School Starts Monday!

It has now been two weeks since I’ve arrived in China and I still love it. It is very beautiful here and everyone I have met (even strangers) have been kind and helpful. Last week it was extremely hot, but this week it has been cooler with light showers. When it is sunny outside all the women carry umbrellas or those who ride bikes to work wear a coat or special sleeves just for their arms so that the do not get burned. Many woman are concerned about tanning, they try to stay as pale as possible. My house mom is always concerned when I leave the house without an umbrella on sunny days because she doesn’t want me to get tanned. MOSQUITOS! I never see them, but I get bit all the time and the bites itch and get really big.

Training just ended yesterday! I start work on Monday at a primary school here in Nanjing. I’ve heard great things about the school; it is among the top primary foreign language schools in the city. My house mom says the children there are relatively well behaved in comparison to children at other primary schools in the city. Training was difficult for me in the beginning. By the 2nd week of training we were “performing” in front of 5-6 children, their parents, our teaching colleagues, and our instructor (who was evaluating us). In the afternoon our instructor went through her notes and told us everything we did wrong. The first couple days it felt like everything we did was wrong and it was hard to have to sit professionally and take criticism without being emotional about it. However, everyday got better and better, soon we getting “Great Job!” on our evaluations, so that was very rewarding after such hard work. Our instructor did laugh at us occasionally because we would play games with the 4-5 children (all who were little angels and eager to participate), our instructor was imagining us attempting to play those same games with 40-55 children, many of whom wouldn’t be interested in English, let alone games. So, I know I am in for a rocky time, at least for awhile until I get the hang of teaching and class management. The good news is that my ability to draw stick figures has improved immensely as have my skills at making crafts and props for my lessons!

I’ve done some sight seeing around Nanjing. The pictures at the top of this are from our visit to Purple Mountain, it was really bright out and very hot when we stopped to take pictures, which is why we all have our eyes half shut and are sweating. Up Purple Mountain is Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s mausoleum, which is at the top of a tremendous amount of stairs. We also climbed the Linggu Pagoda and were able to see Nanjing from above. I’ve been doing a lot of sightseeing with the other new teachers, but unfortunately they all left today to their respective cities. Next week I will move into an apartment with a teacher who has been in Nanjing for about 6 months. He is very helpful, he helped me get a cell phone, he told me where to find the foreign book store (I bought a text book to learn Chinese), and has been helpful when our group has gone out to eat because he can order for everybody. My house mom has equally been helpful; I’ve bought shoes and other things with her help. She has been able to get the prices down, usually by about half of what the seller started at. I don’t know what I am going to do when I have to go out on my own. We’ve been playing a lot of charades at training and pictionary, so I’m thinking those skills will come in handy. I had to draw a picture of a clothes pin at a shop the other day; the woman was then able to show me right to them!

Food has continued to be entertaining. My house mother knows many people and has many connections; I’ve been to several banquet dinners with her. Women almost never drink; the men get very drunk and smoke non stop. There is always three times the amount of food needed. Usually no one at these dinners speaks English so she has to translate a lot for me. However, many of the people try to speak to me in Chinese and try to include me in the conversations at the dinners. The more the men drink the more they try to speak directly to me in Chinese. As the men become more drunk my house mom stops translating everything because they become very troublesome and boisterous. No one expects me to drink which is a big relief, but they always offer. I’ve noticed that the women don’t drink so I try to follow their leads; besides it’s usually beer or very bitter straight alcohol.

I’m sure I will have more to write after my first week of teaching. Wish me luck!

CHINA AT LAST!

Hi Everyone!! I miss you all so much! Things are going well, a little bit of a rough start, but everything is fine now. By the way I apologize for spelling and weird punctuation if it happens, the key boards are odd. Also, this program/site I use to make a blog comes up in all Chinese so I hope I can remember what all the tabs are!

I arrived at the airport in Shanghai and had a huge surprise, I was forgotten!! Just kidding, it turns out I was standing 10 yds from the man with a sign with my name on it. I waited for an HOUR. Then I found the airport's business center and found phone numbers. By the way, I was so special, I traveled to a foreign country and didn't think to take any contact numbers! Finally it was worked out and I found the guy. I'm going to skip some details and give the highlights so far.

The office where I do my training is air conditioned and my home stay family has air conditioning, so I am very happy and cool! It rained the first full day I was here, but since then it has been unbelievably hot. I'm getting use to being wet all the time from sweating. I drink water constantly and as a result have to use the restrooms in a lot of ... how to put this, interesting places. The office and my home stay have western toilets, but everywhere else is Chinese. They have literally very nice toilets, but they are in the floor, and they flush just like ours, you just have to squat. I'm finding that I kind of like them better, they seem more sanitary because there is no toilet seat. I think in most places guys use a trough and there are no partitions or anything.

My host family is the greatest! It is soooooooo much better than my stay in Spain. The mother is so nice and sweet, she takes me a lot of places and helps me with anything I need. Today was Saturday so we have spent it together. We went to her friend's house and ended up eating there. Meals are communal everywhere (everyone eats from the center of the table), including restaurants. I like it because you don't feel like you have to finish everything on your plate. Plus I don't eat as much because it takes me a little longer to eat with chop sticks, so my stomach gets a chance to tell me when I am full before I feel overstuffed. The family gave me their daughter's room. It is very nice, it has an attached private half bath. The best thing about the apartment is that the bed isn't too hard. The one at the hotel almost broke my back it was so stiff, I couldn't sleep at all. There is only the mother, her husband, and daughter. The mother is a principle at a primary school and the father is a police officer. The daughter is 14 and has great English, but like me, she is shy to use it with a foreign stranger. They always take their shoes off when they enter the house, which is great, but then they put slippers on. I always forget the slipper part.

Eating... that could be its own entry. The first day we were treated to a banquet like meal. This is where there is a lazy Susan in the middle of a large round table and the waitress brings out dish after dish after dish for like an hour. You have to be careful to not eat too much at the beginning or you won't make it. The director of our program thought it was really funny to order the weird things. We ate eel, squid, duck, chicken, pork and many veggie dishes. I was proud of myself I tried everything. However, nothing was gross, which surprised me, the worse problem I have with food here is when it is too spicy (Dennis you'll love it). Food didn't get unusual until dinner time when I went out with two other teachers who have lived in China for 3 yrs but don't really speak Chinese. So, we ordered chicken and the waitress said okay. Then, she went out the front door, went to the cage with the live chickens, selected one and weighed it, then came back in to ask us if that chicken was okay. When it came out of the kitchen it was in a large communal bowl in a broth like thing with lots of veggies. I went first and tried to scoop out some meat, I got the HEAD! The entire head of the chicken that had been alive 10 min before. Then on the next try I came up with chicken feet! We finally found the parts that were okay to eat, but it was still weird. For lunch the teachers break up into small groups and go out for lunch, it is incredibly cheap to eat out. Today's lunch was my second experience with rare food. The dishes were all laid out and everything looked great. So I started eating, and I tried everything and I really liked the pork. At about this time they asked if I knew what it was, turns out I was right, it was pork, it was the liver of a pig! So far I haven't had any digestion problems, which is really good!

Teacher training has been slightly dull. Since my house mother is a principle I've learned a lot about the school system between her and the training. Nothing I've heard has struck me as odd. They do have a lot of competitions though. Everyone competes over something. There is even a competition for teachers, the goal is to write the best and most effective lesson plan. Teachers are also given marks based on their students grades so many feel a lot of pressure to do well. The students, even at the primary level, have a ton of homework. By third grade students average 2 hours a night for homework. Plus their days are crammed with extra activities, many either do some type of art thing or a sport. The daughter here does ballet on Saturday nights, I think she takes calligraphy at some point, and she use to take piano lessons. English lessons for kids is not a part of their day, its more like an extra class parents sign students up for, thus giving them more work to do.

I've been getting nervous about teaching. I guess it never occurred to me when I was assigned 7-9 yr olds that there would be a lot of creativity needed. I thought it would be like our 3rd graders, where we sit and do quite exercises to learn the material. Turns out we are expected to be a heck of a lot more entertaining then my 3rd grade teacher ever was. Everyday our lesson plan must include a game and a song, plus the regular things like vocab and oral practice. I don't know if any of you know this about me, but I'm not the biggest fan on having come up with songs to teach children things like the weather and the names of family members. I am excited to teach, but I think I am going to have to adapt to a different mind set and really try to understand what a 7 yr old child would need to learn a completely new language. Basically we are told to constantly be changing the activities so the students don't get bored.

That is most of the highlights, sorry it was so long. Nanjing is beautiful, they have tons of trees and green stuff lining the city streets and small parks around apartments. Last night we went to the most beautiful park (you have to pay to enter). It had a huge lake in the center and it was so serene to walk along it, and there were areas with the traditional like architecture that made up parts of the walk way. We then rented a paddle boat and paddled around the lake for a bit. I was with my house mother and she had taken me there to meet a cousin of her Irish friend who teaches English here, it was something to entertain both of us since we don't know the city. I definitely want to go back and spend more time there. I have to take a bus and then a taxi to get to my office for training because they live farther from the center of the city. The whole thing costs 10 kuai one way, which is like $1 something. However, we have been repeatedly told to not convert prices into dollars because we will be making a Chinese salary, so we need to base our ideas of what is expensive or cheap on our salary.

Hopefully next week I will be able to post more. As many of you know I am not a big picture person (Thats another funny thing. My house mother is always taking pictures for me with her camera of things she knows I like. However the Chinese are huge into being in the center of their pictures, so she is always making me stand in front of things. Mom, I'm sure you can imagine how much I'm enjoying that. Its hard to explain that I'm camera shy and don't like to be in photos. There are a lot of things we both try to explain to each other, we use the same language, but sometimes I can't understand why they do some things and she can't understand why I wouldn't want to be in my own photo.) Sorry for the detour. Anyways, my point was that, when I get around to taking pictures I will start posting them, until then you all will have to use your imaginations!