Helen's friend Rouen came over this afternoon, and they did their best to make the largest craft mess that the apartment has ever seen-- but also had a great time doing it. Of course Sophia had a great time "helping". Then they watched Mulan in Chinese (for Rouen) with English subtitles (for Helen).Amazing how this bilingual friendship seems to work.
Tonight we went to the restaurant next door to our building for the holiday party given by the University for the foreign professors and instructors. It came at a good time, because we are still missing Deborah and Kate and also said goodbye to another friend today, and so are really feeling the need to make some new connections. There are teachers here from all over the world. In the guesthouse there are Thai, Japanese, German and Taiwanese...and tonight we saw other Americans, Europeans, Australians, Africans....a very diverse group and some familiar faces. After dinner, some of the international office staff got up to do some amateur entertainment..some was quite surprising, including some off key singing and a fair performance on of all things, an accordion.
The girls livened up the party with some dancing..
The famous "Amoy Bill", longest standing foreigner in Xiamen and author of "Amoy Magic", got up to share some humor and a song in Chinese...
And the finale was a great pop/rap song performed quite well by 2 of the African students...they drafted Helen to dance with them at one point.
On top of all this, Thomas is invited on two playdates tomorrow, so I guess we are having a social weekend.
We came home to find that Grandpa was calling us over Skype using his new webcam. Sophia gets quite excited to see him and tries to reach out and grab the little grandpa inside the computer..."That is Grampa...he's a man" was her comment afterwards.
If you don't know about Skype, you should..free calling anywhere in the world over the internet...and with a few cheap webcams, we have video conferencing....cool.
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