Getting up to the present, but first....Christmas party, kid drawings

In the days leading up to Christmas, it became pretty clear that Shanghai is lacking in real Christmas trees, and even if we could find one, it wouldn't have been worth the trouble to bring it back to the school. Instead, we bought this little two-foot guy along with his decorations at our local supermarket.

Nicole decorating.

Neighbor Stephanie had a fancy tree too.

The school threw us a Christmas party at a nice Italian restaurant. The food was ok, though I did get some severe food poisoning the day after.

Helen Hu, the person with the challenging job of keeping us foreign teachers in check.

After some of the teachers had a few bottles of wine...limbo. Conks won.

Me with my fifth or sixth cup of coke. Living dangerously, I know.

I'm going to switch tracks for a second and show you some of the posters my kids have been making. A few weeks ago, I had them create companies because we were doing a chapter about businesses.

Here are what my little entrepreneurs came up with.

Actually, these are pictures of the back of Rain's notebook. She's one of my Korean students.

This one is from Conks' class. Pinky Pooh is a proposed type of candy. Note the diagram, the outside layer is strawberry, the middle is white chocolate, and the center is a dollop of yummy black chocolate.

This is my Japanese triangle: Rika, Maki, and Miyu. I had to correct their spelling from "craps" to "crepes."
"You can taste two tastes in our hamburger."
Ok, no matter what I do, I can't make these pictures post the correct way. This one is from four of my Korean students. I told them they could start any business they wanted, no limitations whatsover, so they decided on a discount home appliance store. The Korean says something like, "Big Savings Store"
This one is a gym I think.
A few of my boys are obsessed with this fellow student (whom I've never met) called David, and one in particular always draws this portrait of David. Here David is the head of an advertising corp, and he claims that he is the most sexy.
Here a hairy David (try not to look too hard at the shorts, yep, 14 year old boys) sells sporting equipment.

Alright, so that's it for now. Coming up very soon, either today or tomorrow, are Beijing pictures and then Xi'an.

Cole already put up pictures of Beijing if you want to go over and take a look.