Thanksgiving

(I don't actually have pictures of any of this. Hopefully I can get them from people who brought cameras)

Thanksgiving at our school was not nearly as big as Halloween was. We've been doing Thanksgiving themed activities for a few weeks, and we put up a few decorations right at the entrance of our school, but that was it (no intense haunted house or big performance, thank goodness). One of the days this week, my kids went on a field trip to the post office so I spent the morning putting up a paper thankfulness tree. We had paper leaves that people could write things they were thankful for on and put up on the tree.

Thanksgiving day itself (I suppose that is today) was Parents' day, so the parents of all the kids came and watched class. It wasn't as bad as I had feared. Some of the kids actually behaved better with their parents there, and while my lesson wasn't amazing, it wasn't a disaster either. I had met some of the parents before, but it was fun to meet a few more of them.

We (the 15 girls in my ILP group) had planned on having a potluck Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday evening. This happened to coincide with the birthday of one of our Chinese friends (There is a tea and smoothie shop down the street from us that we like to go hang out at, and we've made friends with all the owners and workers), so we ended up having our thanksgiving potluck at the tea shop. It was really fun. We all brought the stuff we had made to the little round tables that the tea shop has set out on the sidewalk and sat on stools and had Thanksgiving together with everyone. I was surprised at all the things we managed to make. We didn't have any turkey, but we did have mashed potatoes (the powdered kind) and gravy, stuffing, pumpking pudding, and green jello, along with other things. It actually felt sort of like Thanksgiving, albeit outside and in China and with fish balls on the side. Then, of course, we had birthday cake afterwards. I was sufficiently full by the end.

Bragging Rights

Today I ran 17.5 miles. I figure that gives me bragging rights.
For those of you who aren't aware, this is 2 miles farther than I had ever run before, so it made me feel awesome. It also made my legs hurt a lot. :)

My Kids!

If you couldn't tell, I've kind of given up on blogging about my Beijing trip. Blogging doesn't take me that long, but I was kind of avoiding it, so I never got to it. Maybe I will post some pictures on facebook sometime.

I finally managed to get pictures of all of my kids! Since kids are hard to take pictures of, some of the pictures are better than others, sorry. Here are pictures of all the kids in my homeroom.

First of all, we have Valerie. She's pretty quiet and very sweet. She's the one that can't dress herself so that I have to do it every day. It is less that she can't do it and more that she just stares off into space and doesn't do anything. She always wears t-shirts and pink stretchy pants (okay, not in this picture--those are her uniform pants).

Next is Alyson. She has this gorgeous long hair, and this sassy personality. She's also one of my best English speakers ("I is a mermaid princess! Terrence is Prince Charming!") and knows all of the Disney princesses by name. I feel a tiny bit bad for any boys who know her when she gets to high school. They don't stand a chance.

I don't have a particularly good picture of Phoebe (this is her with Alyson). She's the oldest of my students by a few months and is definitely the tallest. She seems to like me a lot, and is always grabbing my hand/shirt/whatever she can get a hold of and pulling me over to stand by her.

Jophy is super, super quiet. I often can't tell if she is saying her English right, because she speaks too quietly for me to hear. She is very good friends with Phoebe, so I can't ever have them sit together. She likes me fine, but she sort of does her own thing. She also poses well for pictures.

Cary is sort of my star student. He is really good at following rules, and says what I want him to say about twice as much as everyone else (he's not quite as good at having a conversation as, say, Alyson, but he speaks much more in class).

Tony is a sweetheart, but he's also definitely a handful. If he grew up in America, he would probably be a football player in high school--he sort of has that cool-guy personality. He speaks English quite well ("Teacher Diane! I'm a tiger! I will eat you!), but also very loudly and not always at the right time.

Peter took a little longer to like me than my other students. He's pretty shy, and he has a hard time with English. I think I'm winning him over, though. I make sure to wave to him specifically when I come into class in the mornings, and he is to the point where he smiles and waves back.

Terrence is super tiny, and Lindsay likes to say he looks like a little teddy bear. He's behaves pretty well in class, but every so often he gives me this little mischievous smile and refuses to do what I say. It is pretty darn cute.

Day 3: I can't actually remember the name of the town. It was a little place near the yellow mountains.

We got into the Huangshan railway station at a bit after 4 in the morning, which is a rather inconvenient time, considering that normal buses don't start running until a decent hour and we sort of had to get to our hostel in the next city over. We ended up taking a private bus. Or, rather, three private buses. I was pretty out of it, but the other girls say that we spent a good half hour driving in circles while we were on the first bus. Then they kicked us out and told us to go to a second one, which claimed to go to our hostel, but actually just kicked us out and told us to get on a third one. We were getting rather worried at this point, and annoyed that we had to pay for three buses when we were expecting one, but we finally did arrive.

Everyone else except Rachael just crashed in the room for a few hours, but I looked off our balcony and saw this view:

And I was like, I have to run around that place. It turned out that the hostel had super, super cool grounds with climbing structures and old walls with gates in them and a steam train front (what is that part called again?) and all sorts of pretty scenery. They had a climbing wall that I really, really wanted to climb on, but I wasn't sure if I was allowed to and the belay device was different than I am used to, so I didn't. I did get out my camera and take lots of pictures, though.

When people woke up we spent the rest of our day walking around the town, enjoying the scenery and taking more pictures.

Day 2: 19 1/2 hours on a train

Theme song: "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey

(Mostly because of the line "She took the midnight train going anywhere." It came up on my music player near midnight and it made me laugh really hard. Probably because I was tired from being on a train for 14 hours. At midnight.)

We got up early the next morning and got on a train to the yellow mountains. And stayed on the train for the rest of the day (until 4:00 am the next morning, actually).

The first thing you do when riding a train in China, is you go wait at the train station with everyone else waiting for your train. It looks about like this.

 

Except the waiting seats were all taken by the time we got there, so we looked more like this:

Chinese trains are really interesting. You can buy tickets for either "sleepers," which are little cot things set into the wall, or "hard seats," which look about like seats on a tour bus. Hard seat tickets are quite a bit cheaper, so we got them for all of our trains.

There are five seats across, with three on one side, two on the other, and an aisle in the middle. One thing about the aisles in Chinese trains is that they aren't empty. People can buy standing tickets for trains and then they just hang out in the aisles or by the bathrooms. There are also carts that come through the aisle selling stuff, and the standing people kind of just squish into you until the carts pass. It makes it a bit difficult to get up and go to the bathroom (that is, if you are brave enough to go to the bathroom in the first place. I will show a picture of a squat toilet later). It is definitely an experience.

The seats face each other, rather than facing the back of another seat, so I got to spend 19 hours staring at a Chinese guy who I had no way to talk to (I swear, he didn't move the entire time. He even slept in the same position that he sat in). There is a little table that extends from the wall about 1 1/2 seats. The window seats are the best for sleeping, since you have a wall and a table to lean against. Plus you get to look out the window, which is really fun. The aisle seats are the best if you want to be moving around a lot. The middle seat on the one side is just really terrible because you can neither sleep well nor move well.

I had a window seat for this ride, but I didn't get a whole lot of sleep, since the lights didn't go out, and I hadn't quite figured out the art of train-sleeping yet.

Day 1: Guangzhou

We hadn't originally planned to stay in Guangzhou during our vacation, but the train times ended up working out that way. We took the fast train there (it takes about 45 minutes) right after we were done teaching classes so we had an evening to do whatever we felt like. We found our hostel, dropped off our stuff, and went out to explore. We saw something that looked like this:

We thought that the contrast between the old style tower and the very modern tower was rather striking. The modern tower was too far away, but we managed to find our way to the pagoda. It was surrounded by a little patch of rather thick forest with very loud crickets and a dark little path leading up to it. The door was barred so that we couldn't go inside, but it was very cool.

We wandered around some more, decided to go eat somewhere, and ended up just going to KFC. It was very large and super busy. I knew that KFC was popular here, but it was different actually seeing it. I would compare the food to the KFCs in America, but I don't think I've been to a KFC in America since I was about twelve, so I can't.

We finished off the day with a mooncake party in our hostel because, after all, this was the moon festival.

Post-Beijing Blog (the first of many)

I've now been home from my Beijing trip for more than a week, so this is me finally getting around to starting blogging about it. I will do a separate post about each place we went to, but that may take a few days. I mostly just wanted to post something to let ya'll know that yes, I am alive, and I will get to posting more.

First of all, here is my group. In the picture we are at the Zhongshan train station all ready to set off.

From left to right, there are Lindsay, me, Savannah, Ashlee, and Rachael. Everyone is my roommate except Ashlee, who is my honorary roommate. They are all awesome.

Statistics:

Length: 12 days/11 nights

Stops: Guangzhou, Yellow Mountains, Beijing, Xian

Total cost of the trip: US$480

The cost covered:

12 days worth of food

7 nights at hostels (the other nights were on trains)

7 train rides covering a total of approximately 6,000 km

Transportation around the cities (buses, metros, taxis)

Entrance fees to various sites

Souvenirs

I went slightly over-budget, which was not surprising, considering how small my budget was, but this is still amazingly cheap compared to what I would pay for a similar vacation in the states.

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.