Out of the Rainy Season and Into the Sunshine

Local weather update for 28 October 2012: Clear, Sunny, 21 degrees C

It has been like this for two weeks now and it is so hard to wrap my head around the fact that it is almost November. While most of you reading this are in the midst of fall with all of its color and cold, we are warm and green and not a pumpkin in sight. I am enjoying the sun, but I can’t help but feel that it is not quite right.

Chinese Fast Food

Thursday morning, as a Parent-Teacher Conference treat to ourselves, Eric and I stopped at our local Baozi shop for a quick and yummy Chinese breakfast. We ordered 6 rou baozi’s for ourselves. Baozi’s are bread buns filled with mushrooms, vegetables, or meat mixes. They are steamed and eaten hot. We ordered meat (rou). So good!



Baozi in its industrial sized steamers.




Eric buying rou boazi for breakfast from the garage stall..







YUM



Fun Fair

This past Saturday was KIA’s yearly Fun Fair. It is a one day carnival organized by the school and open to the greater Kunming community. Each high school class sets up booths for playing games and serving food and all proceeds go into their class funds to help pay for senior trip (NOTE: in our international setting senior trip takes on greater meaning. Our students come from all around the globe and after graduation they scatter again. Many students will never see each other again after they graduate so having a final trip together is all the more meaningful.) Eric is one of two freshman homeroom teachers and I am one of three sophomore homeroom teachers so we both had our hands full on Saturday. I spent most of the day rounding up 10^th graders to staff booths, directing kids to fill up water balloons for our water war booth, and taking turns in the Dunk-a-Teacher booth. We weren’t being dunked, but we sat on a stool under a water balloon while people paid to throw bean bags at a target. Hit the target and the water balloon is popped and the teacher is soaked. Thankfully it was a warm day!

Before the chaos. Check out those KIA Flying Tigers t-shirts.



Getting soaked.



I love the look on Eric's face!



Amp Week!

Each year KIA has a week set aside to AMPLIFY our school year theme. Our 2012-2013 theme is Living on Purpose. We had a special chapel time each day with praise time and guest speakers. It was a time for everyone to focus in on what we are doing in life and, for Eric and me, what we are doing in China.  We know we are serving here with purpose, but sometimes it is easy to lose sight of that purpose because we get caught up just trying to maneuver everyday life. We have gone into this life transition with the idea that we don’t want to just survive China, we want to thrive here. Thriving, we have discovered, takes a great deal of patience, flexibility, and grace. To be honest, we are not there yet, but we are learning to rely more on His power and less on our own.

A Little Catch Up

A quick review of our Mid-Autumn Festival/National Day break:

Monday: We went to a get together at a fellow staff member’s house. I don’t know if it was for National Day or just because. Regardless, we had a great night playing games and enjoying an impromptu Christmas caroling session (slightly random, I know.)

Tuesday: We joined up with friends Kevin, Emma, and Kim and bused to Yun Feng, a shopping center where the entire 5^th floor is dedicated to western sized clothes. We spent most of the day sorting through piles and messy racks of clothes. There were many brands that I recognized and a few items of clothing that I even remember seeing in stores.

Tuesday night Eric and Kevin took me and Emma on a surprise date. I had no idea where we were going or that we were even going to meet up with Kevin and Emma, but at 5pm a hired car pulled up at our apartment and there they were! We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Green Lake and ate on the terrace overlooking the water. It was unlike any place I had been to in China in that it felt deliberately designed to create a relaxing, calm atmosphere. Most restaurants and stores aim for the opposite - if the place isn’t loud, so the thinking goes, then it isn’t a happening place to be. Having people yelling in microphones is a common occurrence in the grocery stores because they are trying to create a lively atmosphere which supposedly makes people want their product (I have a hard time believing this to be true.)

After dinner we were whisked away in a cab to the building where the Kunming Youth Group meets. Emma and I followed Kevin and Eric completely confused why we were going to Youth Group, but upon arriving we discovered that they had arranged for a dancing lesson! We spent the next hour attempting to perfect our waltz. Whether we achieved perfection, I am not sure, but we had a fun time trying.

Wednesday: We spent the entire day hiking in the Western Hills (Xi Shan) around Kunming.



Traveling up the mountain in style! Via gondola.



Thursday: This was Eric’s day to catch up on work and my day to get some projects done around the house. We had a group of friends over for dinner which was an exciting first for us in China.

Friday: We traveled with 8 friends to Anning Spa. Anning has 20 or so hot pools that range in temperature and size. Some are contain color and fragrance as well. There were rose pools, apple, coconut milk, strawberry, and what we thought was coke (as in Coca-Cola), but we were informed by a 7 year old that it was sugar cane (thanks, kid.)

Saturday:  I went back to Yun Feng with my friend, Josalyn, so she too could discover the joys of western clothing. Eric spent the day planning for class. 

Sunday: We mourned the fact that our week off flew by!

Holiday

This week we are celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival/Moon Festival and National Day. Moon Festival was technically yesterday (Sunday, 30 Sept), but we celebrated Saturday at a party thrown by a school family. National Day is today and commemorates the founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949.

Normally these holidays fall into different weeks and KIA has a few days off each week, but because of the lunar calendar the holidays fell into the same week this year and allowed us the whole week off! Everyone at school was so excited for this week and Eric and I were no exception.

Mid-Autumn Festival/Moon Festival is viewed as kind of a Christmas like holiday in China. It is a time to gather your family and celebrate the end of fall harvest. It seems to revolve around the buying, selling, giving and sometimes eating of Moon Cakes. Moon Cakes are small pastry things filled with either meats (savory) or fruit (sweet). Yunnan province is famous for its ham Moon Cakes. The fruit filled cakes remind me of applets and cotlets and I think they taste okay. The meat ones, on the other hand, were not anything I need to try again. It is customary to give Moon Cakes to your family and friends at Moon Festival, thus leading up to the Festival there were huge tents on many street corners selling these cakes either individually or in gift boxes. Some were only a few RMB, while the larger gift box sets could go for around a 1,000 RMB. We were told that Moon Cakes can be the Chinese equivalent to the American Fruit Cake: they are obligatory to buy and give, but no one actually wants to eat them so they get passed around all season. To some extent we saw this was, indeed, true.



Moon Cake



 The party we attended on Saturday night was a big potluck dinner with both Chinese and expats attending. After dinner we each received a paper lantern, lit them, and made our way to Wicker Basket, a large international Bakery and Restaurant in the neighborhood. We rented out the top floor deck there so we could have a clear view of the moon (it didn’t work that way as it was really cloudy Saturday night.) We had dessert up on the deck while each person attending shared a poem or a song with the group. Some people told jokes, others told sentimental poems; one person sang a hymn. I don’t know if the sharing of poems and songs is a traditional Moon Festival activity, but the hosting family had always celebrated that way so we were happy to join in.

Today is National Day and honestly, I have no idea how this holiday is celebrated other than people just enjoying the day off and hanging out with family. We are certainly enjoying it. I am celebrating by making crock pot apple sauce and unpacking our final suitcase. Good times with the Warrens!

Getting the lanterns ready.



Lighting a lantern.



At Wicker Basket with our lanterns.



Everyone gathered on the deck.