Back to School

Wow, my first post of 2009 and it's already January 14th!

So, what have we been up to the past couple weeks? So much! School has started back up, and I have all new classes. Then last weekend we headed off to Chengdu to chaperon the ISC chess tournament.

Some of you may remember, Chengdu is the closest large city to the epicenter of the huge earthquake last year. Amazingly, most of the city was spared as the shock waves radiated out in an oval shape rather than a circle, thereby nearly completely missing the city as far as damage is concerned! As far as I know, we did not see any evidence of the earthquake in the areas we visited.

What we did see though was pandas! Chengdu has a panda preserve, similar to a zoo but with large, natural areas for the pandas to live in. Enjoy the pictures of these amazing creatures!



Btw, our Chess team did AWESOME. Our HS team took first and second place, the only two places that the tournament recognized. Congrats students!

It also snowed again. A lot! In fact, we almost couldn't make our flight on Friday for the chess tournament. After it started coming down hard around 2:00 PM, they closed the airport. After a few hours it opened back up, and we were only delayed by about 1 hour 40 min. And we had a lot of fun playing in the snow at school :-) Pictures of that coming soon.

Other than all that, nothing major is happening. We have a two week break starting next Thursday for Chinese New Year, and while we could do a bunch of traveling, we're planning to just lay low and get some rest. Who knows, I might even work some and get ahead on my lesson plans!

Miss you all and hope you are well!