北京 Beijing, baby!

That's right, at this very moment I am sitting at Starbucks in
Beijing...drinking a something-ccino and stuffing a blueberry muffin
in my mouth as fast as I can. It's not because I'm hungry or in a
hurry; I just want to inhale all of the American-ness at once before
it slips through my fingers. (yes, even though we're in the most
famous city in China, to us it is like a taste of home.). We left on
Tuesday afternoon, and already we have seen Starbucks, Dairy Queen, 7-
Eleven, Papa John's, Walmart, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Hooters. (we
skipped visiting the latter.) But please don't misunderstand, we
intend to experience all we can of real Beijing...the great wall,
Tiananmen Square, Peking duck, the silk market, and the gleaming new
subway system. After we finish our rounds through Beijing, we plan
to visit Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Wenzhou, more famous places in
China. After what I'm certain will be an exhausting 2 weeks, we will
return to our apartment in Yichang, hopefully with a few good stories
and great pictures to share with you.

Merry Belated Christmas?

Here's the thing.  It's not that I didn't want to update all of you on our lives during the holidays...it's just that I didn't feel it was all that exciting.  And to tell you the truth, a ho-hum holiday is exactly what we wanted.  You see, excitement isn't always good when you're in a foreign country.  Sure, if we ate roast dog for Christmas dinner or had a bamboo Christmas tree or had a Christmas morning earthquake...we’d have some very fascinating stories to tell.  But, while excitement and stories are great for any other day, it’s the last thing we wanted on Christmas.  So, perhaps you can understand why I’m thrilled to report that we have nothing to report.  We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with our closest friends, Katie and Jessica.  We holed up in our apartment and gathered around the Christmas tree, ate Christmas cookies, watched It’s a Wonderful Life, stuffed stockings, opened gifts, and enjoyed a Christmas dinner.  Just like you!  There’s nothing better than having a few days when you feel like you’re at home.  The day after Christmas, it was back to reality, and we had a huge Christmas party for all of our friends...the final count was 31 people.  We ate store-bought cookies (shaped like snowmen, flavored like beans), listened to Christmas music, read the Christmas story, and played white elephant/dirty Santa.  The pictures above are of our Christmas tree and of some of our friends at our Christmas party.  I wish I could put several more pictures up, but alas, I am still extremely limited by the “Great Firewall.”  But as always, if you want to see more of our pictures, you can go to our Picasa page...I just put up pictures from the month of December.
Our Picasa page:   http://picasaweb.google.com/elizabethopheim/

For New Year’s Eve, our school took all of the foreigners out to eat.  We all got on a bus and drove for about an hour to a restaurant in the middle of nowhere.  During the bus ride, somebody shouted to our boss, “Jian, where are we going?”  Jian responded, “to a slave market!”  While we love his sense of humor, the whole night was a little unbearable.  The food was super weird, the restaurant felt like it was in the middle of Antarctica, and the drunkenness of the other foreigners made us embarrassed and uncomfortable.  After it was finally over, we got home and Zack bought a giant pack of fireworks to try to redeem the evening, and we rang in the New Year with the explosives...of course, we had our New Year about 14 hours before you all did.

Now we are just finishing up the semester, getting into our final exams at last.  We are exhausted, and definitely ready for classes to be finished so that we can have a rest.  But, we are also extremely optimistic about next semester and what is in store for us and our work here.  We hope you can keep us and our Family here in your thoughts as we prepare for a New Year of work.