at Chets Creek in Jacksonville, and were all part of the same fellowship in Gainesville in the 80's! (Westside)... Still having fun "connecting those dots"!

The hotel staff insisted on a picture of our whole group before we headed out to teach all over Asia!

Wheaton College Classes

Universities in China require that its English instructors all be certified TEFL (Teachers of English as a Foreign Language); for most of us that means taking three graduate-level classes through Wheaton College, which has been kind enough to offer them in Beijing to help us adapt to our host culture while we're at it. Last week was "TEFL Methodology"; beginning today, "Asian Culture and Communication"; and finally "Classroom Dynamics"

Amazing Reunion

Sometimes I feel like my life is a game of connect-the-dots, where the Author delights in showing me snap-shots of the big picture...

"Tina" Wang remembers me as the principal of her high school in Asheville, North Carolina the year she became our first foreign exchange student from China...

Her mother teaches English at the very campus of Beijing Institute of Technology where Grace and I will be employed the next two+ years!

The Great Wall

Neither one of us is really into the tourist thing, but this was a must and it did not disappoint... After all, it is one of the "7 Man-Made Wonders of the World".

The other 6?
*Chichen Itza (Mexico)
*Christ the Redeemer (Rio de Janeiro)
*The Colosseum (Rome, Italy)
*Machu Picchu (Perú)
*Petra (Jordan)
*Taj Mahal (India)

Visits from Family!

We have been so blessed to have family from the US and Germany visit us in our first week in country...

These four as part of a group from our home fellowship in Jacksonville, Florida... "just happened" to be dining a five-minute cab ride from our hotel four days after our arrival...

Sabine Brauer is a cousin from Germany that I (Greg) had never had occasion to meet... until last night, our sixth day on the other side of the world!



"Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He Who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another -and all the more as you see the Day approaching." -Hebrews 10:23-25

Life in a New Lane

Grace was kind enough to allow me to post this picture of her struggling with her chopsticks during our first restaurant meal without interpreters... not really sure what we ordered; the beans were delicious, and we think the meat may have been donkey... perhaps it's better we don't know!

您好, Beijing!

We left the campus of the University of Northern Colorado at 6:15 p.m. Monday; arrived at our hotel in Beijing 4:15 p.m. Wednesday... with a 14-hour time difference that's a total travel time of 32 hours!
Here we are ready for the 14-hour hop from Newark-to-Beijing...

...and our hotel room, "home" for the next four weeks!

Our Departure and the Anniversary of an Arrival

We fly out tonight... Denver-to-Newark-to-Beijing, arriving Wednesday afternoon, local time. What many of you may not know is that Grace's Mom spent a few years in China (pictured below being tutored in Chinese in the mid-40's)

She left this earth July 30, 2002, making today the 10th Anniversary of her arrival in Heaven. Some would call that a "coincidence"... Knowing the Author of the Fifth Commandment the way I do, I see it as His way of allowing a daughter to honor her mother's memory on this occasion...

再见, Jacksonville！

Grace and I took a quiet moment to give thanks for her 14 years in this beautiful home (photo taken from the back porch)...

...sealed and weighed the last of our luggage a little after 11:00 p.m. I (Greg) am really proud of my bride's ability to hold lightly the things of this world... and to get everything in 4-50 lb. suitcases, 2 carry-ons and a briefcase!!

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...got 'em all in the back of the Explorer for our 5:00 a.m. run to the airport!




Here she is in our dorm room at the University of Northern Colorado, where we'll be housed through next Monday during phase 1 of our training!