End of classes

The end of the year kind of snuck up me when I wasn't looking! This has been an amazing year. While the previous year (2008) brought great change and transition in our lives. 2009 was a year of settling in and finding our place. While after any move, there is a time of transition as you make friends, find a church, and figure out your new city. I think that moving to a new country (with a different language) just intensifies that. By the end of the school year last year, I was ready for a change. All of our kids were in school and I just felt at odds. I knew that I could look for a job (teachers, especially ones who speak English, are always desperately needed), but I just didn't feel that was the right path. The thought of going to school and really pursuing learning Mandarin Chinese just kept coming to mind. Now, I have finished my first semester and have time for reflections. While none of the speaking and very few of the vocabulary was new, I was quickly overwhelmed with characters. But about a month into classes, the characters become less just sheer memorization through will, but I began to see the rhyme and reason to (some) of them. It is like I was unlocking this giant puzzle that with each step began to make a little more sense. Someone asked me the other day what my long-term plans were for learning Chinese. Honestly, I don't know. Since we have no plans to move back in the foreseeable future, I think I will be using it. :-) And how I use it beyond our time in China? Who knows? But somehow, I think knowing more of the language that is spoken by 1/5 of the world just might come in handy.

But now that I am done with classes, I am going to finally catch up on some much needed blogging. Has it really been almost a month since talking with you all? Yikes!