Pictures, a Video, American Culture, and Pizza

As promised, here are some of the pictures and videos from December that I couldn't include in my last post.

All month, we had holiday-themed activities at our Friday night English club. One week Amy taught everyone how to make gingerbread houses (only we made them out of store bought cookies instead). It was great to see how creative they got. One guy finished his house and then made Santa's sleigh, complete with 4 reindeer and a bag of toys in the back!

Our gingerbread village

We had all kinds of fun at our class party on the last day of school. One of the highlights was them making reindeer antlers out of balloons and a pair of nylons, and then teaching them to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer".

Some students from our 6:15 classes, Boston and Seattle

On the 25th, after the opening of presents, we had dinner together as a team (an important tradition in Sara's family). It was an interesting combination of American and Central Asian foods- green bean casserole, mashed potatos, and shashlik! But it was delicious.

Then that evening, we took turns skyping with our families. Except for last year, I haven't spent the holidays with my family since 2005, so I'm kind of used to it. But I still got a bit choked up talking to them, so I asked them to gather around so I could take a picture!

My dad, sister (Katie), mom, and grandpa

And last, but certainly not least, New Year's Eve! This video is spliced together from two that Jennifer took that evening. It only shows about 12 seconds of the fireworks, but they lasted like this for almost an hour! It was beyond description. By the end we were no longer able to see the building across the courtyard because the smoke was so thick.

After that, we kind of took a break from everyone and everything for a while. It was great. We had a few lessons with our old students before the new semester started, but it was very laid-back. On Thursday we finally officially began 2nd semester and met our new students (we still have our old students, but the classes had gotten small, so we tested and admitted more). I'm so excited to be teaching my favorite class again, American Culture. It's going to be great! I can't wait to hear my students start quoting "I Love Lucy" or saying "We're not in Kansas anymore"!

This last Friday for our English club, we made pizzas. We provided the dough and sauce and they brought whatever toppings they wanted. It was a lot of fun, but we definitely had a lot of cooks in our kitchen! It was a bit of a cross-cultural experience. Apparently we make pizza very differently, and it resulted in a lot of "why are you doing it that way" comments. :) But we got into quite a rhythm of rolling out the dough, passing it off to the people in the other room to 'decorate' and baking. It was our own pizza assembly line, and we turned out about 7 of them in an hour and a half! It was fun, but I'm glad I won't be responsible for leading another English club for a few weeks!

That's about it for now. But hopefully I'll have plenty of new stories to share as we start the semester with new students and a lot of fun things on the agenda! Stay tuned...