Another week has flown by....It is Thursday evening...Tim is still in Prague (it is snowing there) and Abi is on her way home from basketball practice. I spent the day working on a couple of quilt projects and went to a Thanksgiving lunch held by the American Woman's Club of Shanghai. We had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. In true China style the turkeys were very fresh...two of them greeted us at the door (still living) and two were....well...lets just say they did not make it to the "greeting". I heard they arrived yesterday from the US. I thought they tasted a little jet lagged. Ha Ha

The big Turkey!!! and the paper centerpiece. I was the lucky winner of the table decoration.

Lunch with the gang....

Sherie (on the left...she is from Portland, OR) and Ceyda....

I had two more Chinese lessons this week....I am so happy with my new teacher (not that I am retaining much of what she teaches me) because she is pushing me out of my comfort zone. I have to do an oral report every class period about what is happening in the real world...AND I have to say it in Chinese...of all the nerve!!!

Wednesday I got to see my Chinese students again....they were just as cute as always. I am getting to know the teachers better so that is fun as well as helping the kids. I was again humbled by my conversation with one of the teachers. He asked what I did the past two weeks...I told him about my tour of the Shikumen houses. He said he had never been there. I get in the car and cross the river into Puxi several times a week(some times a couple of times a day) and think nothing of it. For some local people it might as well be a different country.

Our 4th grade English lesson this week went like this... A) "Excuse me. Where's the store? (restaurant or movie theater) B)"Over there". A) "Thank you". B) "You're welcome". Our new vocabulary words were... hats, T-shirts, stickers, store, restaurant, and movie theater. I did not make up the lesson...it was in the book. I would guess that none of these kids have ever been close to a movie theater. The 6th grade lesson was about describing people. Their vocabulary words were straight, curly, short, long, black and blond. Our conversation was this...A) Who's that girl over there? B) Which girl? A)That girl. Oh that's Sally. She has long straight black hair. I try to roll play with the kids but they are very shy. A few are warming up to the idea so I think I am making some progress.

No school for Abi tomorrow. It is parent, student, teacher conference day. We will be at the school at 8:00am (Abi is grumbling about this and wanted to know why we had to go at 8:00 instead of 12:00.) and then probably go out for breakfast. Then...maybe make a visit to the fabric market.

I am very excited about Saturday. Our friend Xiao Wu gave us tickets to the Tennis Masters Cup Semi- finals. We will be watching 2 doubles matches and 2 singles matches. Yippee!!!

We are still counting the days until we are back in the states....