moon cakes!

---

Today was a Chinese holiday called mid-autumn Festival. As a result I got the day off from teaching. I can’t claim that I was particularly active. I spent most of my time reading some book by Charlotte Bronte (not Jane Eyre!), and practicing Chinese with Rosetta Stone. I’ve been bad about working with Rosetta Stone since coming here. Part of the reason is that the aim of the program is fluency (or at least semi-fluency), and so it teaches a lot of sentence structures, words, and phrases that I have no particular need of at this point, and takes forever to teach basic survival language. The program is also the same no matter what language you’re learning, and doesn’t take the culture of individual countries into account. Thus, I’ve just gone through a unit on paying for things with cash, a check, or a credit card, when in fact China is an almost entirely cash society. I’ll probably never come across a single check during the duration of my stay here. What I’d really like to learn in Chinese right now is how to order different meals at restaurants. Granted, the point and hope method has worked uncannily well. Sometimes I wonder if the people at restaurants are doing us favors, and replacing the random things we point to with things they think we’ll like.

Anyway, mid-autumn festival seems to be more relaxing than festive. From what I’ve heard, this is a day for people to stay home with their families, eat moon cakes, and appreciate the beauty of the night sky. I was given a bag of moon cakes as a teachers’ day gift, so I was able to try them. They’re little cakes with very intricate designs on the front, stuffed with different kinds of filling. Mine were filled with something dry and greenish that tasted like burnt almonds. One of the other teachers got one with an egg inside. A small group of us spent the evening having a picnic (inside, to avoid the mosquitoes), and then went outside to look at the moon and take pictures.

The school offered to give me a class on Sundays as overtime, and I took it. It’s an extra 200 yuan a week, but I actually took the class because so for teaching is the most fun part of being here. Part of my reason for pursuing TESL was to see if I truly wanted to pursue teaching as a career track. Admittedly I’ve only been doing it for two weeks, but I think I’m completely in love with the job, and teaching is definitely something I could see myself doing in the future. My Sunday class is two hours long, and the students are first and second graders with mixed levels of English skills. The kids in my Sunday course seem to be remarkably well behaved, which is interesting considering that many of them are the same age as my two wild weekday classes of first graders.

I think it’s fun when random Chinese people come up to talk to me. I’m aware that the phenomenon has more to do with them wanting to practice their English than it does with any particular desire to get to know me, but I’m not bothered by it. Yesterday a middle-school aged boy sat down with me and one of the other foreign teachers, and spent about forty minutes asking us how to say random things. He was a funny kid, who kept acting like he was different animals to try and get us to say the English words for them. I enjoyed it. He wanted to show us a place to eat “delicious foods”, but we declined.

And now, a couple of random observations about China, in no particular order:

- Milk here comes in a variety of flavors, none of which taste a thing like the milk I’m accustomed to back home. That said, I’m pretty amazed by the existence of walnut flavored milk. It’s delicious, especially mixed with coffee or black tea.

- babies here don’t wear diapers. They wear pants with big holes in the butt.

- The lack of animal life is hard to get used to, coming from Maine. Since coming here I’ve only seen one bird, and it was a shock. I do hear birds every morning, but I have no idea where they hide during the day. There are also a lot of bats.

- Hair styles here are awesome. The variety of scrunchies is especially endless.

… and that’s all for tonight. I think I’m getting a cold. Actually, I’m sure that I’m getting a cold, and trying to fend the thing off with cold-eeze and lots of water. I’ve got tests to grade, and then I’m going to go to bed. Or maybe I’ll go to bed and then wake up early to grade the tests.

---

Comments

[Firthy]

:-)
It must be a pain having to learn the unnecessary stuff. Guess you'll just have to persevere with it.

[Ang]

That moon festival sounds lovely!

[Bruce]

Mastering or even muddling in any part of the language sounds like challenge enough !

[Deanna]

Coffee
So you found coffee then, eh?