Things I've Done Since Returning to Reality
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!
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!
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