2008…has been an amazing and life changing year for Dong Da (our university). Every day we 

see the KING moving in the lives of our university students in our community. More than ever kids are starving to experience the KING'S love. Last semester our team built relationships with 400 kids and 165 of them heard good news.  We returned to China this past August not knowing what was in store for us, ELT Edge or the students here at Dong Da. Most of the Family was becoming seniors, which for those who do not know the school system in China, the second semester for seniors is spent off campus looking for a job. With that in mind, we knew that our family was moving on and that we needed to be looking and waiting for the opportunities to meet new people.

On December 20th we put on a Christmas Party for our campus and followed that up the next night by caroling around our campus.  We had 28 participants in the caroling and almost 100 students showed up to the Christmas party. Unfortunately we chose the coldest day of the year to date to stand outside caroling. When we arrived back home the temperature outside was -19 degrees Celsius (-1 F).  We were so proud of the students that came out to sing carols in the freezing cold.  At the Christmas Party we were able to teach some traditional carols and Mark read the Real Christmas story to the students. Christmas was great! We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day at a different school so that all of the teachers from ELT Edge could be together and celebrate.  We did some singing, read the Christmas story, watched some movies and played games all day.

After Christmas a few of the teachers here had their girlfriends and boyfriends come to visit. 

We became very busy trying to meet everyone and have group time with the teachers and the students before we all take off for two months for the winter holiday. Our anniversary was kind of spread out through three days. One day we went out to a nice western restaurant and the next day we went ice chairing together(ice chairing: think of a chair with runners and  you move with large ice picks in each hand that you dig into the ice to create momentum).  New Year's Eve we spend with one of our teachers who is at another School. Candice, a teachers at our school had a big New Year's party but earlier that day Sarah, who has epilepsy had a few seizures so we went and spent the evening with her just relaxing and watching TV.

Our winter holiday travels are expected to be long. We will be leaving Qinhuangdao on January 10^th for Beijing for one night and then we will be taking a plane to Qingdao. We have a friend from last semester there who we will get to spend a few days with. From there we will travel to

 Shanghai on the 13^th where we have three students that we know. We will spend about a week here where we will also go to Suzhou and Hangzhou just to visit. On the 20^th, if we are able to get a train ticket we will go south to Xiamen where Carrie’s student from last year will meet us. (For those of you who go to Fox Island “C” this is the same boy whose letter we read to you all.) He lives about two hour by bus from Xiamen and we will spend the Chinese New Year with him and his family. About 8 days or so. Then, one of Carrie’s friends, Veronica from WSU, is dating a boy who plays for the China Basketball Association (CBA) and is on a team in Guangdong. Veronica will be visiting her boyfriend and we intend to meet up with them. He has a game on the 2^nd and 4^th of February that we are going to try and attend. Then, we will travel further south to the Hainan Province and the city of Sanya, which is very similar to Hawaii. We are so excited to be in the warm weather. Also, the hostel that we will be staying at has ¥18 massages for an hour. That would equal about $2.70 an hour. After about a week or so in the sun we will head to Lijiang, Chengdu, Xian and then back to Beijing. We are planning to be back in Qinhuangdao around the 25^th of February, which will give us about a week to prepare for classes that start on the 2^nd of March.

                We will try to get on our blog and email from time to time to keep you all informed with how everything is going and where we are but we cannot guarantee anything. Most hostels though do have Internet. We are so excited about this trip and the ability to see more of this beautiful Country.

Again, we hope that you have all had an amazing holiday season. We love and miss all of you and America very much.

Wow…the last few weeks have been very busy.

The same old China: lack of communication between the University and the foreign teacher and interesting talks due to the language barrier, keep us on our toes at all times. We apologize for the delay since our last newsletter but along with the busy schedule we did not have internet for two weeks. The school was trying to get us on their internet service but it was not working with our new computers which had vista and there were many other problems like the fact that it would be 5 times more expensive and it would be a slower internet. Anyway, finally the school decided to go back to the old internet which we are very grateful for. (We are not sure but we think the purpose of the new internet was for the school to keep a better eye on what we were doing on the internet. Something to keep in your thoughts.)

For Carrie, she traveled to South Korea for five days to visit a friend from South Korea which she met in London when she was there four years ago. She was gone from the 19th till the 24th. South Korea is so beautiful and so westernized compared to China. There were coffee shops and small sandwich shops everywhere. Traffic was organized, people actually stopped at red lights and the stayed in between the lines of the road. Not a lot of honking and people where not crossing the street when or where ever they pleased but only at crosswalks when the lights signaled for them to cross. China or at least the area which we are located in is very flat and the air quality is bad. In South Korea, about 50% of it is mountains, so it reminded Carrie a lot of back home. Trees and grass were everywhere, and above all, the air was so clean and clear. It was also extremely nice, yet sad at the same time, because South Korea, unlike China, also celebrates Christmas as a national holiday so the entire city was decorated. While Carrie was in South Korea she spent two days at the most southern tip in a town called Busan, which is a big tourist area, beautiful sandy beached and great views of the water.

Mark stayed behind and spent the weekend in Beijing with Bobby and Evie. He was able to enjoy western food so he had a great time. Another highlight was that they were able to get into the Beijing Opera. Some business had rented out the entire theatre for an anniversary party so when Mark showed up to get tickets they thought that the three of them were with the company and let them in for free. The great part was that they were given VIP passes and ended up sitting in the very front, at a table on the floor with all sorts of goodies. However, in Beijing Mark got a cold which he is still trying to get over and has passed it on to Carrie.

All fifteen of the foreign teachers as well as a few other foreigners which we have meet around town and some Chinese friends all came together the Sunday after Thanksgiving to celebrate Thanksgiving. We had a total of 35 people crammed together in the hallway of one of the dorm building. A dozen or so tables stretched down the middle of the hallway as we all circled around and passed the different potluck style dishes around. All of the teachers and their families sent them different ingredients so that we were able to have a normal Thanksgiving menu plus some Chinese dishes. The only thing that we were not able to have was a turkey. So we had chicken and duck instead.

We had our first snowfall on December 10th. It was very nice to see the ground all white outside. Unfortunately, Mark cannot enjoy it because he was sick and has been now for two weeks. Carrie taught his class for him which he appreciated very much (the class appreciated it too because they were able to watch a movie in class).

Christmas is coming soon and all of the teachers are getting ready to celebrate together. We hope that all of your plans are going well as you get ready to celebrate the Christmas and the New Year. We are going to be finished with classes in 2 weeks and then we will have 2 months off for winter vacation. Some of you might think “Wow I would love 2 months off for Christmas or winter holiday” but this time is actually very difficult because we live in a city where there is not much to do and almost all of the students will go home for the break. So that leaves us with deciding whether we will travel or be very bored in Qinhuangdao for a little over two months. We did decide to travel over the break but we don’t know exactly where we are going other than a city near Hong Kong where we want to visit one or our students. Other than that, we will probably spend about a month traveling and staying at hostels (about $8 a night or less) and then come back to Qinhuangdao to rest for the remainder of our break. We have been saving part of our paycheck every month so that we can travel and are very excited to see different parts of China. If anyone has any suggestion on where to travel please let us know. You can either respond to this blog or you can sent us an email at carrie_roddy@yahoo.com.