Student visitors to our apartment and student gifts

During April, we had 2 visits from students to our apartment. The first was Violet, Amaya and Kobiashi. Violet was the student that lives in ChenLu and gave us a tour of the town last winter. She wanted to visit to bring us a gift, a teapot. So they came and visited for a while. Nadia, the student from one of my classes could not come, she was busy with TEM-4 preparation. TEM-4 is the Test for English Majors, 4th semester. All students majoring in English in China are required to take this test the spring of sophomore year. Others can elect to take it, in hope of a good score for their school record. All my students are sophomores and were very stressed out over this test.

Here are the visitors with us: Me, Rosie, Violet, Amaya and Kobiashi

This is the teapot they brought.

This is a hada from a student who is from Inner Mongolia. The Tibetans give it to honored guests. The Mongolians give it to respected persons such as a teacher(Me!) If you look close, you can see the characters and symbols designed into it. It is made of silk. If around my neck and hanging in front of me the two ends go to my waist.

On student did her oral report on her grandfathers hobbies which are drawings and calligraphy.
She showed a video of him doing the above calligraphy. She had him do it for me. It is to a respected teacher. The small characters are the artists' name and the date.

I decided I needed a QQ account. QQ is the facebook/gmail/picasa/news website in China. All my students use QQ. I found an international version and got part of it setup. Unfortunately all is not available in English. These students volunteered to come and help me finish the setup. Summer, the one in the front on the left sat with me at my laptop and we finished the setup. Rosie had the others in the kitchen and had them make chocolate chip cookies. Most have never cooked before let alone made cookies. They were so proud of their cookies! While they were here, they asked why I don't have a Chinese name, I did not have a good answer, so they picked one for me:
陶去病
or in pinyin:
Táo qù bìng
it is from two famous Chinese men with the same year of the ox as me: Huò qù bìng and táo yuān míng a general and a poet.
Rosie made the hat you see on April (the front right one) and promised hats for the other 3. We will give them their hats this Thursday. The names of the two in the back is Dorothy and Clare.(left to right).
 As you can see I now can type Chinese characters and pinyin with tone marks on my laptop!