Time flies

**Note- I wrote this post last Thursday or Friday, but due to internet problems, I was not able to post it until now. (Thanks Alex!)

It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a week! I’m not entirely used to being back in China yet, but I still feel like I’ve been here a bit longer than just 7 days.  My language skills are coming back to me very quickly; I end up doing a lot of speaking and translating in class (especially for the elementary school teachers whose English is not as good as the middle school teachers) and have found that I can understand the majority of the local dialect here in Zhenfeng, especially if I’m trying hard.

Zhenfeng itself is very beautiful. The city is quite poor but still manages to have a few taxis, and the entire surrounding area is encircled by vegetation covered mountains (much like the ones found in Guilin). As I mentioned previously, the people here are also extremely nice.  We have a small group of teachers from the department of education who eat all our meals with us and escort us to and from class. It can feel a bit constraining at times, but I’m sure they’re just looking after our safety and taking advantage of the opportunity to be seen with us foreigners. They have also been ridiculously accommodating to our various “demands,” especially regarding food.  My cohort and I joke that we are making their lives less flavorful with our numerous dietary restrictions: my aversion to pork (the main meat in China) and her inability to eat spicy food (the Guizhou province, like Hunan and Sichuan, abounds in spicy food). Overall though, I think our escorts are having fun demonstrating their flexibility and trying to figure out what we will and will not eat.  Almost every meal begins with a phrase akin to “we made sure they didn’t put a single chili pepper/ piece of pork in this dish.” And in place of pork, we have dined on chicken, goose, and dog, all regional specialties. The dog was quite good, though a bit fatty, and was served hot-pot style in a soup with lots of mint leaves, which are apparently essential for dog dishes.

Teaching has been going quite well.  We teach the elementary school teachers in the morning, and the middle school teachers in the afternoon.  The morning is usually much harder to get through, but most people seem pretty interested in what we have to say. We often play games which we then analyze and discuss how what skills each game works on and how the teachers might choose to integrate them into their curricula. Each class lasts about 2.5 hours with a small break in the middle of the lesson… or that’s what we would like to happen. Thing is, our school is located right next to a local hospital which often sets off firecrackers in the middle of the day to signify a recent death. Although the firecrackers go off about 3 times a day, I have been informed that that does not necessarily mean that 3 people died that day.  More likely, people are just using the excuse to set off more firecrackers, as their use is prohibited otherwise (except at weddings).

Other interesting classroom/ teaching things… many of our students have interesting English names, i.e. Lonely, Pain, Amigo, Wing.  Also, today for some reason everyone seemed to have brought their camera and took a lot of pictures of us during the break.

This is a picture of some fantastic tea that we were given as a gift by one of the school principals.  It was actually a half kilo bag that they divided up into these nice little boxes for us to take home.

At this point, I think my best friends here are my coworker and one of our escort’s daughters (pictured below).  She’s 9 years old and reminds me a lot of the little sister I mentored back in Grinnell. She’s super talkative and loves telling jokes and playing games. I’ve found that, so long as I can hear her clearly, I can understand about 90% of what she says. She’s taught me a couple of Chinese card games and we often play cards together before meals while we’re waiting for other people to arrive. I’ve found that this also tends to get me out of taking part in awkward business talk which happened quite often during our first few meals in Zhenfeng.

Tonight marks the longest I have stayed in any one room during my stay here (this is the 3^rd hotel I’ve stayed in… we move so often!).  It’s nice to have settled down for a bit, even if it’s only for the next week and a half or so.  Wish me luck in my last week of teaching!