Pre-Beijing Post

We have finally managed to get all of our train tickets for our long vacation. It was exceedingly stressful, and we required a lot of help from our school coordinators, but we did it! Now we just have to survive our train rides.

We are packing light, so one backpack per person, and it is hard to fit everything. My backpack is very swollen. Because of this, I decided not to bring my computer, and therefore cannot blog until I get back. Then I will probably blog a whole lot at once. You have been warned.

My schedule is as follows:

Wednesday, 26: Teach in the morning. Fast train to Guangzhou (1/2–1 hr). Evening in Guangzhou

Thursday, 27: Get up in the morning and take a train to the Yellow Mountains (18 hrs).

Friday, 28: Explore the Yellow mountain area.

Saturday, 29: Hike the mountain.

Sunday, 30: Get up in the morning and take a train to Nanjing (6 hrs). Afternoon in Nanjing. Board a train to Beijing at 11:00 pm (11 hrs, Standing tickets).

Monday, 1: Explore Beijing.

Tuesday, 2: Explore Beijing

Wednesday, 3: Explore Beijing

Thursday, 4: Explore Beijing. In the evening, get on an overnight train to Xian (13 hrs)

Friday, 5: Explore Xian (the terracotta warriors mostly)

Saturday, 6: At 1:30 pm, get on a train to Guangzhou (30 hrs)

Sunday, 7: Arrive in Guangzhou at 6:00 pm. Take slow train back to Zhongshan (2 hrs). Die.

Monday, 8: Try to be able to wake up at 6 in the morning and teach kids.

We have "hard seat" tickets (They're about like seats in a tour bus, so not really "hard") for all of the trains except the one eleven-hour standing ticket ride (meaning we don't have seats at all). I am not looking forward to that. I'm also not looking forward to the 30-hour Xian–Guangzhou. I really, really tried to get on a different train that cost the same and was only 21 hours, but it was sold out by the time we bought tickets. Yay.

This Is a Title

This week was a little less eventful than last week. We spent most of our time teaching and preparing to teach (and finishing that Korean drama, of course). The kids are starting to get pretty used to me. After the welcome at the beginning of the day, everyone is supposed to line up behind their homeroom teacher, and they all looked excited to come to me every day. A lot of times it's more like they run up and tackle-hug me in a group. It makes me happy. I think they all know my name now too, although they like to call me "Teacher Lindsay" (the teacher that I switch off with for part of the day) or "Teacher some-word-in-Chinese-that-obviously-means-something-funny-but-I-don't-know-what" because they know it bothers me.

We had some more fun culture classes this week from the Chinese teachers. One day we did Chinese painting. We learned how to hold the brush and we got the special kind of paper and paints that you are supposed to use. We made this painting. In case you can't tell (because I couldn't), it is a picture of flowers and grass overlooking a pond with fish in it. The Y-shaped things are flowers.

Awesome Things

This week was rather more eventful than I anticipated. I like lists, so I will do this post in list form.

1. Tuesday was Teacher Appreciation Day. I went into my classroom and saw some of the kids holding flowers. One kid handed me a flower, and I was very happy and said thank you because I love flowers. Then the rest of the kids in the class all came up and gave me a flower too. In the end, I got 16 different flowers. It made me so happy, and it was so cute to watch the kids giving them all out. I put them in a vase (aka. water bottle) when I got home.

Survived the First Week

I've been in China almost for two weeks now, but I just finished my first week of teaching. We spent our first few days in Zhongshan doing training and hurriedly planning some lessons, then we started right in on Monday. I didn't know quite what to expect, and I was rather terrified, but I survived, and I have a better idea of what to do now.

The school I'm teaching in is quite adorable. It is a pre-school/kindergarten, so it only has ages 2–6.

I am teaching a class of 4–5-year-olds. My class has seven kids in it. I teach them for a half hour, then we go outside for to play for a half hour before going inside and helping the kids change clothes (Some days they take off their clothes before outside time and spend the half hour running around in their underwear. I thought it was a bit odd the first time they did that, but whatever). Then the kids have a snack, we switch teachers, and I teach the same half-hour lesson to a different group of kids. Finally we switch back to our original class and teach a second lesson that usually ends up being only about 15 minutes. The whole thing takes only about two and a half hours, but it is quite tiring anyway.

The kids are often rowdy, but they are quite cute and most of them seem to like school and like us. Most of them can't really hold any sort of conversation in English (beyond "help me" and "I want that"), but a few are getting there. Often, the kids who are the rowdiest tend to speak the language the best, which I find interesting. I guess since they talk more, they get more practice speaking than the students who are too shy to talk at all.

Hong Kong day 2

Our second day in Hong Kong, we spent the morning visiting the Big Buddha. We had to take the subway to a place where we caught the bus to go up to it. The bus drive was about 40 minutes, and went through some very pretty mountainous-ish areas.

When we got there, it was very impressive.

Hong Kong day 1

Warning: This was exciting for me, so it is likely to be rather long and have a lot of pictures. Feel free to only read as much as you want to.

Our hotel room in Hong Kong was smaller than an American hotel room would be, but it was very nice. It's a bit messy in this picture, but it gives you an idea.

In the picture, I'm standing next to the bathroom, so you can't see it. The bathroom had a translucent glass sliding door, which felt a tiny bit odd, but we survived. As you can see, the whole back wall was a window, and we were twelve stories up, so we had a very cool view of the city.

Plane Rides

Total Travel Time (From my house to my Hong Kong hotel): 32 hours

This means 3:00 AM-->11:00 AM the next morning.

With the time change, it is 3:00 AM Utah---> 1:00 AM Hong Kong two mornings later (so August 27–August 29)

Plane rides are a little bit wonderful, a lot awful, and really very much too long. I travelled with six other girls from ILP and got to take four planes. I first went Salt Lake to Denver, then Denver to Seatle, then Seatle to Tokyo, then Tokyo to Hong Kong. Here is a picture of my first plane:

Internet Censorship

First of all, I hate the China firewall.

Hey everyone. As you may have guessed by the previous statement, the reason I haven't blogged yet is that Blogger happens to be blocked in China, just like facebook and youtube and imdb and all sorts of other really useful websites. I was willing to deal with a facebook block, but I've been getting more and more frustrated with the firewall over the past week and a half and finally broke down and paid for software that gets me around the block. For some reason I still can't get facebook or youtube, but I am working on that. Gahhh. I used to not care so much about internet censorship, but I do now so much.

Anyway, I kept writing posts even though I couldn't actually post them, so I'll put them up now.