What would you do. . .

. . .with a whole week off?

Yes, it's true! I have this whole week off of school. It's the National Day holiday here in China. . .kind of like the Fourth of July--only this lasts a week.
The beginning of the break, our entire school staff had a retreat at a conference center at Laoshan, the famous mountain on the outskirts of Qingdao. It was a great time! The entire purpose of the retreat was to give people a chance to relax and be refreshed. There were some scheduled activities like hiking, going to the beach and some seminars. . but mostly it was a lot of free time.
I ended up coordinating the youth sessions for the middle and high schoolers that took place whenever the adults had seminars or small group sessions. I had a lot of parents thank me for doing this and several people comment on how I wasn't really getting a break. . .but if I was completely honest, I wouldn't have done it any other way. I had a fantastic time with the kids. Some I knew because they are in my classes. Others, I didn't even know their names because I couldn't tell them apart from their siblings. But by the end, I felt like I knew all of them. We played games and had fun activities, but we also had some serious times learning from the Word. I can only hope that there was a lasting impact from our time together. Our very first activity was a photo scavenger hunt and I hope to post pictures from that because they are hysterical!
And the amazing thing is that in between my time with the kids, I watched an entire season of Survivor (Fans vs. Favorites) and read 2 books ("And the Shofar Blew" by Francine Rivers and "Hadassah" by Tommy Tenney) So, I definitely had some time to relax. I watched Survivor with a bunch of the other single girls and we had so much fun! I haven't laughed that hard in a long time and it felt so good.
We ate our meals in the Chinese fashion with a huge lazy susan in the middle of the table and the waiters would put big plates of different dishes in the middle and we would just turn the lazy susan while people grabbed food off of the plates. It was at these times that I was thankful that I came from a large family. I was polite, but I certainly wasn't beyond reaching to get what I needed :) There were definitely some interesting things that came out of the kitchen. . .the most interesting were the seafood dishes that were served. Whole fish that had been battered a fried. Shrimp that still had eyes, squid rings (which look a lot like onion rings). I only tried the squid rings, which weren't too bad.
The sad thing is that I didn't take any pictures to be able to show you the place where we stayed. I'm sorry that I'm so bad at taking pictures. . .I'll have to check around and see if anyone else has some that I can share with you. One thing I wish I could show you is the room that I stayed in. Because I coordinated the youth session and there were more people than ever that came on the retreat, I ended up staying in the youth dorm with the rest of the students. I didn't mind it. The other adults were over in the main building that was basically a hotel. But the one thing that both places had in common were that the beds were unbelievably hard. We had bunk beds in our room and both of them were basically a sheet of metal that held a foam pad that was about 1 inch thick. And that was what I slept on for three nights. I never thought I would actually find something harder than my bed in the apartment. . .but it felt heavenly after the retreat.
Well, this has been a long, meandering look at what I've been up to the last few days. Maybe tomorrow, I'll write again and tell you more about what's been going on here in China.
Until then. . .Happy National Day!