Kate and I are having an Easter egg hunt with the students on Friday. This could either be amazing fun or a colossal mess. We’ve brought in eggs for the students to dye at lunch and those are the eggs we’ll be hiding. We did the coloring bit last year, but this is our first attempt at hiding them. Unfortunately, it has been raining/drizzling non-stop for two weeks now, so it might have to be inside. I hope that’s not a problem with any of the administrator-types.
We’ve also created a “silver egg” (couldn’t find gold paint/nail polish) that I’ve put 3 yuan in. They students are incredibly eager to find that one.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this all turns out.

I have been teaching lessons about Easter this week.
It’s quite amusing to see the students confused the idea of the Easter Bunny with Jesus’ crucifixion. I think they finally understand that those are two separate concepts though. Goodness, at least I hope so!
For grade two, this is my second Easter with them, so they learned quite a bit last year…and I must say, it was appalling to see how much most of them had forgotten. I guess that just goes to show how useful my teaching is!
I’m sure it’s probably largely because the entire idea of Easter is something utterly foreign to all but my two Christian students.

Speaking of Christianity, one of my students came to my apartment a couple of times last week and she was talking to me about how she is considering becoming a Christian and she really finds prayer comforting. Of course, given my position, I really couldn’t continue much of a conversation along those lines, but it was a fantastic thing to hear.

All of this talk of Easter has been causing me to develop Easter candy cravings!
I don’t miss Peeps so much, but man…. I sure miss those Reeses Peanut Butter Cup eggs, the little Candbury mini eggs, and the Cadbury creme filled eggs.
Mmmmmmmmmmm…….

I hope that you’re all enjoying those for me.

Kate and I are heading to Liuzhou on Saturday to celebrate Easter with 8 other foreign teachers. The two of us have been put in charge of a Saturday service…so we’re doing a modified Easter Vigil before dinner. Should be interesting. I think it’ll be nice.

Here’s a little Easter quiz that Kate wrote….
See if you can get all the answers:

Easter Quiz

1.What does Mardi Gras have to do with Easter?
a. It’s the first day of Lent.
b. It’s the last day before Lent.
c. It’s the mid-point of Lent.

2.What is the origin of the word ‘Easter’?
a.It was a deity associated with rain and agriculture.
b.It was the name of a spring goddess
c.It was a mythical beast crucified by its herd.

3.What’s the difference between a rabbit and a hare?
a.Rabbits are more often seen in daytime.
b.Rabbits have shorter ears and legs.
c.Rabbits are born covered in fur and their eyes open.

4.Which US president did the first White House annual Easter egg roll?
a.Calvin Coolidge.
b.Theodore Roosevelt.
c.Andrew Johnson.

5.How is the date for Easter calculated?
a.The first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.
b.The second Sunday following the harvest moon.
c.The tenth Sunday after Epiphany.

6.On how many dates is Easter observed?
a.1
b.2.
c.3.

7.What day was Jesus crucified?
a.Good Friday
b.Holy Saturday
c.Easter Sunday

8.Which of these did NOT happen on Maundy Thursday?
a.Last Supper.
b.The feeding of the five thousand.
c.Judas betrays Jesus.

9.What happened on Palm Sunday?
a.Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey.
b.Jesus washes his followers’ feet.
c.Jesus eats the first Easter egg.

10.What kind of Easter egg would Kate like this year?
a. Smarties.
b. Crunchie
c. Mars bar

Two posts in two days!
Now I’m making progress.

It’s yet another dreary type of day here. Last week it was all sunshine and cerulean skies peppered with white, fluffy clouds. As soon as Thursday afternoon crept up on us, so did the rainclouds. Most days since then (it’s Monday afternoon here) have been plagued with gray skies, sprinkles, and showers. Naturally, this is the kind of weather that is conducive to staying indoors and getting things done…right?

Alas, it is not always so for me. Somehow, I find the endless thick clouds distracting and melancholy. Therefore, instead of staying in and actually making progress, I’m staring at book covers and pondering the existence of the word “towards”. (That dilemma is solved, thanks to my trusty friend www.dictionary.com- Usage Note: Some critics have tried to discern a semantic distinction between toward and towards, but the difference is entirely dialectal. Toward is more common in American English; towards is the predominant form in British English.)

There are things to be planned and finished. There are things to be sent, taken care of, and applied for. I am certainly well aware of these things. They eat at my inner stomach lining like soft, black leeches with sharp teeth. I know I need to take care of them, but I just can’t seem to get myself to move. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be a sloth in a tree. (I was always terrified those creatures as a child…photos in science books made them look mean and dirty)

The cracks in my bedroom floor tiles are getting worse. You know, I’m not sure I’ve mentioned them before. Sometime last term, a tile developed a crack. Then it began to spread. When I came back from the holiday, the tiles had begun to move up as though some force was putting pressure on them from below. It’s really quite strange. Mary (co-teacher/friend/waiban-foreign affairs assistant) was over here today to take a look at it, so I’m expecting that it’ll get fixed sometime in the near future. It’s certainly not life-threatening, so I’m not terribly bothered about it, to be honest. Mostly I just think it’ll get worse and it’ll be more work for the school if I just let it go. For now, I just avoid those two tiles (which are unfortunately directly behind the chair I’m sitting in at the moment.

Here’s a sign of how behind I’ve gotten with my emails. My dear friend Cynthia sent me a link to download some music ages ago (I honestly don’t know the exact date) and I didn’t bother to download them until last week and I didn’t even get a chance to listen to the album until today.
I’ve certainly been missing out. It’s an album by Alela Diane called “The Pirate’s Gospel” and it’s absolutely fantastic. Highly recommended. Perhaps a bit behind the times, but recommended nonetheless.
Now playing: Alela Diane - The Pirate’s Gospel
via FoxyTunes

I just got word that a fellow Amity teacher was “was injured in an unfortunate encounter with a dog” recently. He’s now in the hospital being treated and he got the lovely rabies injections. Ugh! Scary thought. I suppose I ought to be more careful than I am currently when it comes to animals.

I think I’ll end this post with a photo from my trip in Sumatra as a tribute to sunnier days.

I’m terrified of bees.
Absolutely terrified.
Unfortunately, there are bees here that are the length of my thumb. Really. They are ridiculously large.
To make matters worse, They seem to be particularly fond of my lessons.
It makes for an interesting time, that’s for sure.

During library time this afternoon, I was talking to a group of my students about insects in Yizhou. (inspired by the giant bee that was buzzing at the window behind us)
Apparently many of them used to play with cockroaches as children.
One of the girls told me that she and her friends used to hold them still with their fingertips (to keep them from biting or flying away), then they would tie a string to one of their little legs. They would then have a little cockroach on a leash. My understanding is that the best part of this whole little game was when the cockroaches went to fly away- they couldn’t get far because they were tied to the string. The kids would stand there holding a string with a cockroach struggling to fly. It gave me this image of a small child with a really horrifying cockroach kite of some kind. Eww.
However, I feel that I’m required to mention the fact that when I was a little kid, I loved cicadas. I would definitely play with them and they’re certainly not a whole lot prettier than cockroaches. To be quite honest, I’m not sure what attracted me to those funny little bugs in the first place. Kids can be strange.

I’m listening to a World Cafe podcast (of course!) and there’s a guy named Joe Boyd who worked with Nick Drake talking. I’m an enormous Nick Drake fan (Pink Moon is possibly the best album of all time) but I realized that I know very little about him and his personality. It’s extraordinary to listen to this guy talk about what Nick Drake was like and how he felt when his albums failed to succeed. Tragic, really. I fall in love with his music every time I listen, so it’s sad to hear how depressed he was about it. I suppose that it would be heartbreaking to put so much of yourself into something and then have it rejected the way that his music was. I guess he was just one of those artists who was ahead of his time.
Actually, that’s a saying I have often heard applied to artists and musicians who failed be a success during their lifetimes, but who were wildly popular after death. It’s such a peculiar thing to say. Can someone be “ahead of their time”? I understand what it means, of course, but it’s an odd idea if you think about it. The phrase implies that each person has a “time”. That’s rather frustrating to consider. I don’t remember being given a choice about when I was going to be born, so what if I’m before “my time”? What does that mean for me? Does that lable always result in an unhappy and unfulfilled life?
I suppose that I’m just thinking about it too much. That’s what happens when you spend your days explaining the meanings of phrases like “identify luggage” or “to be faced with the problem of”. You start to analyze every phrase for every possible meaning.
Well, I’ll leave you with a bit of one of my favorite Nick Drake songs to enjoy.
Nick Drake – Way to Blue

It rained for a little while tonight. I’m not sure if it was enough to cool the weather down for tomorrow, but I certainly hope so.