Winding Up the Semester in January 2011

 This past two weeks, Dave has been testing his "Oral English" Students.  Since I finished my classes a couple weeks ago, I was available to go out to the West Campus with him, and help him.  The students in the above picture were some of the last ones to be tested.  They're all really fun, friendly and kind.  We've had a great experience working with them.  Dave has classes of forty eight to sixty-six students.  But they're almost all girls.  Each class has only four or five boys.  The guys here just aren't too interested in being English majors, I guess.

 These lovely turtles are in the "meat department" not the pet department at our local RT-Mart.   RT-Mart is a lot like Walmart here in China.  Turtles are sold here for turtle soup.  I've never tried it. . . .  have you?

 This past Thursday, Jay and Dana Thelin took us to the West Market for some shopping.  Jay is the man in the upper right corner with the black hat.  Dana's the lady with the white hat -- I think.  I was waiting for Dave and the Thelins, and I kept watching this lady who was selling hot-dogs on a stick.  They look kind of good, in a way.  They make diagonal slits in the skin of the hot-dog all up and down the surface.  Then they fry the hot-dog in oil. So it turns out quite crispy.  It's certainly not very healthy, but everyone was buying them.  This area of the market is out-doors.  It was really cold.  

Here I am, washing the dishes.  Notice my dust-mop slippers.  I love them! They're comfy, and very good at shining up the floor.  Oh yes, one thing I think of when I look at this picture is that when I put my nose down by the red bag in the lower right part of the picture, I can smell something really stinky.  I think there's some sort of a leak that pools up under the lower cupboards.  It smells like a moldy, rank puddle.  I regularly pour a little Lysol down the drain, and that seems to help a little.

We're winding up our activities.  Dave gave the final for his written classes this morning, and we just finished grading them.  He's emailed the grades into the English Department, and we're feeling that we've accomplished a lot. Yeah!!!!  We've finalized our shopping too.  We're bringing home presents to our kids and grand children.  It's been fun trying to find gifts that we think they'll like. We will leave here on Wednesday morning, early, to fly to Shenzhen, which is a suburb of Hong Kong. Then we will participate in a conference for all the BYU China English Teachers there for about four days.  On the 24th of January it's on to Utah where we'll welcome the new grand daughter into the family and have a wonderful time spending four to five weeks with the family!  We're excited!  We've really missed our kids and their little ones.