It has been 11 days of 2009 ...I hope it has been filled with many great moments. We have been mostly just waiting for our last finals which we finished on Friday. They are now finished and graded, and now students are gone for home. The campus is getting empty and quiet, and we are ready to leave for Hong Kong on Wednesday. We had a good New Years with our traditional toasted fish with friends. On New Years eve we got a treat of snow, and students out with their umbrellas and huge mountains of snow for their "snowball fights." It is quite rare to get snow in Anshun, but the most fun was to see multiple students who have never seen snow before (From Guangdong, Hainan and other warm places).

The cold weather has been long though, so we are very excited for our winter holiday break. We will leave on January 14th for Hong Kong for our conference and then the 20th to visit friends in Malaysia. It has been two years since we have seen most of our college friends, so we are excited to see them. From there we are heading to visit our Compassion child of five years in Indonesia. I have been planning a special trip to some famous places for Patty. We will get to see Siska and her family and then travel to Bromo National Park to see the volcanoes, mountains and hopefully get up early to hike up and see the sunrise. Then we will go to Bali to see the famous beaches. After that, we will finish our travels by going to visit our students in Zhejiang. We are super excited and then will take the 30 hour train back to Anshun and start classes again on the 2nd of March.

Can you keep in mind our next term of classes? We will have fewer classes, but more challenging ones and Patty is hoping to look into the foster care system here in China, but we are contemplating what that would mean for us. We are also looking at our future plans, but still planning on coming home to Minnesota this summer. We are hoping to get home for the 4th of July and a friends wedding and hopefully our class reunions (I cannot believe it has been 10 years already). We wish you all blessings!!