Finding Former Students

Rebecca Sorgius was in my Advanced Placement Spanish class her senior year at Gainesville High School.  Here we are 22 years later at a coffee shop in our new hometown (Beijing) getting "caught up"!

She and her husband, Jeff, have both been in China more than ten years, and are now homeschooling four children, the oldest of whom is six!

Definitely one of the coolest perks we have as teachers is to find former students with their heads on straight in this crazy world imagining we might have had some role to play in that!

March Coffee House

The "live mic" portion of our coffee houses features students displaying their talents on stage

These seven were at my table at the 7:00 p.m. session... just a delightful mix us underclassmen, majoring in everything from Public Administration to Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.
The topic for this month was "Luck or Destiny".  We talked about "Why bad things happen to good people", whether or not there is a purpose or plan for each of their lives and where it might have come from, etc... Good times!

Spanish Office Hour

This is it... our first Office Hour in what native speakers call "the language of Heaven"; plans are to meet for an hour every Tuesday afternoon for the remainder of this semester and go from there!

Kara's Engaged!!!

She and her dear friend, Eddie Kelly, made it official this weekend... the proposal happened during an extended ride on the SkyView Ferris Wheel in Atlanta's Centennial Park (pictured behind the future bride and groom.)

These are the times that make it hard to be 13-time zones away from our "kids"... we are, however, thrilled with Kara's choice and will of course be in Atlanta for the August 8 wedding!

...the couple will be posting a website with pertinent details soon!

Stay tuned...

大理 Dali

Hard to convey in a blog post how cool it was to spend four days with one of our students in her hometown of (Yunnan) Dali, meet her relatives and friends, hear stories of how life has changed over the years in this beautiful province in south-central China and to enjoy exquisite meals and precious time with her sweet family!

L2R: Jessica's "second parents", cousin, teacher, grandfather, dinner entertainer, teacher's wife, grandmother, mom, aunt, cousin, self, uncle

Chinese New Year

Jackie (Loftsgard) Miranda introduced us to this precious Thai family last year while we were in Chiang Mai.  They hosted her for a portion of her last semester at Calvin College.

This photo was taken in their living room, right after dinner and before we joined the festivities in "China town"... traditional new year street food, a talent show, lion dance, fireworks, acrobatics and the ubiquitous dragon... things wrapped up around 12:30 a.m. (past our bedtime ;-)

Travel Plans

Grace and I will be at this airport tomorrow morning early... sure that we will not get the reception Dennis Rodman got there last week on his trip home from North Korea, which is fine with us!

We'll be away from Beijing for 27 days (mostly for our annual conference in Thailand), but also to visit a student at her home in Yunnan province on the return!