Winter Holiday 2016 – Bali
After Beijing, six of us then traveled on to Bali, Indonesia with a small layover in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Ben, Clarissa, Elizabeth, Jenny, Ryan, and I were the “Bali Ballers”.…
Winter Holiday 2016 – Beijing
The first part of my winter journey this year was a 2-hour train ride to Beijing. This was only the second time that I’ve ever taken first class (because all…
New Years Fun
I was glad to be able to start off the year 2016 with my city team at the Wu’s apartment (Jonathan Wu is our City Director). We had fun playing…
Christmas Celebrations 2015
Christmas this year, even more than other years, felt like I was working double-time. Not only did I teach about Christmas traditions in my classes, but as in past years,…
Christmas Decorating
After all of my travels this fall semester and making up all of my missed classes, I knew that I wouldn’t have enough time to decorate everything for Christmas by…
Making Up Classes from Thanksgiving
The part of my trip back to the States that I would have most likely not mentioned are the make-up classes. When I was home for my brother’s wedding and…
Happy Birthday Ben Priday!
I was sad to hear that Ben’s birthday was the day after Thanksgiving which was when both Jenny (my teammate) and myself were back in the States for weddings. I…
Thanksgiving 2015
This was the first year in 3 years that I’ve been able to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family instead of trying to teach Thanksgiving traditions to my Chinese students. I…
Wedding #2: Dan and Alexa
I was so thankful to have the opportunity to attend my oldest brother’s (Daniel) wedding with Alexa. This is actually the second wedding of the year since my younger brother…
Annual Spanish and Latin American Cultural Festival 2015
At first, I expected the Western Languages Department Competition to be this event, but when it wasn’t I was curious when this event would actually occur. This festival (not really…
Western Language Performance Competition 2015
This day was a true reminder of the importance of communication and relationships as well as how much I still must learn of the Chinese culture. A week before this…
The Wild, Wild West of China
Every year our school has two major holidays that each last 1 week, in October and in May. For this October holiday I had the privilege of traveling to Urumqi,…
¡Earthquake!
On September 14th, almost 1 month into teaching, I was about half-way through my 4-6pm class. All of the classes run on a 2-hour cycle, so each class is 100…
Happy Birthday Elizabeth Walker!
Just within the first few weeks of teaching this year, our teammate Elizabeth had a birthday (Sept. 9th). Unfortunately for her, she said how that time of year is when…
City Team Hiking
Every year at the start of the fall semester, my city team (both at the Yanshan University and my university (Hebei Institute of Foreign Languages) get together from some training…
