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Published: August 5th 2009
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Staci and Marts
About to go off for our first real day of teaching! Staci: It's official. We're the boring old married couple. We just walked back from dinner and passed other program participants drinking beer and smoking cigars without a care in the world. Us? We got dinner at the same place we ate the first night- we each got a plate of noodles stir fried w/beef and vegetables (I didn't eat the meat) and a glass of beer. The total expenditure? 28 yuan, or about 4 dollars. I am all about getting buzzed off one glass of beer that cost me about 50 cents. Buying food in the states will seem ridiculously expensive after this! Now we're back in our room studying and doing homework like good little kids.
Luckily, we're okay with being that boring married couple. I love being able to get back to the hotel and strip down to my underwear without having to make small talk with anyone else. And I love having a partner I can debrief about the day with- Martin is definitely making the transition to a new culture a LOT easier. It is making us less likely to make best friends here, but that's okay. Everything has just been so exhausting. We've made a
few friends in our own classes, and ate lunch today with one of the same women we ate with yesterday- her name is Rose and she's from New Zealand.
So, day two of training. Pretty intense. Two hours of Chinese class, followed by a TEFL lecture course, then lunch, then TEFL activity course, then TEFL lesson planning hour, then TEACHING. 8am-4pm. This is what every day will look like for me, and for Martin, but with the times of the courses switched around. We had a pretty frustrating lunch experience. We got lost trying to find the school cafeteria we ate at yesterday, so we went into a different place with a few other people, only to find out that you needed a prepaid card to buy the food, and it was not the same card we had for the main cafeteria nor did we know where to buy it. Not knowing Mandarin makes ordering food, or doing anything really, pretty difficult. We went with two other women in our program to a convenience store and ended up eating carbo central for lunch: a small loaf of coconut milk bread, a mini bag of LAYS 'American Classic Style' chips
Want some tea?
Our little teacups:) and some random cookies...washed down with water and a shared bottle of Coca-Cola. Oh yeah. We're pretty awesome. We'll definitely work on finding the cafeteria tomorrow, especially since we still have some money on a prepaid card we need to use up.
My chinese teacher is awesome. She was trying to teach us one of the tones, which is very forceful, by telling us to pretend we hated something. Then she suggested thinking of George Bush and we all got the tone perfectly. 😊 Martin and I only bought one set of books, but luckily there's a girl in my class who also only bought one set of books with her boyfriend who is in Martin's class, so it works out well!
Teaching went pretty well. My teaching partner, Dan, is from Wisconsin, and went to Washington University in St Louis. We covered 'The American Home' today, and although the first half of the lesson was a learning experience for us, the second half seemed to go pretty well and we got good feedback from the coordinator who was sitting in. My favorite part? Trying to get them to guess the word pig by Dan saying it was
the best kind of meat, which caused them all to whisper and then yell out DONKEY!!!! Um, sure. Donkey meat must be delicious. We're going over "The Daily Routine" tomorrow, and have a few activities planned out- I'll look online for more ideas tonight.
We have to get our temperature taken every day before we enter our classroom. That's after walking ten minutes from our hotel room and climbing four flights of stairs, in the heat and humidity. Awesome.
If any of you all happen to get online on the west coast, probably the most likely time to catch us is around 7am or 4pm your time. We got on facebook briefly through some sneaky website, but can't seem to post anything, so still contact us on gmail.
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Mom/MD
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Old Married Couple
definitely sounds like you are glad you have each other...so no worries about feeling like the "old married couple". Each day sounds like a new adventure for sure, and of course by the time you get this one down, you will be onto a new adventure at your assigned school! Enjoy the learning as well as the teaching! (Looks like Martin got a haircut...I would imagine he would need it there in the humidity...very nice by the way Martin!)