After a short delay I am finally back on my blog! Things got a little hectic here with two major firsts happening in China: my first visitor and my first sickness!
China experienced its Golden Holiday week from October 1st-7th, meaning I was on vacation during this time. Michael, a good friend from the UK who I met in university, decided to do a round-the-world trip in 45 days that he has between quitting his first job and beginning another. This meant that I was the first on his list of visitors between China, Australia and the States. He arrived in Shanghai on the 27th of September (I think) and I met him there in the late evening on Thursday the 30th of September. Nothing memorable to report about the flight there other than the amazing service in both the Beijing and Shanghai airports. I arrived very early to the airport thinking a biblical exodus of Chinese out of Beijing to vacation spots was about to happen. It was extremely busy but so organized that I was checked in, through security and at my gate within an hour. The flight was about an hour and forty minutes, and was in the terminal right on time. Once again, the Chinese amazed me when I received my checked luggage, got a taxi (when there were literally 200 people in line infront of me) and was at my hotel in an hour! I arrived at the airport at 12am, and was drinking in my hotel room with Michael by 1am! We stayed at the Crown Plaza Hotel, which was very beautiful and very close to subway stations and bar sections, the latter being the most important of course :)
That night we went out for a crazy night with Henricka, Michael's friend living in Shanghai. This was the beginning of a six day long, daily cycle: go out to a club, go home at 5am, wake up at 1pm, find lunch, visit popular tourist spots in Shanghai, go back to the hotel and get ready, repeat. It was six days of hilarity and inside jokes, amazing city scapes and spectacular sights, long nights and sunny days, mouthwatering food and tantalizing desserts. We spared nothing in our quest to conquer this city. I was in love with it more each day: it is beautiful and modern, and you would never run out of things to do. If I decide to stay in China, I think I may move to Shanghai. The opulence of the city still astounds me. ANYTHING you wanted was available. For example, one night Michael decided it was important that we saw sharks while we were there (don't ask me why). We ended up at a club at 2am with a shark tank in it stretching the entire hallway! There are just too many sights and sounds and overall memories to be discussed in one post, so please check out my albums on facebook and take what you can from them.
While there we also went to the Shanghai World Expo, a show where countries send delegations to set up pavillions to promote their countries. It began in March and continues until the end of October. IT. WAS. AMAZING. INCREDIBLE. Just as the Chinese do in everything else, they completely outdid themselves. The amount of space and time put into the show was insane. Just insane. We were able to visit the UK Pavillion (interesting but meh), the Canadian Pavillon (AMAZING, I was so proud), the Peruvian Pavillion (kind of nice) and the South American Pavillion (lots of freebies). We ate Chinese food there and were really upset about it when we realized all pavillions sold food and we could have had poutine and empanadas. Oh well. Each of the countries tried to outdo each other with the buildings, so the architecture was fabulous. We went for one day, but should have gone for two.
Michael then came back to Bejing for four days, where we continued the Daily Cycle. While he was here we went to the Beijing Open 2010 where we watched Andy Murray and Robin Soderling kick ass in some entertaining tennis. We went to the Silk Market where we bought a bunch of fakes to bring back with Michael. Other than that we didn't do too much, as I had to work on the Friday and Saturday, so Michael puttered around by himself.
On the Saturday I woke up completely congested and weak. I went to work but by the end of the day I knew it was over: Michael and Shanghai had defeated me, and I was sick. Really sick. By Sunday I had a fever thrown into the mix, and by Monday I was staying home from work to head to the doctor. I knew I had a sinus infection, so I told the doctor, and I swear he didn't even bother checking me after that. Thank God I was right, because the medicine worked. By Thursday I was feeling much better, but by Friday I started getting pains in my stomach. Bad pains. PARASITE PAINS. This was bad; my constant fear of being away from Canada is getting another parasite, and it looked like it had happened. I told the other teachers what I was feeling and one of them recommended I go to the pharmacy and pick up an antibiotic they had used for the same thing. I grabbed it, have finished it, and I feel fantastic! Crisis averted!
I will be updating regularly again now that I am back. We are starting into the midterm season so work is very busy. The kids are warming up to me more and more each day, and I still love my 15-16 year old classes and want my eldest 18 year old class students to go far, far away from me forever. Each day is constantly different and I never know what to expect.
I still love China!
I received a wonderful and suprising gift from my students this past week. I had been mentioning offhand how I really wanted to decorate the back board for Halloween but I couldn't draw, so maybe I would bring in pictures and tape them up so the kids could see what it was like in the West. A couple of days later I arrived to find the back blackboard decorated with Halloween pictures and an obviously researched blurb on what Halloween is! They even made a mobile of scary pictures and hung it from the projector on the ceiling! I couldn't believe how sweet and thoughtful it was! This is a picture of my PAL kids, my youngest students and members of the grade that decorated for me. So sweet! Im actually really sad about exams coming up, because administration will be using the grades to mix around the classes and make proper levels of students rather than a complete mishmash that it is in each class. I'm supposed to teach the top students and the worst students, both of which should be more than interesting, but I'm sad to be loosing this wonderful group!
One of the teachers from the school, Peter, is in the chorus of the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, so early evening one Saturday we headed down to watch him preform. The venue was in the Forbidden City, actually IN the most famous tourist section of Beijing that is normally blocked off at night. It was absolutely wonderful. They played a mix of Chinese and English songs all having to do with Rivers; the chorus sang for maybe half of them. It was my first time to something like this and I was pretty much in awe at how beautiful everything sounds when you are there in person. I snapped this photo and then got yelled at so its my only one. 
Shankar and Ileen, two teachers, had their son's third birthday party at an awesome restaurant a couple of Saturday afternoons ago. We had SEVEN courses, all of which filled the table like in this picture (this was round three). Literally, I ate one, maybe two, of everything that I liked and I was stuffed by the end of it. A weird thing about it: I stayed completely sober because, ya know, it's a kid's birthday party. However, the party was separated into mens' section and womens' section and the men just got absolutely, horribly wasted. Nobody considered this out of the ordinary even though the party was for a child. I ended up sitting on the mens' side because the womens' side ran out of space and I was better friends with the men anyways, so I got quite a show. It just didn't feel right to get hammered with little kids running around with toys and stuff, but I guess that's the way China works!
