Thanksgiving, River Walking, Ice Cream, and Gua Sha

I can't believe it has already been one month since I last blogged!  Time has been flying recently here, and I have a feeling it will only get busier as I get excited about many new things...

One of my many adventures when I could've been blogging...

Also where I got completely soaked...

And made new friends!

I have had a busy past month- lesson planning, river walking with friends (yes, like walking in a river), eating too much ice cream, shopping in fancy stores, making upcoming travel plans (back to Hong Kong in November, Australia in January, Kuala Lumpur in February), not to mention celebrating Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from my preschool students- they made hand turkeys!
 (and want to go to Canada to see the snow!)

Here the big focus in school now is preparing for our upcoming Christmas shows.  My students for preschool will be perfectly adorable as usual.  I actually don't know much about the song they're singing as we've had some CD player issues.  But we will have to begin practicing soon.

Warning: extremely adorable Christmas song

My elementary school production theme is "Christmas around the World"- and no, it wasn't actually my idea, although I obviously LOVE it.  As America is just too easy for us, my 1st graders will be celebrating in Italian, and you can listen to their song above!   My fifth graders have their work cut out for them- they'll be performing Auld Lang Syne in the original Scottish of Robert Burns.

Yep, we're awesome...but only enough to do the first half.

This means lots of practicing in addition to lots of schoolwork which keeps lessons very busy.  But in a good way!

I also went to the doctor yesterday because I've been having some headaches and neck pain.  I went to a traditional Chinese doctor (which is a real doctor, by the way) and had a great conversation about why I should drink less coffee (oops), not eat cold foods (no more ice cream) and sleep more.  Sounds like a pretty good plan to me!  I also got gua sha done, which is attractive.  Basically I got my skin scraped on my back and neck (my neck is actually redder than my back) to promote my circulation and release bad things (like stress) from my neck.  Bye-bye neck pain!  I highly recommend trying it at least once.  And unless your skin is like mine, it probably won't look quite this bad!

I promise, it feels great!

All right, that picture is a little gross, so to make you (ok, me) happier....

This is an ice cream and cake place...that used to be an optometry clinic...and still looks like one...but instead of glasses in the drawers there are cakes!!!

So I will try and blog again soon with more updates on my fantastic life...like my field trip next weekend, Halloween party, and going to see Thor 2.
In the meantime, I miss you all!  (Unless if you're in Taiwan!)