Its Official--A Contract Signed

Hello Friends and Family,

It has been awhile since the last post. We have been waiting and have since received through fax our official contract from the DongFang Language College. We are very excited and pleased to see the guarantees in writing that we will be provided with. A 2 bedroom apartment (whatever size it may be) a kitchen and private bathroom with a refrigerator, air conditioner (yeah) and a washing machine. Also utilies at no cost, a comparable salary, a travel bonus at the end of our contract and lots of vacations and travel opportunities. It is very exciting to have signed something official and we had our very own ceremony in our living room to celebrate:

We are still waiting to get a couple of the semantics clarified just to make sure, but we are planning on faxing it back to them tomorrow or early next week. Right now they have a week off celebrating Labor's Day. We get one day off in America but they realize that a vacation needs to be longer to be a vacation. They also take two hour lunch breaks; one hour to eat, and one for a nap. We are looking forward to that. It is 72 degrees and sunny in Nanning right now, which is pretty tempting with cold May weather.

Kealy has been working hard with school, teaching full-time at Myers Elementary and taking OSU classes. She is very thankful she found such a great program and we are both excited to be done with school for a little while. Now we get to be the professors. Hopefully we'll be good ones. Ma Qin, one of my fellow co-workers at the capital, has been giving me Mandarin lessons during the day and I am trying to relay them to Kealy but I am not that good of a teacher. Still, we have learned how to say hello, goodbye, thank you, my name is and other basic things that will help us survive.

Going to be an exciting weekend with the mid-high kids, maybe test my spidey-sense and join the rest of america and see spiderman 3. Keep an eye out for a new post soon...

Sincerely, Ryan and Kealy