Class Trip with the English Club...

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Along with the sixteen classes I teach each week here at my high school (55 kids per class = around 960 kids), I agreed to also teach an additional two classes on Wednesday afternoons for a group of bright, motivated kids for an English Club (EC). They asked Jenny to help me (thankfully!) so we both get together and teach thirty-two of the top English speaking students at my school and we really enjoy these kids because they can express themselves in English fairly well, even though they are in their first year, Grade 1, of high school English. The English Club gets a few perks, the main one being a day-long field trip this semester with me and Jennifer where the object is to have fun but also speak English with us all day. This year the kids voted and we are headed to a day in a neighboring city of historical significance, Yangzhou.

Yangzhou is in a neighboring province, Hunan, and it is a prefecture-level city. A prefecture-level city is not a "city" in the usual sense of the term, instead of urban sprawl it's an administrative unit comprising, typically, of a main central urban area (a city in the usual sense, with the same name as the prefecture-level city), and its much larger surrounding rural area containing many smaller cities, towns and villages. The larger prefecture-level cities can be over 100km across in size. It is a beautiful city as far as China goes, and it has a long history...

The EC doesn't provide any money to the kids, the irony being this is the #1 most expensive high school in our province..hmmmm??!! so students had to spring for their own tickets and food but we got a discount and I didn't realize how much we were going to see and do for the price of 150rmb (about $18.00).

As usual, we were told on Thursday evening that our trip was next Sunday but we planned as much as possible and made it out to greet the bus at 7am. China really knows how to organize day trips and they love their buses! Our King Long tour bus is basically a rock n' roll band bus sans the bathroom and beer, but it has everything else including a karaoke system, reclining seats, air conditioning... We hopped on the bus and tried to wake each other, and the students, up during the hour long ride to Yangzhou.

Typical high school students in the early morning; they are groggy, have ipods plugged in one ear and a cell phone hanging on the other, backpacks full of snax, decks of cards, books to read..it took a little work to make them gurgle a bit of English so early in the morning but by the time we got to Yangzhou they were awake and giddy.

Many of them had been to Yangzhou but we were doing things they had not seen before such as the spending a few hours at Slender West Lake , the tomb of Emperor Sui from the Qing Dynasty, the Yangzhou Museum , and the highest, longest bridge in China and third in the world Runyang Bridge .

We started with a walking tour around Slender West Lake. It is large for china, and there are crowds of boats on the water ferrying tourists out in the lake for a relaxing meal, or a quick jaunt from one end to the other, or small paddle boats built for a small family to slap around on the water for a few hours. Our guide was very good but as with all guided tours, I continue to fall behind because I like to take pictures and I end up getting left in the dust (the main reason we don't do guided tours here is the folks move at a dizzying pace, practically running through the sites). History has it that the people did anything and everything they could to keep their Emperor happy including building a pillar of salt in his honor and hiding in the water beneath Lilly paddies and placing fish on his amateur hook to convince him he had caught a few himself.

We were divided into groups (safety is a huge concern for our school, which makes sense considering these kids are living away from home, and families in China are only allowed one little Emperor or Empress), and my group had four guys so after the walking we went off to find a place to sit and eat with our 80 minutes of 'free time'. We got lost a few times and were sweating by the time we found a place to eat as today it is in the 80's. They ordered noodles for me, rice, and some more noodles and before I could say 'no way' a 40oz beer appeared at the table as if by magic. I saw my year of teaching here grinding to an abrupt halt in my mind as they calmly poured several glasses nonchalantly (drinking is not a big deal here at all because they are so responsible), and then snapped a few pics of them with their teacher and their small cups of brew. I made them hide it but they were well behaved, didn't order another one, and didn't act any different than if it had been a cup of orange juice...so I still have a job presumably. :)

After the lake we headed to the tomb of a famous Emperor from the Qing Dynasty. This exhibit reminded me of the Terra Cotta Warriors; it was built about 20' into the ground, it was a bit chilly, and so low-lit that pictures were practically impossible. It was the real tomb though but I couldn't find out for sure if the real emperor was resting there or it was empty...

After the tomb we hopped back on the bus and rolled a couple of minutes over to the Yangzhou Museum. A small, but modern museum, it was impressive for how well layed out the exhibits were and it was very clean and organized. We traveled up and down the four levels and enjoyed a variety of discoveries and information including a really interesting floor which highlighted the printing and etching skills and they even had a craftsman on site carving an extremely detailed wood block etching, truly a tremendous talent. We picked up some Chinese prints for a few pennies on the dollar that we can frame later back in the USA, they are so beautiful and so cheap I was almost compelled to buy a few dozen and send them to my Dad who could probably sell them for a nice profit on eBay...might go back and do just that...:)

After the museum we took another short 30-minute trip and stopped to view a small museum focusing on the huge suspension bridge, one of Communist China's greatest engineering feats. It is the third largest in the world and China's first largest. It is impressive, especially after seeing some of the bigger ones in the world in my travels in Italy, Austria, and other countries.

On the way home one of the students asked me to sing a song so I grabbed Jenny and dipped into my wallet and pulled out the words to the first two versus to Jame's Taylor's, You've Got a Friend...we did it together and the kids loved it! That started the whole bus going and we sang and had a great time all the way back to the school.

Jenn and I went home and warmed up some delicious spaghetti sauce that we were smart enough to cook the day before and had some delicious spaghetti and red wine and garlic bread. We toasted our poor, tired, sunburned students who had to go to two more classes and then another three hours of self-study time before they could head home. I hope we made the day entertaining for them, they seemed to enjoy it as much as we did!

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