A Hunting we will go ...

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A hunting we will go. High ho the merrio a hunting we will go. (Something like that.) Cat and I went to get train tickets yesterday. It was exactly like going back to India with the Indian train stations except you're surrounded by Chinese people instead of Indians. There are boards up that say where all the trains are sitting in a big huge hall. You have to get your bags x-rayed to go into the hall and then over to the left there are large windows where you get your tickets. I'll take a picture next time I go and post it along with some of the other pictures that I've taken recently. People in Chinese lines are just like people in Indian lines. Some people are patient enough to actually stand in the line but if you don't stand pretty much touching the next person's back then someone will cut in front of you in line. Also there are the other people who aren't patient enough to stand in line and just go right up to the front and butt in at the very beginning of the line. Fortunately Merry, the librarian, was with us and she just got the tickets for us while we guarded the line. We're going to go to Shenyang (the capital of Liaoning) on Sunday. We've heard that it's a bit dirty and there's not much to see but we've decided that we want to go and make up our minds ourselves. It's like getting a movie review. Some critics say a movie is horrible and then you go and love it (or the opposite happens sometimes). Then around Wednesday we're going to go to Dandong (a smaller city on the border of North Korea) and meet Russell there. That'll probably be the closest I'll ever come to being in North Korea. Apparently one can take a boat that goes just on the border so the two coasts are the two countries. We have a week off of school from October 1-9 for National Week. I'm not even really sure what happens during the week. Saturday is the big festival (more than likely complete with fireworks) but then everyone gets the week off so many people are going home or to other cities. Some of the Chinese teachers here live too far away to actually go home for the break so they're staying here and I may get to hang out with them when I come back and before I leave. I don't know if I'll have e-mail access the whole time so I may not be able to write everyone till I get back. I'll take a journal of my travels and post it when I get back too, unless I have time and am able to post it while I'm actually in the places.

As for anyone who may want to send me something the address is as follows:

Ya Yuan Hotel
Rockies English School 4th Floor
No. 80 Wusi Road
Xigang District, China 116021

Class is over today and I don't have any more classes till Friday but we're going hiking tomorrow. I had a pretty good day today. My first K5 was awesome. I'm going to have to plan a different class for them than my other K5 class because they are very smart and get bored easily. The other K5 class that I had just after that one doesn't know practically anything. My assistant has to work very hard for the second K5 class to translate absolutely everything I say. My K2 class was like teaching a review class. They knew all the colors already, and were even using colors that I didn't teach today (like pink). I had to teach them "What's this" and "What color is this" which seemed really easy for them. The only thing that was hard for them were the other words like "cell phone" and "notebook". It's a good thing we had those nouns to teach them otherwise they would have thought the whole class was review. It was pretty comical. They're almost too smart.

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