Our vacation is coming to a close now. We have thoroughly enjoyed the past four weeks of a much more relaxed schedule. But reality hits Monday morning as we’ll start teaching again. We are excited to get back into the classroom. Rick and I will both be teaching freshmen this semester so we will most likely be their very first foreign teacher which will be pretty fun. We’ve only taught second semester freshmen and sophomores so it will be exciting to have the first semester freshmen. They always seem a little more excited to be at school. 

We’ve had opportunities to get together with many students the past few weeks for meals. It’s been good to catch up with our former students. I also went to school one day this past week and visited all of my students from last semester. It was so good to see their smiling faces again. One of my students that lives here in town invited us over for a meal a couple of weekends ago. It was our first time to go to a student’s home. This student in particular comes from a wealthy family and their home was amazing! 

It was a town home but it was very fancy and it was four stories! It also had four full bathrooms! It was unbelievable! They just kept showing us room after room. I thought the tour would never end! They also had a huge garden out back so they sent us home with tons of fresh vegetables. I helped his parents make dumplings for dinner and they also made a ton of other food.

They stuffed us and stuffed us until we could eat no more! They kept inviting us to come back any time. We enjoyed our time with them and we were able to practice our Chinese because his mom spoke very little English and his dad didn’t speak any. 

We had a reunion party here today at our home with Rick’s camp class. There were 19 of us playing crazy UNO, Dutch Blitz, and Monopoly. It got quite loud in here so hopefully we didn’t bother the neighbors too much. We then ordered dinner and they all ate here. It was a good time of fun, food, and lots of laughter. It was good to catch up with many of them. 

Tomorrow I’m having six girls over for dinner that I taught first semester last year. There will be lots of catching up to do with many of my students. I’m glad that they are all back in town. I’ve missed all of them.

Rick and Lauren