Wednesday 5/15:
Wednesday morning I woke up at 4:30am to the sound of what I like to call mockingjays. I can't remember what everyone else calls them but they look like mockingjays to me and it makes me less annoyed at them if I think of them as fictional animals. I remembered Sam saying that the sun rises around 5am and he has pointed out before that if I wake up that early I should just try staying awake so that's what I did. I headed up on the roof and watched what has now made one of the top 5 sunrises of my life. It comes up behind mountains so you could see the perfect line of orange breaking the crest and eventually the entire beautiful sun. That's a bonus to living somewhere that the air's so dirty-- most days you can look straight at the sun.
Once the sun was up for the day I headed down to the track and ran a couple miles while one of the guards swept water off the train from rain a day or two before. He doesn't speak English and I don't speak Chinese so it was kinda fun having him count laps and laugh at me completely out of breath. I finished about the time the sunlight hit the track and headed back up 280 stairs (I think that's what we counted a few months back) and showered and read a couple talks out of the Ensign I brought before I headed to breakfast that I haven't been awake early enough for in about 2 months. They had "scones" for breakfast which, when I used to get up early enough to go, was the breakfast I always missed on the days I slept in so I was excited to finally try them. They tasted pretty decent once I put honey on them but I was still starving afterward.
Back at the dorms I went back to reading and fell asleep on the couch for a while until Luke came in and woke me up so I moved back to my bed an slept for another hour until Melanie woke up.
We went to the beach with Sam and ran into another wedding photo shoot. I don't think I've ever been to the beach without someone getting wedding pictures taken there. Probably a place a photography agency uses. We even though we saw a nude photo shoot and walked over to investigate but it turned out that she was wearing a bikini. Shucks.
We got back late and missed lunch and had to head straight to inservice where they informed us that even though we had 5 weeks left we were going to get a head start on doing inventory and end-of-the-year cleaning. Melanie, Mikelle, and I got assigned to inventory and clean the kitchen which seemed pointless because even the amount of dishes change every day because people stash them in their rooms plus there was no way it was staying clean for a month, let alone a day. Whatever.
Since I missed lunch I made my last package of American noodles and while they were cooking put together the idea that not only do moon cycles affect the water level for high or low tide but they change the water level depending on where you're at in the cycle during the month. That never occurred to me before because I've never stayed by the ocean long enough to notice.
A bunch of people went into town that evening so I took the quiet time to read Eat, Pray, Love and was visited by Geoff and Sam when they got back. They bought me a Chinese version of Monopoly Deal that has all the text in English and Chinese and has different names for some of the properties. Pretty cool.
Thursday 5/16:
Thursday I woke up for breakfast again and it was back to the basic rice porridge, boiled egg, and mento but this time they also had this bean/root stuff that was pretty decent. I was sore from running the day before so I just showered and read my Ensign some more before Sam told me that one of the piano rooms was open. They have 4 or 5 pianos here but I never know when the rooms are unlocked so we can use them to I took the opportunity to use the piano music I hauled here all the way from America. I got to practice for about an hour before they needed the rooms for students but it was really nice to have a peaceful hour of music again. I didn't realize how much I missed playing instruments. The only thing though is that some of the students were looking at my music and Lely from my 5th grade class said my music was really easy. I was told by a 12-year-old that my music was easy. I guess that's what you get for comparing yourself to China.
I spent the rest of the morning tanning on the roof. That's one of the goals on my list that I want to get done before I come home from China-- get a tan. I probably should have been more specific by saying "get a nice looking tan" because I've somewhat of a tan started but it's uh.. interesting. I only have tankinis to tan in here and ya really can't strip down under that without taking major risks so I'm getting some pretty bad lines.
For lunch they fed us something new!!! It was this green bean mixture with onions and beef and it was delicious. Apparently green beans are now in season and for that I am very happy because I get tired of eating the same food sometimes. After lunch was a meeting with Ella and Kelly informing us about the tug-of-war competition on Monday. They said they were going to have 30 teachers competing again our 20. I thought it was nice that at least this time when they cheat they're giving us a heads up. Also, most of the ILP teachers weigh twice as much as the Chinese teachers so it shouldn't be a big deal to have 10 more.
The topic for class for the week was describing people so for one of the lessons that day I had the kids draw someone and then describe them. Ex: My girl has brown hair and green eyes. She is wearing a yellow shirt and black pants. Tall, short, dimples, beard, glasses.. those sorts of things. Walter, my aggressive 4th grader, drew someone with a bloody mace. What's sad about that is such drawings are a completely normal occurrence in class. I am mind blown by how violent my kids are an how accepted violence is in their society/culture here.
Our second block of classes we had an arm wrestling competition which Melanie had done in her 3rd grade classes and it had worked out well. Not so in mine. The objective of the lesson was to teach them phrases like "I am the winner." "I am the loser." "I beat you." I got first place." … those sorts of things. They just went psycho. Very stressful for Miss Amanda.
Thursday night has become designated go-in-town-for-dinner night so Melanie, Mikelle and I went to get noodles but at the last minute Melanie wanted chicken instead so we got that. Meh.. Not a huge fan. I wasn't super happy about the change but it's not worth arguing or making a big deal out of things. We found a brand new bakery and bought these strawberry shortcake cones that were really good, at least they would have been if I liked whipped cream :) At our 10 yuan stand on the night market we found these bright pink shirts that say, "Nobody Gives A Love" which I'm head over heels in love with but am saving to wear at home and not ruin here. The DVD shop was closed for some reason which was probably good because it eats our money and has become the obsession of many people in our group. On the way out of the night market I bought... wait for it.......JELLYFISH! It was 10 yuan (less than $2) for 3 little jellyfish in a container and I've now fulfilled my dream of owning jellyfish.
On the bus on the way back there were at least 70 people standing up in the aisles, not including those sitting down. I managed to lick Melanie's elbow while she wasn't looking and prove to her that you can't feel it if you don't know it's happening. She wasn't super impressed. That night Melanie and Jay threw out the idea of going to Shanghai but they need a third person to go but I still hadn't decided what I wanted to do for our last vacation.
Friday 5/17:
Friday morning I laid in bed watching my jellyfish swim around for half an hour instead of getting up and showering like I had planned. They're quite relaxing and interesting to watch. For class we reviewed their spelling words for the week and then took the test. Susan came in for observations during this time and my children were angels which was really nice to feel in control of everything that was going on during an observation and feel good about it. I let both classes play Jeopardy for the remainder of class which they really really love and I love because it's easy for me, they have fun, and they still learn.
That afternoon there were kindergarden tours for incoming students so the school wanted us to make ourselves visible so the parents knew they had Americans teaching at their school and weren't just copy/pasting our faces into their brochures. Therefore, when classes ended for me that morning I spent the next hour chilling outside appreciating the beautiful day and working on lesson plans for the next week.
I still had a little time left before lunch so I cleaned my room for a while and then headed downstairs. After lunch I showered and then headed downstairs to practice the Footloose dance for the end of the year performance that we were starred in. It was pretty warm out in the sun and ended up being kinda pointless for me to shower but 2 hours later they finally let us leave. I was tired of looking like I just got out of bed so I tried so do my hair the way I did for Halloween a couple years ago when I was Mrs. Peacock but it failed epically. Life just doesn't work as well here in China.
Sam had to teach a class that afternoon for the district people to watch but when he finished he came hung out in my room and we tried to figure out what kind of jellies I owned. The closest we found was the cannonball jellyfish but the internet is far less than average here so I couldn't search it properly. I hung out with Luke for a while and he commented on how I should do my hair which made me laugh because I'd just done it.
On the weekends we eat on a different floor of the cafeteria since most of the kids go home and the food was super gross so I went to the next window over and got good food. I don't know why they had different food at the other window, probably because it was all left-overs, but the boys were jealous when they saw my plate. After dinner I went down the street with Luke and Sam. Sam and I dropped off some letters at the Post Office and then met Luke back at the Jia Jia Yue where I treated myself to a couple of these wonderful banana popsicles I recently discovered that taste like Creamies and are only 1 yuan.
I've been wanting to watch all the Star Wars movies for several months so I bought them at the DVD shop and we watched the first one that night. It wasn't as good as I remembered it was when I watched when it came out ~15 years ago but I'm glad I got to see it again. After it ended I sat in the common room and talked to Kristen while Sam half-slept on the couch. I'm trying really hard to be friends with her because I've always really liked her but just have jealousy issues.
Back in my room I talked to Melanie for a while and then worked on a blog post I wanted to write. I only got to the point of writing down bullet points but once I'm caught up on journaling I do hope to actually write it.
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