A Golden Harbor Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is truly a North American holiday.  Typically our gratefulness is centered around the love, health, and fortune of our families.  I don't think we knew what to expect regarding celebration of Thankgiving in China.  Of course, we knew there weren't going to be large Snoopy baloons parading down the street.  Would other North Americans celebrate or just give it a slight nod?  Could we get the foods that remind us all of Thanksgiving day?  I'm happy to say that all of the questions were answered in a very positive way.

Steve and Sandra Carpenter host an annual Thanksgiving party.  This year it was on Nov 19 at their town house in Golden Harbor.  They provided plenty of turkey, and everyone else all chipped in with a dish.  Chessie made sweet potato casserole and refrigerator rolls, so we felt at home.

Between dinner and dessert we enjoyed about a 15-on-15 pick up American football game.  It felt like Thanksgiving.

Some photos are below.  I'm guessing there were probably about 75-100 people there.

This is the kitchen after the turkey was pretty much cleaned out.

Here's the look into their dining room where some of the food was kept.

This is looking down into one of their sitting rooms where some people were eating.

The kids spent all of their time on the trampoline in the back when they weren't eating.

> Clayton

Our House, Part I

Sorry if you saw this post originally a week or two ago.  The video wasn't working, so I pulled it off.  I've had some problems uploading video to the blog, but that appears to be fixed now.

This isn't going to be as exciting as the Deathly Hallows, but we thought we would do a video tour of our house in two expisodes.  Chessie and I came to Wuhan in Oct 2010 to look at homes for our stay in China.  We looked at about six different homes -- stand alone houses, town houses, and apartments.  The one we chose was a pretty easy choice.  It was the house with a floor plan that best matched what we were used to in the USA.  There was also another house that was huge and spectacular -- definitely a story for another time.

This first episode shows the downstairs.  Everything is pretty well explained in the video, so let's get to it.

> Clayton

Speaking Chinese 谈话中文

It's obviously tough sometimes getting around China without speaking the language.  It also quite amazing all of the things you can communicate to people without saying words -- a lesson we learned very quickly.

We are slowly making progress learning the language.  The most progress we made was with our Chinese teacher, Fennefer 方园.  Fennefer clearly isn't a Chinese name, but you may be surprised that it is her English name.  I think there's a story there, but it obviously wasn't that interesting because it didn't stick with me.  Fennefer was recommended to us through the company paid language training company.  She would come to our house once per week beginning in Feb.  She worked with Ema and Chessie for one hour and then worked with me for two hours.  (Bella wasn't interested.)



Lessons continued through June.  Fennefer is a student at Wuhan University.  She went home to Beijing during the summer, so we decided to just take a two month break instead of finding a new teacher.  She came back to Wuhan, and we restarted lessons in late Sep.  Unfortunately after just a couple of weeks, she said she was returning to Beijing for the rest of the semester.  It was already Oct by then, and the company paid benefit expires at the end of the year.  We decided just to let it go.  We liked Fennefer, but overall is wasn't a great experience.

The person we need to communicate with the most is Mr. Huang, our driver.  When we arrived, I quickly learned out to send text message to him in Chinese.  This was perfect because I could take my time to figure out what I needed to say, and with an English-Chinese iPhone app I could be accurate.  I mostly just needed to send a few characters that told him where we needed to go and what time.  Of course, that was all under the assumption that he needed to pick us up from our house.  After awhile I was able to communicate more complicated items.  For example, Chessie walked around the local area with the kids one day this summer.  It was so hot they decided they wanted a ride back home.  Since Mr. Huang didn't know that they had gone out, I had to communicate to him where they were and what he needed to do.  Everything worked out fine.

Mr. Huang is who I learn the most from now.  I try and talk with him as much as I can in the car.  Words I learn from him seem to stick in my mind better than they did learning with Fennefer.

> Clayton