The Real Blogger of the Family

It's been so long since I've posted on here that most of you have probably already figured this out, but if you want the real, frequently updated scoop about our family it's best to check out Sarah's blog. She just recently posted some cool stuff including my family's recent visit and a great new place we discovered here in Xi'an today.

If you haven't already, you should subscribe to her blog. It's great, and I'm not just saying that because I'm her husband!

Joshua Diego's Future Wife :)

You gotta check out this post on Sarah's blog about our boys! 

The Chinese Actor and Other Random News

One of our resolutions this year is to teach Joshua more about cultures and race: Not long ago we were in an Indian restaurant having dinner and two guys with full, dark beards walked in. I'm not exactly sure were they were from, but I'm pretty sure they weren't from India. Joshua took a look at them and then asked me why they had mustaches. Before I could respond he answered his own question: "They have mustaches cause God made them that way. We don't have mustaches because we're humans!"

Okay, so anyways, life in China: Apart from our beloved Liza leaving us It's been a fun few weeks for us here in Xi'an. For my birthday we went to Beijing as a family along with the Petersons and had a great time. We ate chimichangas and bacon cheeseburgers like we were coming off a forty day fast, and we brought
back a whole case of root beer. Such gluttons. It was great.

For Christmas we hung out with some friends here and skyped with a lot of the grandparents. Christmas is quite a different experience here, but we were glad to have friends here to celebrate with, and Skype made family feel not so far away.

One new development is that I (Chris) am officially an actor. (!) I've traveled to a few different cities, interviewed government officials, managers and CEOs and got a behind the scenes look at a Chinese pharmaceutical factory while wearing a suit that looked like I worked at the nuclear power plant with Homer Simpson. All that for a ten minute film. On top of that it was pretty much all done in Chinese so I had to act like I understood everything that was being said. It's been a very enjoyable process, surprisingly enough. Look for me on CCTV in about a month. Just kidding, it's only for internal use at the company, fortunately for me.

Other than that it's life as usual- language, language, language, friends, language, soccer and language. We are all still enjoying learning Chinese and feeling very motivated, even as we wrap up another semester.

Joshua is going to school three days a week and he absolutely loves it. His Chinese is progressing like crazy. Everywhere he goes he's singing Chinese songs about love. The taxi drivers especially love it!

Last thing- thanks to airline miles and a great wife, I head out next Sunday for Tokyo to meet up with a snowboard team from the Denver base. I'll be with them for a week and I'm really looking forward to it!

You can go to our website for a super embarrassing language story and some photos of our Beijing trip, including my three birthday desserts!

Much love from all of us here,

Chris, Sarah, Joshua and Zac R E

TFFCast Test Run Three

This is the third test run of our experimental TFF China Podcast, with a brief intro into why we're considering starting a podcast.

If this works like we're hoping, you can simply to subscribe to our podcast through iTunes. If you don't have iTunes you can download it here.



Hope this works!

Beijing Trip 09

Fun times in Beijing! (Posted by Sarah)

For more photos click here.

Im not that (kind of) excited...

Today I went to an office where they make informational videos. They needed someone who speaks American (they have a word in Chinese to distinguish American English from British English) to record a voice-over for a video. I wanted to impress them as they pay pretty well considering the ease of the work, so I dressed a little nicer and went out of my way to perfect the script I was to read. The first run through went alright, nothing special. They asked me to read a little faster and (I think) with more enthusiasm. As their English was pretty limited and so is my Chinese, I consulted the dictionary on my phone to find out the word for "passionate," to make sure that I understood. I found a word whose initial definition looked pretty accurate and showed it to my "boss" to verify. He made a weird face, shook his finger and said "no, no, no." That confused me because then I didn't know what they wanted from me, so I asked him again and he responded the same way, even a little disgusted this time. So I clicked through to the full explanation of the word and here is what I found:

-to get excited
-passionate (thats all I could see when I showed it to him initially)
-aroused to passion (!)
-to fall in love
-in heat (of animals) (!!!!)

No wonder he was disgusted- I had asked if he wanted me to read the script while "in heat" or at least aroused!

Lesson learned!

P.S. They did ask me back in spite of my...forwardness.

P.P.S. I should have known better. In Spanish, if you add an "o" to the word "excited" you have the same meaning as the Chinese word I found. The word you're looking for instead is "emocionado/a". I've messed that one up before too!
 

http://www.tffchina.com

Sunshine Camp 2009

“Those were the best two weeks of my life!”

I was happy to hear that, because I had talked him into coming with me and he had no idea what to expect. But when my little brother Blake and I were leaving the Sunshine Camp I could tell he had made some great friends and had had a wonderful experience. He spent all of his time with his Chinese friends, learning phrases in Mandarin and hanging out with them. He’s already planning his move back to China after he graduates from high school!

I had a great time also, making new friends and reconnecting with old ones. On top of that I had the privilege of speaking at the camp. The first of my talks was about stereotypes and cross-cultural friendships. I brought 150 fortune cookies to show them about stereotypes, and you should have seen the American student’s faces when I pointed out that only five Chinese kids out of over 50 had ever eaten fortune cookies, most of them outside of China! After that I was part of a panel of speakers and we answered questions regarding purpose, relationships, career choices, etc. My final talk was on focusing our energy, not just our time, on the things that matter most in life (which was ironic considering how sick and exhausted I was the morning I gave the talk, thanks to some stomach problems). But the highlight of the time for me was hanging out with Jess and Lisa from our Xi’an crew- it had been five months since I had seen them, which was hard because they are like family to us.

There are some other potential developments that came out of the camp but it will be awhile before we know if anything will materialize. We’ll keep you posted as to how things progress.

We had an offer on our house, but it was withdrawn by the buyer after the inspection for some vague reason. We appreciate your prayers for wisdom and God’s help in the situation.

We leave next Tuesday (the 18th) for China! Joshua asks us pretty much every day when we are going back to China. Soon we can tell him "today!"

With Love,

The Failla Family