General update

We're super-busy these days. Last week we had our first days of TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) prep classes and activity classes (I'm teaching folk tales, Katrina's teaching poetry, and Julie's teaching journalism) and we started taking tai chi classes in the morning's, so now we're spending lots of time trying to prepare lots of lessons every week and do research on what the third-year kids should be doing to try to get into an American college if they want to try that, and Mr. Ren wants us each to write some sort of research paper about our teaching. Oh, and there are some students forming English clubs that they want us to advise (one of them might have up to 400 students in it; I have no idea what we could possibly do with 400 students), and we're maybe adding another two hour middle school lesson on Sunday afternoons (we did this week, actually, but there was only one student who came, so it was pretty informal this time).
On Saturday Marilyn, one of Katrina's regular students and my TOEFL student, invited us to go look around the city with her for a while. She took us to a church that was built by some Americans who may have been from Carleton, and she had us try a local snack ("Not food," she told Katrina, "snacks!"), stinky tofu. Stinky tofu is... stinky. We ate it with a moderately delicious sauce, which is good, because, as Julie observed, stinky tofu tastes like horses smell. After that, Marilyn invited us to her home for a fruit smoothie. The smoothie was.... amazing. It was perhaps a distant cousin of what you might think of when you hear "fruit smoothie." She chopped up some fruit - apples and pears and little oranges - and some jello, then she microwaved a bar of chocolate with some yogurt and poured the mixture over the fruit chunks. As a final touch, she added some little gummy candies. It was tasty, but unexpected.

Pictures!

So we did in fact go on our trip to Pingyao, the ancient walled city. We took the bus down for an amazingly inexpensive 10 kuai each (about $1.25), though we had been warned away from the bus (a cab would be safer, we were told). The bus was actually pretty great; we made friends with some Chinese students who were traveling to Pingyao - it was kind of too loud and bumpy for conversation (and also none of our linguistic skills were really up for it), but they asked if we had pen and paper and we spent a long time passing notes to each other (I am a beautiful girl, they are nice boys, and we have an invitation to visit them at their college if we have time). Eventually the girl sitting on my other side got in on it, too, and wrote a note saying, "I want to communicate with you, but my spoken English is very bad. What is your name?" which maybe expresses the spirit behind most of our interactions with anybody in China. She lives in Fenyang (the guys we were talking with don't; they are going to college somewhere nearby learning to be PE teachers) and is going to the medical college to become a nurse, though it is not her dream. I don't know what her dream is; she was going to tell us, but the bus got to a bridge we couldn't drive across (there were giant piles of dirt and mud in the way) so we had to get off, walk across, and switch buses ("Don't lose the foreigners!" says the driver), and when we got on our new bus, she wasn't sitting next to me anymore.
Anyway. Pingyao was beautiful. Here are some pictures.Once upon a time, the city was prosperous - it was the site of the first bank in China - but it became less prosperous and was never modernized. Now it is famous as the best-preserved walled city in China, and it's prosperous again, though now as more of a tourist destination than a hub of trading. The center of the old city (there's a newer, modern city outside the walls) is a pretty-much-no-motor-vehicles zone.
At night, the city is lit with red lanterns. The whole time we were there, it was raining and cold, and at night, everything glistened. It was nice.

This is silly and blurry; that glowing thing behind me is the Market Tower (or something like that, we think).

Two views of the courtyard of the hostel we were staying in (Yamen Hostel; it was recommended by the Lonely Planet). The first is at night and the second is when I woke in the morning and snuck out of the room to find breakfast before my roommates woke.

In addition to breakfast, I found a friend.
That day, we bought a ticket to get into most of the museums in the city. It also let us through the gate to get up and walk along the wall, and we walked around from the North Gate to the South Gate. It was easily my favorite thing that the ticket got us into; it was quiet and peaceful and offered a different view of the city.
After walking outside in the cold and wet for a few hours, we stopped in a different hostel and ordered some hot chocolate that was expensive but was also made with real milk and chocolate and, more importantly, was hot.
We spend two nights in Pingyao. The second morning we took the bus up to Taiyuan, the provincial capital, where we did nothing but buy cheese and butter.
Annnnnd that's what we did with our National Day holiday. More later.

Holidays, weather

Hokay, so.
Mid-Autumn Festival was last Tuesday, and we had the day off from school (no one knew that we were getting the day off until Monday morning, though, which seems like awfully short notice, but it was definitely a happy surprise for everyone). We didn't do anything super exciting, but Mr. Ren invited us to his house to make more dumplings (carrot and mutton filled) for lunch, and he had us over again that night to sit with his family and eat fruit and watch the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival tv program. People kept telling us about how the festival was a day for being with family, so we sat on the couch with Mr. Ren and his family and missed home a bit (well, I did, anyway), but it was a nice evening and it was very sweet of Mr. Ren to invite us over.
Monday was National Day, China's 58th birthday, so everyone except us had the Monday and Tuesday off (we had to teach elementary school in the morning both days, but we have four days off starting today to make up for it), and one of Katrina's students, Marilyn, invited us to go see the world famous Fen Chiew (Fen Jiu) distillery. Fen Jiu is the local hard liquor (when we had lunch at Haihua's house, she gave us each a little shot to try, but it was not delicious, so at the end of lunch when her brother was cleaning up, most of our fenjiu was still in our glasses. He looked at them for a second and then poured them out to use to clean and disinfect the table), and the distillery has really beautiful green gardens as well as rooms full of liquor. Apparently our tour was a little short, though, 'cause they've closed some areas to prepare for the upcoming Alcohol Festival.
Elementary school classes are a little nutso. I have it easy - my classes are a middle school class and one of the older elementary classes. The middle school kids are so easy to deal with, and even though the elementary kids are pretty rambunctious, at least they can already speak some English. Katrina and Julie both have younger kids, who I think must be even harder.
The kids don't have much of a sense of personal space or property; they're curious about us and they dig into our bags pretty much whenever our backs are turned (if they take things during break, though, they always give it back at the end). Some of them got my camera out of my backpack on Monday, so.... here's a few of the kids in my elementary class. The classes are hard, mostly because they're a pack of energetic kids who don't really speak English and we are inexperienced teachers who don't really speak Chinese (we each have a Chinese person helping us, too; if we didn't, Sunday classes would be impossible). On top of that, we teach in some unused rooms in another school, and the classrooms are pretty minimal. There's chalk, and a chalkboard, and desks. My classroom doesn't seem to have electric lights I fiddled with the light switches for a while before noticing that there weren't even lightbulbs in most of the lights. Some of the kids need glasses; very few have them. There's a pair of twin boys in one of my classes who share one pair of glasses. There weren't classes last year for the really young kids, so Katrina and Julie have to figure everything out as they go along.
The weather here has been fantastic (I am the only person who thinks this). It's been damp and cool and just like home; I was talking to one of my students and she said that there has never been weather like this in Fenyang before. It's been drizzling for about a week. The roads really aren't designed to handle water, so there's standing water on all the streets and the back roads are in really awful condition (they're in pretty awful condition even when it's dry).
Today is the start of a four-day weekend for us, so we think we're going to go to Pingyao, which is supposed to be lovely, and also probably Taiyuan (where we can buy cheese!) and maybe Taigu (where some folks from Oberlin are teaching). Anyway, I'm off to start my day. Bai bai.

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.