New Year's Eve

Monday- New Year's Eve was a VERY busy day! We went to the hospital to get a physical exam so that we can apply for our work visas. Below is a picture of the instructions given to us. If you click on it- you can make the picture bigger and read the funny English mistakes like, "Welcome to Feng Yuan Hospital! Nice to service for you!"

Here is the Feng Yuan hospital:

Here is Mary getting her blood taken.

So after watching the video above did you conclude that this girl looks exactly like Kirsten Dunst but cuter?

And here's Jessica getting her blood pressure and vision test.

After the exam, we went back to the school to start our training. We were given our class schedules. I'll be teaching three small groups of approximately 6 kindergarteners each from 8:30-11:30 Monday through Friday. Then I teach a basic reading class which consists of six 7-9 year olds from 1:30-4:30 four times a week. My last class is 4:40 to 6:40 three times a week and has seven 11-13 year olds.

My kindergarten class is actually held in another building that is a short bike ride away. Here's a picture of the morning kindergarten teachers in the other building...notice the walls are decorated like a castle which is perfect for me since I told the Chinese secretaries that Sara means princess in Hebrew and that they can call me princess if they want. Ha ha.

After training, we decided to go to a bakery and buy a cake for our New Year's Eve celebration. The cake was so big we weren't sure how to get it home but we were able to strap it to the basket of my bike.

Here we are on our bikes in Feng Yuan. I wonder what people think when they see this parade of nine Americans biking around the streets that barely have enough room for the cars and scooters. We won't always ride around in this big herd but for right now- I love the fact that everybody actually likes going places together. It feels like we're this big Brady Bunch family.

That night we went to dinner at a place called Le Chei's and ordered yummy pork dumplings. Then we went to this place that sells yummy fruit Bingshaws...I'm guessing that's how you spell it. It's a fabulous smoothy with fresh fruit. I might just have to live off these for the next six months.

Chocolate banana bingshaw!

At home we played games and laughed till it hurt. Then, at midnight we went on the roof and watched fireworks going off all around the city. We are definitely having way too much fun.