Greetings, everyone! Peggy and I have now been in China for three weeks! We’re into our our third week (of 14 weeks) of teaching! Peggy teaches 18 classes (720 students) in grades 2, 4 and 6 while I teach 16 classes (640 students) in grades 1, 3 and 5. We see each class of 40 (usually 20 boys and 20 girls) only once each week! Thus, each week sees us each teaching 8-9 hours a week with only three lesson preps that we repeat ad nauseum! (This is not a complaint!) Lessons vary in length from 20 to 35 minutes! Things are settling down, and I am feeling a greater comfort level with my littlies! Quite the learning curve for this teacher of teenagers! Thank you to all my primary teacher friends for your helpful suggestions of repetition, songs, art and stories! Mind you, the puppets (from the thrift shop) I brought with me are a big hit, with Pooh Bear being my constant companion to my six grade 1 classes! He sits on a water bottle at the front, and commends them when they do well! He also asks them their name in a squeaky voice, and a couple of wee ones have responded in a similar squeaky voice! Too cute! My five-fingered duck puppet came in handy last week for the song "Five little ducks went out one day ..." Nothing like a puppet and singing to have everyone in class listen up!! Weifang China-Singapore Bilingual School is a very good school! Peggy and I feel very fortunate to be placed in such a good, safe situation with one excellent and patient contact, Zhang Gang, who speaks superb English! We get free room and board here, (and 5000 yuan/month plus half of our airfare) and live right on the school grounds! The food is delicious! We eat rice twice a day using chopsticks! Usually, we have a soup and 2-3 other vegetable and meat stir-fry type dishes as well! No desserts! Quite healthy cuisine! We are getting accustomed to our apartments with showers that shower the entire bathroom. I have the cleanest bathroom floor and toilet ever, as they get washed and wiped daily! The school hooked up internet in my apartment for my laptop nearly two weeks ago, and I have already enjoyed talking on Skype with some of you!! It’s amazing how my computer now doubles as my telephone and video phone! Quite exciting! Free to fellow Skypers and cheap calling to landlines! Our mattresses are rock hard, but by doubling over the duvet and sleeping ON one half, my back actually is all the better for it now! My new television only has Chinese channels so I get my "news" fix from the internet instead! About half of the 1350 students stay on campus for a HOT lunch which is prepared by many cooks! Then, they ALL NAP for about 1 hour on bunk beds in the very building where Peggy and I reside. This used to be mostly a residential school, but now only seven students reside here during the week. Play time (recess) is quite organized with the kids staying in their class groups, and doing an activity (jogging, exercises, skipping) together on the large track field. Music is usually piped over a loud speaker, and when dance music comes on ... the entire track has the multitudes moving to the music! Peggy and I were asked to have an “English Corner” as an extra-curricular activity for interested students. About 80 students from all grade levels attend this event for one hour each Friday afternoon from 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm! Our camp experience has come in handy as we teach them songs and chants, such as VGoing on a Lion Hunt!V, Simon Says, If You're Happy and You Know It, The Ants Go Marching One by One, There’s a Hole in the Bucket etc!! The internet has been invaluable to us to recall the words! We are doing lots of walking on the large flat track between our apartments and the school! We also have been exploring parts of Weifang on foot and by bus. Weifang has beautified all along both sides of the three rivers that pass through this city, so we enjoy seeking out the riverside peace and quiet on the trails and leave behind the busy, and sometimes dusty streets with crazy traffic scenarios where pedestrians are lowest on the totem pole! A one-trip fare within the city by bus costs one yuan ... about 17c! Prices overall are often considerably cheaper here in China! Today, eight oranges and two bananas at the local market cost us four yuan ... 68c! We have mastered a few words in Mandarin ... Peggy is much better at it than I! One word, in particular, seems like magic to us ... "Ni hao" (pronounced "knee-how") which means "Hello"! Because there are few whites here in Weifang, we’re quite the novelty and get stared at a fair bit with curious blank expressions ... so we often stop them in their tracks with "Ni hao", and then magically their faces break into gorgeous smiles and they say hello back, in Chinese, of course! Another word ... "xiexie" (pronounced "she-she" and meaning "thank you") brings surprise and smiles to their faces when it comes out of our mouths! The weather has been much warmer than we expected ... so our few short-sleeved tops have been washed several times already! Temperatues have hovered in the low to mid-twenties for many days, and cooler at nights! Mind you, when our teaching counterparts in their layers and long-sleeves see us in cooler, single-layer clothing, they often ask if we are cold! Guess our internal heating chambers operate differently at our older age than these oriental youngins! The air quality is nothing to write home about ... as I do just that! There is often quite a dense, grey smog with a hazy sun. Dust in insidious ... settling everywhere daily! We swiffer frequently! One good rain during our first week here cleared the air, and I was thrilled to be able to photograph the rare BLUE sky for a few days afterwards. Dining out has had its "bloopers"! On our first night in Weifang, we were treated to an outdoor street barbecue. Our job was to select the vegetables ... so we envisioned a stir-fry, and chose at least 4-5 vegetables from the cooler. Along came 4-5 separate vegetable dishes ... which ended up being far too much food ... for which we felt rather silly! Then, last Saturday, Peggy and I ventured out to explore our city, and have lunch out! With no English menus and no one at the restaurant speaking English, we decided to be brave, and just pick two items from their menu! We ended up with two largish bowls of similar soups to share! Not quite what we had hoped for, especially the one with grizzle and some unwanted internal organs! Our wonderful dining room manager, Zhang Hui, cooked a big chicken (no turkeys in China) for us on Thansgiving weekend ... serving it with both head and feet intact! A fish soup was served with whole fish! Thus, our Chinese culinary experience comes with a few new things to stomach, and ... avoid! Love and Best Wishes to all! Cheers! Margie