Winter Carnival

During the month of February, my life pretty much revolved around planning the first winter carnival at our school. Karen and I worked together on this endeavor, even though she originally had no idea what a lollipop tree was!! We work so incredibly well together because we both know each other’s strengths! Karen is amazing at organizing, art, and design! She took the whole concept and really brought it to life with all of her artwork and color schemes for the tents!

We used the gym of our school for all of the games and activities! I brought back most of the prizes and small items we needed from the states when we were home over Christmas. Most of us felt better about using tattoos from abroad than from China - one never knows!! We had lots of activities for the younger children and then to satisfy the older students we set up two wii’s! The hardest part of the planning for the games and activities was getting enough volunteers! We recruited both parents and students and in the end it worked out great, although every 45 minutes Karen and I were running around making sure the new volunteers were in place!!

In the cafeteria we had food, sales of jewelry, a local Tianjin artist, basket raffle, and cake sale! The biggest hit was the Snowball kiosk, which is Korea’s version of Dippin Dots! The most interesting piece of equipment was the cotton candy bike! Yes, you read that correctly. The cotton candy was made and sold directly off of a very dirty bike! I’m pretty sure it would not pass the health inspection in the US, but in China, anything goes!!

I think the entire PFO (who were extremely helpful and dedicated in the planning!) was shocked at the number of people who came out on a beautiful Saturday! We sent busses to two different venues and they all filled up. The food was all eaten and we ran out of almost all of the prizes. There is not much to do with the family during the winter here, so it was fun to spend the day together!