On Friday afternoon I went for a walk through 北湖公园 (Beihu Gongyuan, "North Lake Park"). As I was walking back home I came across a crowd of people who were watching a group of Chinese girls playing the 古琴 (guqin), which is like a Chinese harp that is played while sitting down and lays flat across a stand.


There's a music school right where they were playing and they were putting on a performance for their parents. One group of students would play a song or two and then another group would come on. There was a group of younger students, girls who I guess were all about eight or nine years, who weren't playing when I got there and they took an interest in me as I was standing there watching.


I watched the music for a while and then continued on home. I had been walking for a couple minutes when I heard two of the girls running to catch up with me. I stopped and waited for them and when they reached me they asked if I would come back the following afternoon to watch them play again. I said I might and they ran away laughing.

On Friday night we all got on the bus at 6:30 and went back to campus for the Teacher's Day celebration. After some speeches were made by various faculty the student performances began. Lots of singing (mostly pop music), some traditional and contemporary dances, a martial arts exhibition, a comedy act, Chinese classical music, and an interpretive dance about some event from the early days of the Communist Party.




The teachers sat in the first few rows and all the students sat behind us and stood to the side to watch. The freshman trainees were sitting right behind myself and Bleisha, another English teacher from the Philippines who arrived here on Thursday. They were all wearing their camo still and doing lots of whooping whenever a performance involved girls dancing or wearing any tight clothing.

The performance ended around 10 and all the teachers got back on the school bus and came back to the old campus.

Before going back to see the girls play music yesterday afternoon, I went to get my first haircut in China. It was much better than the haircuts I've gotten at places in the US. One guy washed my hair, dried it with a towel, and then massaged my head a little bit, and then another guy, without asking me any questions about how I wanted my hair to look, cut it. Then they washed my hair a second time and blow-dried it. The whole thing cost me 10 yuan. I've heard haircuts are very nice here and now I know they're right.

I went back to watch the girls play music yesterday at 3:30. I saw them play one song where some of them were playing the guqin and some were singing. They were excited to see me.


They finished at 4:00 and I walked back to my apartment. At 5:00 I met one of the other teachers and Bobby, who is Bob's son, and we took a taxi to school to go play basketball with some students. We played for a while and then Bob took myself, Bobby, another teacher, and another member of the faculty to go meet some other teachers at a restaurant for dinner. I thought Bob and I were going to talk about setting up a language exchange between Bobby and I but it didn't come up. Bobby is a freshman in high school at one of the best high school's here in Xinyu. He's a really nice kid and his English is very good so I hope we do get something set up.