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Published: April 1st 2008
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shanghai
the view from our hotel room on women's day it's been a while! everything here is good though, and I finally have a some pics and videos to upload 😊
my kids are all still crazy as usual, as you can see from the pics! lol, but i have managed to get them to participate in hosting flat stanely and in a postcard exchange, which are both working out well! I re-wrote the flat stanely story for my 4th grade classes so they were able to understand and they loved it, haha, especially the part when the bulletin board falls on him, and i made a huge crash with a piece of wood in the classroom and they all jumped, haha. Then they made a list of places in Zhangjiagang that I should take him to, and I did and took pics. I got them printed and then each class took a few pics and glued them in stanley's notebook that the class from NJ made, and wrote some note's about them, soo cute! I've got one more class tomorrow, and I promised Jenny (who i tutor) she could see it before I send it back, since she helped me write the simple version of the story, so hopefully I'll
send it out tomorrow or Thursday. The postcard exchange was with a 6th grade class, we wrote 11 postcards to different states, and so far we've gotten 3 back, that class is also waiting for letters from a class in Kansas so hopefully they'll come soon!
anyway, aside from all that..we just found out yesterday that we have 6 days off starting Friday!! Its a pretty long story, but I have to try to explain it cause its just rediculous and soo "china" haha. Ok, so I think I mentioned before that the May Day national holiday week is cancelled this year, because traveling was too crazy, and the government decided to change it to 3 long-weekends instead. So, 2 weeks ago Carol told us that we'd be off on Friday April 4th because it's a holiday. The holiday has something to do with cleaning graveyards and honoring the dead, but until this year they weren't off from school and work and stuff for it so I'm not sure how big a deal it is..
Well, last week, just making conversation..I mentioned to the other primary school teachers that we were off on fri. and they said no,
flat stanley!
with some 4 grade girls : ) thats wrong, we have to teach fri, sat and sunday..but we're off mon, tues, and wed. Pretty strange, but not for here, so i said ok, and told the other everyone else about it. Well, no one else had heard about that so I tired to find Carol and ask her about it, but our schedules are like opposite so I never could..
Finally, yesterday I just asked the primary school teachers if they were sure, so they called Carol's office and talked to her for a bit. When they hung up they told me that only the foreign teachers were off, and that we had a 6 day vacation! I couldn't beleive it, since we thought we'd only have 3 day weekends this whole semester so I went to Carol's office to talk to her in person and to ask some other things.. On my way there I ran into Fabrice who said he just found out from one of his head teachers that we had to teach on Sat and Sun. what?! lol. so we went over there together and Carol said that she was wrong when she just told them that we had 6 days off...by that
point i was like just tell us already and stop changing your mind!! haha, but she was on her way to a mtg and said she'd call me soon to explain it. Well I got back here, and Carol had texted Candice asking if she was busy on Saturday. haha, she didn't tell her why though.. Anyway, about 20 min later she called me and said that we all had 6 days off! soo, we quickly started planning a trip to Beijing!
One of the primary school teachers helped me order train tickets over the phone today which was nice, and we've booked a hostel! Still can't believe that we're actually gonna have 4 full days there, cause even if we had taken an extra day off with one of the long-weekends we would have been rushed.
k, well, i'm gonna upload some pics now (and a random video of 5th graders playing tug of war cause i want to try out the new video thing on this site, haha) ..can't wait to tell you all about Beijing next week! 😊
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