Catching up

I haven't felt much like writing the last couple days so this is me playing a little bit of catch-up. 

Thursday was our second day of teaching and things got slightly better because I knew half the kids' names and only had to teach 3 classes, not 4. The 4th graders were still unbelievably loud and out of control and the 5th graders still sped through the lesson much faster than I expected so even I was bored by the end. Same basic story for Friday classes as Thursday except that I only had to teach 2 thank goodness. Primary teachers teach in the morning but the 4 of us teaching elementary are scheduled from 1:30-5pm which means our kids are already tired of sitting in class all day. Friday we teach in the morning but it is still their last classes for the day so they're not any less crazy. 

In class I've been reading a story with my kids called Me on the Map so we've been going over vocabulary for rooms/things in your house and tomorrow (Monday) we'll move to town terms and then world terms on Tuesday. After that.. I have no idea what I want to do with them. We had to have lesson plans turned in for the week by last Friday so I just wrote some crap down but I'm sure even my head teachers could easily see that I have nothing really planned. 

I have at least one kid in my classes (19 4th graders, 23 5th graders) who has A.D.D. or is autistic or has some other problem. I'm really not sure but he's constantly drawing something (he's really good) or picking up his desk or simply walking around while I'm teaching and I'm just not quite sure how to handle that when I have 18 other children to worry about. It's not that he's a bad kid at all, he's actually one of the ones I like better, but still a handful for anyone, especially a teacher who isn't a teacher and has no idea what she is doing. 

Thursday morning I finally got off this campus and headed into town to pick up a few things from the JiaJiaYue (Chinese Walmart). I bought a pillow case (now I have a real pillow I can use!!), a set of small shelves that hang from my closet rod (aka my closet is finally clean), a toothbrush holder (I didn't know how many more times I could handle dropping my toothbrush on the floor here and then put it back in my mouth),  Pocky sticky, Chinese Ramen, and fresh fruit!! They don't serve any fruit at the cafeteria. Jk. On Friday afternoons they give you fruit as a special treat so I got an orange. After spending less than $20 I now feel like a queen in comparison to the starving beggar I resembled before. Jay bought this yogurt that you drink with a straw and its really good so I bought some of my own and am trying to fix my calcium deficiency.

Either Thursday or Friday I ate all the food on my tray for one of the meals. That's never happened before because I simply could not make myself eat it even though I was still hungry. It even had tofu (which I HATE and they serve it a lot here) on it but they fried it so it didn't resemble Jello quite as much and I could almost convince myself it was chicken. Oh!! another thing we bought at the store was honey and sugar. Melanie came up with the phrase "tastes like China" to describe our food because the majority of our diet is dry with no flavor. Hence, honey for the boiled rolls we get with half our meals and sugar for the "porridge" they serve with breakfast that I still only managed about 10 spoonfuls of the other day even though I loaded it up on sugar. 

Friday Melanie and Sam and I were going to head to this noodle place downtown for lunch since we finished teaching early but one of the Chinese teachers, Julianna, wanted us to come observe her class and give her feedback so that meant we had to attend at 1 pm and didn't get out of the principal's office until about 2:30. The lesson was good but I just didn't want to be at school anymore. The principal's name is Ella and she reminds me of Julie Andrews even though she is definitely Chinese. She is really beautiful and very refined and poised with a genuinely cheery personality. After we got done with that the 3 of us went to the beach which is about a 20-minute walk from the school and it is beautiful! There are a lot of sea stars and shells and we learned how to find and dig for clams. We spent a couple hours there supposedly planning our lessons for this upcoming week. Which explains why I don't have anything planned past Tuesday. When we got back we grabbed dinner at the cafeteria and then spent the night playing Texas Holdem poker using the tokens the give the kids when they answer a question right. I wiped everyone out the first hand but I'll admit it was more luck than skill because I had 2 flushes and then a straight. Mark won the second game but (and I told him that I'd post this) he only mentions himself winning in his journal, not me. I reminded him that lies of omission are a sin. 

Saturday morning we all signed up to spend the day with local Chinese families. I ended up paired with Melanie so Mars and her mom came and picked us up at 8:30am. We drove to a really ghetto building and watched the end of a voice lesson for another one of my 5th graders, Leo. After that we went to this place called Huancuilou (where Leo's mom also joined us) which is a watch tower on the edge of Weihai that they rebuilt for the Olympics I guess. The building itself was really pretty and had a bunch of art pieces inside. We ended up passing it later that night and it looked really cool all lit up too. After that we went to lunch at this place called My Home Steak which is an all you can eat buffet that has Chinese, American, Taiwanese, and Thai food. YUM. I found the best Chinglish sign so far and still haven't figured out what they meant by it but I ate these cooked greens called, "Grilled rape with snake butter." Ya.. I dunno. After Melanie and I had both eaten 3 plates of food and ice cream, they brought out plates with steak, chicken, and shrimp on them. I hadn't eaten good meat since I got here so I wished I had known sooner that they were ordering special food for us but I ate what I could without throwing up because I was so full. It felt so good to have a full stomach for the first time since I got to China. After lunch we went to Mars's piano lesson during which I had to pee something fierce and the bathroom down the hall had squatters but no stalls and they were really dirty. I compromised by locking the door to the entire bathroom and then braving the rest. After the piano lesson they took us to a park called Linhai Park and it's super beautiful, even in the winter when everything is dead. It's a super romantic area with a long tunnel of flowers that spell the word love and a heart and the Chinese sign for marriage or double happiness. There were also lots of ponds and a church where you could get married. On the edge of the park was the beach so we played there for a while and then told them to take us home because we were exhausted and needed to do laundry. When we got back we started the first of several loads of laundry and then went into town to get those amazing noodles. For $3 I took a bus for 45 minutes into town, bought a huge plate of noodles with vegetables and beef, and then took a taxi home. I call that a successful evening. We played Catch Phrase in the common room for a while before I got tired of people and went to bed. 

Today, Sunday, I slept in because I could hear the cold wind blowing outside and didn't have the courage to make the trek to breakfast. Turned out it was 28 degrees but all the wind blew the intense smog out of the area so you could actually see a really pretty view from the window and we could finally see the ocean from our hallway. Church started at 10am so 21 of us put on church clothes and sat in the common room listening to sacrament meeting on a phone call for an hour (pausing for 2 of the guys in the group to pass the sacrament) and then listened as they did attendance for the 29 different cities in China listening in. How incredible is that?! 29 groups of people in different cities all over one of the biggest countries in the world were able to have sacrament meeting together via a phone call. After attendance was a Sunday School lesson on the organization of the church (sacrament meeting was on personal revelation) but we bailed out on the end of the lesson because we were going to miss lunch and to be honest we were falling asleep. The common room doesn't have any heaters so it gets really really cold in there, especially when it is 28 degrees outside. We all started out in church clothes and ended wrapped up from head to toe in the comforters off of our beds.

After lunch I busted out my supply of hot chocolate and kettle corm and we watched Ice Age together and then went to the beach where I froze to a point beyond anything I ever remember before. Then we came back and got dinner and watched Anastasia. It was a really nice day to just relax and not have to worry about a million things. 

So that's pretty much it. My roommate is allergic to something in our room (my theory is the blankets that have probably never been washed) so she's had a rough last couple of nights with continuous allergy attacks. The birds here are black with white and they look like mockingjays which I think is totally awesome. I weighed myself on the scale Geoff brought here and it said I'm 10 pounds heavier than when I left the U.S. which I think is a load of bull because I feel like I've done nothing but starve myself and climb 1000 stairs every day.

Random fact-- there are 230 stairs from the street to my room so when I say 1000 stairs every day I'm really not exaggerating at all. Probably more some days. 

I'm exhausted so I'm going to sleep. I started taping tissue paper over our windows today so we can have a pretend stained glass window. I'm super excited to finish. 

Anyways, goodnight USA. Y'all should be waking up about now so enjoy Sunday again for me. I'm almost done with it.

Amanda.