Let me fill you in...

A lot has happened in the past few weeks that I'll try to recount in a not-too-long-so-that-you-just-skim-over-it post. First, I'll start with a quick story that happened this morning.
This morning we had listening class, which overall is a very good class. However, today was a little different than usual. For some reason our teacher decided to educate us on all the cities in our country that manufacture their own beer. If you know us much, you know that this isn't a topic that pertains to us at all. None the less, we let her do her thing (mostly because our fellow Korean classmates were listening intently), but also because halfway through this lecture we thought it was a good chance to learn a new word in our new language: "connoisseur." We did our best to spell it correctly in english and plug it into our little handy-dandy electronic dictionary so that as soon as she finished her beer lecture we could call her a "beer connoisseur" correctly in Chinese. So when the break in the lecture presented itself Brandon shouts out in chinese, "Teacher! You are a beer connoisseur!" I thought she might fall onto the floor laughing, but alas, she managed to stay in her chair. Meanwhile it was the first time in our Chinese learning history that we had those koreans simply stunned with our up and coming speaking abilities. (we didn't find it all that necessary to explain that we had just looked that word up.)

So over the past few weeks we've had two Christmas parties with chinese friends and neighbors, we've made dumplings with our tutor, and tallied up a few more squattie potty uses. With no class to attend & the weather being unusually cold (we got our first snow! but by morning there was nothing to show for it) we've spent a lot of time taking down Christmas decor, rearranging our apartment, and catching up on previous lessons we've since forgotten. We brought in the new year over at our friend's house watching the season finale of Amazing Race! It's the first time in a long time that I didn't get to watch the ball drop. Watching it at 1 o'clock in the afternoon the following day just wouldn't have been as cool.
I know I keep promising you pictures, and I promise this time it has nothing to do with my procrastination...our internet just still hates us too much to let us attach pictures to anything.
You better believe once it works I'm overloading the bandwidth like crazy just for you all.
For now we'll just try to go out and do some crazy things to provide good reading material.
Happy New Year!