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.
2. That evening, since it was Teacher
Appreciation Day, the school took us all out to eat at a fancy
Chinese restaurant. The table had this big spinning disk on it that
they put the food on, and we just spun it around and served ourselves
with whatever we liked. I got to eat squid for the first time (I
liked it okay. It was a bit rubbery), and a few of the girls were
rather excited by the fact that the chicken head was included with
our cooked chicken. I also decided that I really like that in the US,
our shrimp are pre-peeled. I don't like how they squirt at you when
you pull the head off. Overall it was a very good experience, and I
liked most of the food.
3. The day after that (probably. I
don't remember the chronology particularly), we had one of the best
thunder storms I have ever seen. The lightning was really, really
close to us, so the thunder was very loud and almost right with the
flashes of light. My roommate Rachel (III) is from Alaska, so this
was the biggest thunder storm she had ever seen. All of us in the
apartment sat around the coffee table and ate fruit while we watched
the storm.
4. One of the girls in our group had a
birthday this week, so on Friday our Chinese coordinators took us to
Karaoke. They had plenty of English songs, so the fifteen of us sang
and danced together for two hours. Minus a few songs that were a
little too sketchy, it was really, really fun. It was one of those
private (aka, you aren't singing to strangers) kareoke rooms with low
lighting and neon lights. I've seen them on TV before, but never been
to one in real life. I imagine they generally serve alcohol at them,
but we obviously didn't have any.
5. I like Korean dramas. So does Rachel
(III), and so do a large percentage of everyone else in Asia. We
convinced our other two roommates and a girl from another apartment
to watch one with us, and it took about two episodes for them to be
completely hooked. We didn't have anything we needed to do on
Saturday, so we ended up having a Drama marathon. We watched one
called You're Beautiful. It was some really wonderful girl bonding
time. (This is the cover. The picture is a bit...whimsical)
6. Today (being Sunday) there was a
district conference for our church district. We got up at 6 in the
morning and took a bus an hour and a half to the
stake-conference-like meeting. There were probably between 100 and
150 people there, including us (there were about 35 of us). It's been
three weeks since I've seen that many foreigners together. It was
odd. The meeting was nice, and they fed us cookies Hawaiian haystack
afterwards, which were very delicious (And we got to eat the Hawaiian
Haystack with a fork! Imagine, eating rice with a fork.). We also got
our ward set up so that we can have the sacrament now. Yay!
7. This week we started our culture
classes. We got Chinese Language Monday and Wednesday, Kung Fu on
Thursday, and Cooking on Friday. I love all the classes and am
excited to continue them. I'll admit, I spent a significant portion
of our Kung Fu class thinking about Avatar: The Last Airbender. (The
stuff we were learning really does look like Earth or Fire bending,
and our teacher showed us some very water-bender-ish Tai Chi while we
were resting. Yeah...)
That's all for the exciting stuff. I
continue to get up at five every morning with my roommate to run and
do strength training. I'm getting better at teaching, and the kids
are settling down a bit since it isn't the first week of school any
more. They are all amazingly adorable and I love them. I will see if
I can post a picture of them sometime soon.
It sounds like a good week.
ReplyDelete