the National Holiday begins

to start off the week long holiday i have, of course, contracted the sickness.  i'm still determined to have fun though, cold or no cold.  i will be leaving for Shanghai this morning and hopefully staying there in order to catch a glimpse of a very rare species in the Chinas: an electronic music festival on the outskirts of Shanghai's technology park... when i get back i'll give you all the details. + on saturday i'm going to a wedding in the country side, traditional with lots of food and if all goes well a little KTV in the city to finish the night... more stories to come!

wish me well and a safe bus ride for the next two hours

the shaky, shaky game!

So this week was awesome!  it was a short teaching week because of the previously mentioned holiday and started out with my friend Nellie's birthday dinner.  Super fun, met some of her friends who also live in Huzhou.  It was a grand mix of Chinese, Americans, Turks, Spanish, Australian and Canadian + delicious cake! pictured here:

I met more girls, Senat and Maria, this is really exciting for me because though i love hanging out with Gino and John, they are boys.  In case there was any confusion.  And they talk and joke like, well, 15-year old boys.  i find this funny most of the time but sometimes i need another feminine perspective to say "that's disgusting" so i know i'm not completely overreacting.

Anyway we had plans to all go to Shanghai for the weekend, but they fell through and instead we ended up partying it up in Huzhou.

Gino and i were invited to Penny's (our assistant and chinese teacher) cousin's birthday party Saturday night.  It was awkward because her whole extended family was there and only Penny speaks English to a certain extent.  We sat at the kids table and tried to tell her cousin, Niu, thanks for having us in a melange of Chinglish while he tried to tell us "nice to see you".  We were told not to bring a present and instead we were given gift boxes full of Chinese bakery deliciousness.  We also ate tons of seafood, including crab legs and a dish called Huzhou very valuable fish. Food was great, and this birthday meant an even larger cake but in the same style as the one pictured above, hen hao chi!

So, Penny has been asking us every weekend if we want to go to KTV with her and we finally said that we would do it after the dinner.  The condition for doing karaoke in China or anywhere for most people is to get loaded.  So we went to a grocery and got some alcohol and prepared to make fools of ourselves.  Little did we know that Penny is a KTV professional.  She has a really pretty singing voice but she only picked slow ballads in Chinese while we made a mockery of the whole thing picking songs from Ace of Base, Mariah Carey, Tears for Fears and we even found Bad Touch by the Bloodhound gang...ridiculous.  It was midnight and we were closing the place down yelling down the halls "I swear by the sun and the moon and the stars, I'll be there..." All-4-one.  i think Penny was thinking what have i done, i've created karaoke monsters!  Even though the boys protested at first it ended up being really fun + they give you tea, watermelon and popcorn with the price of your room!

Side note: every bar in China serves watermelon as a snack.  sometimes there's popcorn or sunflower seeds, but there's always, always watermelon and cherry tomatoes. Always.

Penny went home, maybe a little bewildered by the effect that the combination of whiskey and singing had on us.  John, Gino, Nellie and i then all went to a couple bars and i was introduced to the shaky, shaky game.  Another bar staple.  Through my very thorough chinese lessons i have learned how to count in Chinese.  this is very important for this game.  And by counting i don't mean just the words for the numbers but also how to count, meaning they use different hand signals.  i will demonstrate my proficiency in counting Chinese style with this video:

so basically you have dice in an upside-down cup and you shake them, hence shaky shaky.  you try to guess the total number of dice of a certain number, like four, sixes or five, threes.  whoever is wrong loses and has to drink.  Suffice it to say i kicked John's ass and it was all thanks to my new sister Cho cho.  Since we were four foreigners in a Chinese bar at 1am we drew a little crowd.  We met the owner and we were served copious amounts of watermelon.  There was good music and the place was pretty full, we sat at the bar and the bartender girls began joining in on our game speaking Chinese to us. Cho Cho began to help me as i had never played before and was losing early on.  The only things she could say in English were "very good!", numbers 1-10 for the shaky shaky game and when we won she would give me high-fives, hug me and call me "sister".  

Word of warning, the peace sign will be used abundantly in any and all photos of people in China, drunk or sober, doesn't matter. At 3:30am after spending 20 kuai a bottle on beer that costs 3 kuai in the grocery it was time to call it a night.  Luckily we were really close to the school and just walked home. night well spent in the Chinas...

so pretty...

so this weekend was a holiday, we got monday off for Mid-Autumn Festival (sometimes called moon festival due to these lovely moon cakes filled with anything from red bean paste to meat to ice cream). The red bean one was pretty good.

In this long weekend i did a whole lot of nothing but chilling out.  I went to get my nails done with Gino's and my assistant, Penny.  She is adorable. She's teaching us Chinese in hour sessions, twice a week.  Her Chinese name is Xie Bing Qing, loosely translated to "thanks, ice clear".  Her command of English is far from fluent but without her life would be hell. Whenever we have a problem or a question she takes care of it.  She may look like she's fifteen but she's actually a year older than me!

i tried to ask her where i could buy nail polish remover because my nails were looking pretty haggard but she didn't really understand so we just ended up going to her friend's girlfriend's nail salon in a big mall near the center of town.  i've never had my nails done in the states so i thought, what the hell, it's probably less than $5... and it was, to be exact it cost $1.50! i decided to go all out: purple with white flowers and glitter, when in China...

they turned out so pretty, i think i'll go get them done on

 the regular just for fun.

watch out when i come back to the states i'm going to be totally asian-ified, i already have plans to get a haircut next month. you'd better believe it's going to be Chinese mullet-esque or some form of it. 

So after getting our nails did, Penny went home and i met up with John.  Gino was ill for thursday and friday and i had to teach one of his classes on thursday, it was no problem.  But i really, really hope he doesn't get me sick... that reminds me i have to buy halls vitamin C drops at the corner store as a preventative measure. 

Anyway so John and i wandered around, i made him try bubble tea, which he had never had! Unfortunately i wasn't sure how to order it and we ended up with plain tea flavored ones instead of fruit flavored. It was still good, but he was not big on the tapioca pearls... later we met up with this girl, Nellie.  We all met her about a week ago, she is a god-send.  She's lived in Huzhou for two years and she's from Iowa.  She speaks Chinese pretty well and knows where everything is.  (It's actually her birthday tomorrow and we're going out to dinner in a few hours to celebrate, but i'm getting ahead of myself).  We went with Nellie to an outdoor eating spot where people just set up tables near outdoor street meat carts and buy anything from fried rice to squid on a stick.  We had some beers and some fried potatoes and peanuts (eaten with chopsticks).  We met Nellie's Chinese friend, Yang, he is cool.  

i caught a taxi home around 1:30am and thought i was going to pee myself before i could get the gate open to our building.  i think my late night rabble rousing has started the rumor mill a churning.  A teacher mentioned to Gino that she heard we were staying out quite late and that most teachers are back before 9pm!  Of course we don't have to be back by then, but maybe a little earlier, this is what she said.  Now my suspicion is that they really could care less what time Gino comes back but because i'm a woman i think i'm going to get some shit talked about me.  We'll see how that all turns out.

We went to Nellie's apt for dinner Saturday night and had salad and pasta, amazing! Her apartment is a little far away from the center but it's so cute and she has an actual kitchen and it's clean!  She gave me a coffee pot and a hot plate.  So 

now i will love her forever and owe her my first born child... she also let me borrow some bootlegged movies which miraculously work on my laptop so i don't have to buy a DVD player!

Sunday was super chill: i did laundry, worked out, read some, watched Sex and the City (finally) and then had dinner with Gino while we

watched another movie and in the evening i even studied some Chinese.  Today i actually have to prepare some lesson plans for the week...boo.  it has gotten easier to plan for now though.  i borrowed a bike from this australian guy and rode it to the giant supermarket Da ren fa, this morning. Riding in Chinese traffic, even for a ten 

minute bike ride is stressful, but all my eggs made it back unscathed!

Last thing, we had some typhoon-type weather on saturday so when Gino and i went into town to meet John and didn't bring umbrellas we ended up being stuck under an awning for an hour and a half while it rained to rival biblical tales.  We watched as the Chinese went about on their bicycles and scooters undeterred, if not for making funny squinting faces as the rain beat them up. i mean it was raining hard, the picture doesn't due it justice!

Pros and Cons

There are many ups and downs to the Chinas...

a small sampling of the things i like and don't like at the same time:

Cons

1. it's raining now...
2. squat toilet in my apartment, yeah.
3. really oily cafeteria food, coming from what part of the animal? 
4. my cheap ass will not turn down free food from the cafeteria, at least for now... 
5. things often break here, a lot. 
6. the students are a little crazy, foreign teacher to them = run wild time!
   

Pros

1. when it rains it pours! (None of that non-committal drizzle crap from Seattle!)   
2. i will develop strong thighs... 
3. appreciating grilled chicken more and more
4. food at the cafeteria is free  
5. someone will come to fix it 
6. the students seem to like me

proofs in the pudding:

 

Sept. 10th is teacher's day in China.

here's a card from a Primary 5 student and some

flowers, so cute!

Chinese children kicked my butt!

So the first week of teaching English in China has come to a very unceremonious close: i missed my last class because i was told it was at 13:20 when it was really at 12:30, oops.  oh well, not my fault.

So the teaching, by the numbers: i have 23 classes a week and about 260 students.  I walk up at least 13 flights of stairs every day going from class to class! i was so tired the first two days all i did in my free time was sleep and go out to by some fruit.

i teach two classes of Primary 1 (6-year-olds) and four classes of Primary 5 (10 to 11-year-olds) and one class of Junior 7.  It will take a while for me to get a handle on the whole planning lessons, making them fun and interesting thing.  Since the week is finally over i'm gonna try to plan out next week in advance and make sure we don

't have any mishaps like this week.

Example 1: duck, duck, goose is dangerous.  i injured at least two little girls by introducing them to this diabolical game.  Running on concrete in shiny, new sandals is not a good idea, they face planted and it ruined the game for everyone else!  Really i felt so bad, and i was pretty sure they would hate me forever, little did i know that 6-years-olds have the memory of a goldfish and therefor the next time they saw me they were all smiles.

Example 2: i have been instructed by the administration to skip tea

ching the primary class the alphabet (you know the building blocks of the English language A-B-C) and instead to teach them words with pictures and lots of repetition, how fun and effective that will be!  i'll work it out, at least this way i get to draw a lot of pretty pictures...

The weekend is upon us, and i'm so glad!  TGIF for reals.  I will commence exploring the new city that i live in, Huzhou, Zhejiang province, China! 

Gino and i live on campus, yes this means in the boys dormitory. These little monsters tear down the stairs everyday at 7am and then again for a solid three hours in the evening.  Luckily they go home for the weekend, so we'll have some peace and quiet, it might be kind of spooky actually...  John lives in an apartment in a really good part of town.  But he found cockroaches! and his a.c. doesn't work, but he does have a full kitchen, which i am seriously lacking (components of my kitchenette below.)

ok this is all for now, i will leave you with this jem: when purchasing cell phones from a kiosk downtown, i was on the phone and then i felt something in my hair... it was an old chinese woman petting me, she looked so happy! as she and her companion walked away they mustered up what must have been the only English words they knew "I love you!" they shouted to me. it was surreal.