Ambushed!

We starting teaching our elementary school classes, and they were kind of crazy and oh-my-gosh kids have lots of energy. We sang “Little Bunny Foo Foo” and some games and oh my, it was nutso tiring and involved lots of shouting and trying to get kids’ attention, and then! And then! We had a sneak-attack totally unexpected banquet! For lunch! So now it is 2:30 in the afternoon and I am inebriated! Sigh.

We ate lots of food with a bunch of people from the school, mostly Chinese teachers. One, Zhang-laoshi, was particularly friendly (also particularly drunk; Mr. Ren poured him a gigantic ridiculous class of Fen Jiu (which is brewed right here in Fenyang and ranges from super-strong to tolerable) and he drank it all); he lives across the way from us and talked to us a bunch about how we are all good friends now. It was pretty crazy; I’m glad none of us are boys, or we would have been required to drink more to prove our manhood (there was one teacher who came to visit our table, and Mr. Ren explained that he was a man, not a woman, and that true men had to drink Fen Jiu), and I think we’ve proved our manhood enough for one day as it is. Anyway. The banquet was fun and full of friendly folks, but I am glad that we don’t have to teach class anymore today or anything, ‘cause I don’t think I’m competent to teach class right now.

To Lishi (Luliang?)

So we filled out the paperwork for our official residence permits - we had to drive out to Lishi (Luliang? I don't know which one is actually the name of the place (Luliang actually ought to have umlaut (umlauts?) over the "u")) to get them, and it almost looked like we'd have to try coming back again sometime 'cause apparently the police station is at least mostly closed from Friday to Sunday (a little awkward, since we teach classes at the high school Monday through Thursday), but luckily, Mr. Ren was friends with someone, so we got to do it today. We should actually get the permits sometime soonish, probably within the week, and then we'll be all set.

The drive to Lishi was pretty cool. We hadn't been out of the city and awake since leaving Beijing, so it was nice to see some of the countryside. The first few days we were in Fenyang, the pollution was really bad; we couldn't see the sky, and we met a girl from the medical college who said that she had been there for three years and had never seen stars in Fenyang. The weather today was beautiful, though. It was clear and blue and had little bits of white clouds that really seemed like clouds and not smog.

Sooo this picture is from the drive out to Lishi - the air got worse the closer we got to the bigger city, and we passed an evil looking factory with flames shooting out of it. (pictures by Katrina)

Claaaasses

We’re in our second week of classes here in Fenyang. The first couple classes the first week were terrifying; I felt completely unqualified and incompetent and like what was I thinking, moving to China to teach English? Things have mostly settled down now – we haven’t started teaching all the classes we’ll eventually have, but we’ve mostly gotten the hang of the regular high school classes.

The way it works is we each teach one grade of high school from Monday to Thursday. I’m teaching second grade (which is like the high school juniors), and we focus on reading. Katrina’s teaching listening and speaking to the first grade, and Julie’s teaching writing to the third grade. There’s a lot of emphasis in all the English classes on doing well on a couple exams – the college entrance exam (which apparently only about one in ten students pass the pass/fail rate for which we hear conflicting reports about, but probably fewer than half will pass on the first try) has an English section, and also if they want to try to go to college in America, they have to do well on the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). For each grade, there are 14 classes, and we see each class once a week, so every week we teach basically the same lesson (with some changes depending on the level of each class) 14 times. I think my average class size is somewhere around 60; the biggest is about 70 and the smallest is 44.

The kids seem pretty good-natured and awfully well-behaved. We’re s’posed to read newspaper articles and talk about them, and the kids are not very eager to volunteer answers or speak in front of the class, buuut neither was I. I need to work on speaking more slowly and loudly, and gee whiz I hope I can find articles and activities that are more fun and interesting than the ones I’ve found so far .

Soccer!

Yesterday we went to lunch with Haihua, who was at Carleton last year as one of the Chinese language associates. The food was delicious, and it was neat to meet her family (though we couldn’t talk to them very much), but the most fun was after we were done eating. She has a daughter, Xiaoyu (I think), who is eight, and a bunch of Xiaoyu’s friends came over to see the foreigners and try out the English phrases they knew (Hello, nice to meet you, thank you, how are you?). One of the phrases was “Let’s play a game!” so we went out with them and played hide-and-seek and a game that was new to us that involved throwing a little beanbag and trying to either catch it our dodge it, and then we finished with soccer. It was way fun.
After that, we went home for a while, but later on, we ran into our neighbor across the hallway and she invited us in for tea and conversation. Katrina had just baked a few loaves of bread and banana bread, and our neighbor (whose name I still don’t know) was really impressed that we could bake our own bread (most Chinese people don’t use ovens, I think), so we invited her in to try some. It was a pretty hilarious experience. Our apartment is large and nice and everything, but it definitely has the feel of being inhabited by people in transition; it doesn’t feel like anyone lives here yet. Our neighbor and her daughters tried the bread (they liked the banana bread and might have also liked the regular bread; I couldn’t tell) and then wandered around and looked into our bedrooms and told us that we needed to get real clotheslines put in – we were going to be here for a whole year, after all – and that we really should get all our clothes folded and put away, and we needed to put all the pots and pans away, too. It was definitely friendly of her, but unexpected, and eventually we distracted her by showing her photos of our families (she thinks Katrina’s brother’s hair is too long).
Today, we have free time, we think, so we’re planning on going on an expedition to buy a new kitchen table (there’s a little one in there already, but we could use some more surface space in there). If we feel really crazy, we might even try to replace the missing lightbulbs.