There is a fashion concept here that we refer to as "pretty + pretty." It's when you take something pretty and match it with something else pretty....despite the fact that it doesn't "match." Gia is modeling this with her "pretty" sweatshirt and "pretty" skirt.

One of the things I love about living overseas is all the hand-me-downs you accumulate. There are many people who have gone before me and many of them have left a lot of things behind. Most of the things in my apartment are things I've acquired from others. My girls went through all our boxes of "free stuff" tonight and they ended up with so much awesome stuff that was left behind by others. The best item tonight was the winter jacket seen above. Somewhere in there is my teammate Becky. Have you ever seen such an intense hood? In what kind of conditions would this actually be necessary?


We've finally finished our first week of school. Even though we only taught four days this week it seems like so much longer. I'm exhausted from all the running around I've done this past week. I've had excessive amounts of time in our foreign affairs office trying to work our schedules, classroom issues, apartment issues, etc. for all my teammates. One thing that I'll never get used to here is all the stairs you travel up and down each day. I live 5 floors up in my building and I work on the third floor in our school and I don't ever want to count how many times I go back and forth each day. Overall it was a good start to our year this week. Each of my teammates have survived their first week of teaching and they seem to be doing well with it. We are now on an 8 day holiday celebrating Chinese National Day. It's strange that we only had one week of teaching before the holiday but it's actually a nice little blessing to be able to relax a little this next week. We have some places we'll go in the city and then there will be a few days just relaxing and hopefully sleeping in. Once school starts back up I have a busy semester ahead so I'm hoping to enjoy my holiday as best I can!