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Published: September 6th 2007
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school1
this is the front entrance to the school campus, where my apt is and where i teach.. Hello from China everyone! The internet isn’t really working well, and I can only get online when I’m sitting at the desk so I’m going to try writing this in word and then pasting into a blog...we’ll see how this works. Anyway, I’ve been in Zhanjiagang for about 3 days now and overall it’s pretty nice. There are 4 of us teaching at this school through CIEE, me, Candice, Steve, and Drew. Carol, our waiban, the lady that’s in charge of the foreign teachers, picked us up from the hotel in Shanghai where we were for the week. It was about an hour and a half drive and then we ate lunch with her and the van driver at a small restaurant. When we got to the restaurant they led us to a room with one table in it which was freezing. Carol ordered a bunch of stuff and we all shared, that how all of the restaurants work here which is good cause we all get to try everything, and then no one is stuck with something that they ordered that ends up being awful, lol. Since we were all freezing, when they brought out soup, I took a whole
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another pic of the school buildings bowl full. Not sure what the random slimy white thing in the soup was, I ate it anyway. I’m definitely getting more used to eating slimy unidentifiable things, lol. About 10 minutes later, however, Steve asked Carol what it was, and even though she didn’t want to answer at first, she then told us that it was pig lung! Hmm..don’t think I can ever eat that soup again..lol. Once we got to our school Carol took us to our apartments and told us that she would send some students to take us on a tour tomorrow. Luckily we learned during the orientation that Chinese people do not really plan things in advance, and if they do, they usually don’t think its worth telling you in advance, haha..so yea we had no idea what time to expect the students on Sunday morning.
Anyway, we spent the rest of the day unpacking and then decided to find some bikes, being that that’s the main way people get around here. We got in a cab and Steve, who speaks some Chinese, asked the cab driver to take us to a place to buy bikes. The cab dropped us off on the random
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ping-pong table area, it's a really popular sport here street and then we kept asking people until eventually we ended up at the RT Mart (basically a Wal Mart). Oh, yea, wow..I totally forgot to mention that everyone everywhere we go, stares at us. Apparently its not rude or anything to stare at a person here, and being that the only foreigners in this town are the teachers that come each year, we are very interesting to the locals. Its kind of fun though, people will just look at us and say “Hello”, lol and we’ll say hi back and they’ll laugh. But, yea, so we asked a few people, and then asked a bunch of teenagers that said hello to us, and eventually found the bikes. I got a nice new red bike with a basket in the front, for about $30 (everything is soo cheap here), which I still have to take a pic of. We rode our bikes back and stopped at some restaurant on the way, which was good.
On Sunday, I set my alarm so I would be up by 8:00 just incase the students showed up to take us on a tour. Carol called me around 10:30 though and told me to
my apt building
This is the apt. building that I live in on the school's campus. There are 3 floors, with 3 apartments on each floor and I'm on the 2nd floor. On the 1st floor there's a kitchen, dining room, and 3 washers for us to share (they don't have dryers in China, lol) tell everyone that the students would come to get us in 10 min. Four 14 year old girls showed up and took us to Carol’s office where she went over the schedules for Candice, Steve, and Drew who are teaching the older students. Carol then had the girls take each of them to all of the classrooms they will teach in. One of the girls took me to the primary school office, and I met a lady here who gave me my schedule. At first she just gave me a small piece of paper with a chart of numbers and Chinese characters on it, but I asked her to explain it and to write the times for each period, and eventually she did. I teach each class in the primary school (grades 1-6) once each week for 40 min, so 21 classes total. After we all got our schedules, we went back to the “walking street” which has a bunch of stores, and is right near the RT-Mart. I bought some random things for my apartment, like a sheet set, pillows, iron, and hangers.
Yesterday, all of the foreign teachers had to go to the medical check-up center in
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this is the main room of my apt. the door with my raincoat hanging on it is the front door. I also have a bunch of floor to ceiling shelves which right now are pretty empty except for some random clothes..and hardwood floors which are really nice the morning so I missed my first class. Besides the 4 of us from CIEE, there is also a French guy who is teaching French and 2 Australians who live off campus and are teaching English. The medical center was quite interesting and very different from the US, lol. There were 7 rooms that we each had to go to to have our eyes checked, lung x-ray, ultra-sound, blood/urine sample and 2 other random things. It was pretty weird and I’m glad it s over now, haha. Oh yea, I never mentioned the toilet situation here..lol. Well, its very different, besides the fancy malls in Shanghai, all of the toilets are tiled floors with a hole. That’s not even the weird part though, the plumbing is so bad that your not supposed to flush any paper down the toilet so there’s always a small trash can in the stall. Oh, but there isn’t toilet paper either, everyone just knows to have some with you at all times, haha..so random. So anyway we got back and Candice and I ate in the cafeteria here at the school, which was ok..basically just school lunch food in China, the rice was fine though.
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each apt has a balcony since we have to hang our clothes out to dry, here's a pic from mine After that I went to teach my first 2 classes, back to back. 3rd grade and then 5th grade. I had them introduce themselves and tell me about themselves a little bit and then we played a game with the action words they already know so I could figure out what level of English they are at(basically we made a list on the board and then I called them out for them to do) . The kids were so cute in their little sailor uniforms, but they definitely still acted like normal kids. As soon as I started writing on the board or was helping one kid..the whole class was talking, overall it went pretty good though.
Today, I taught 4th, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade classes. Most of them are on the same level of having a bunch of random words memorized and not knowing what to do with them. They are really cute though and all look at us when we walk around the campus and say hello, lol. Oh, I totally forgot to mention their English names, lol. So, yea, their teachers give them English names when they start school here and some of the names
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here's another pic from my balcony. there's a small garden they they grow things in to serve in the cafeteria..and one of the boys' dorms are hilarious. I’ll have to make a list but for now I’ve had a few boys named Sally, several Dicks, and a couple of Fannys. The 1st grade was pretty interesting too cause they’ve never had English before. I did a stand up/sit down game with them and then the teacher asked me to do a song so I did head, shoulders, knees and toes, which a few of them actually knew already, lol.. that worked pretty well though. Well, this is getting pretty long and I don’t even know if I’m gonna be able to upload it so I’ll stop for now. Hopefully I can get some pics up of the town soon! It seems like it would be kind of weird to take pics around here, but people are already staring at us so whatever, lol..
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Mom
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I love your sheets! very cute. Keep up the blog it's great to read about your adventures!!!