Thanksgiving

Some pictures from Thanksgiving.

Here's the food.


My mashed taters are in the silver pan with the glass top and the black handle. Dumplings to the left, Romeo's chicken at 11 o' clock. Bleisha's green beans and another vegetable dish at the bottom of the picture. Fruit salad next to the ketchup. Fujii's sweet egg sushi rolls with the toothpicks sticking out. And Bleisha's sweet yam dish in the green bowl with the plastic wrap on top.

All of us.


Bill with the chopsticks at the front. Romeo to his left. A guy who works at the gym where Laura and Bleisha go. Then me, then Fujii, then Sheila, who is also from the Philippines but teaches at another college in Xinyu called YuGong College. Next is Bleisha and last is another student of mine named Elaine. You may notice there's another head poking out from behind the top of Bill's hair. That's JingJing, another teacher at the college.

The gym guy, Laura, me, Fujii, and Sheila.


Elaine, Bill, Romeo, and JingJing.


And finally, me and Bleisha at Kung Fu class a couple months ago.


We never went back, too much natural talent.

I'm now done with 7 out of my 9 classes, but I'm still pretty busy. I've been going to some other teachers' classes to try and learn more about how to teach. I'll also be helping students prepare for a couple upcoming speech competitions. And I've picked up a tutoring job with a girl named Michelle who'll be going to Canada in January for her last two years of high school and, potentially, college. We meet four times a week for two hours at a time. This is probably what I'll be doing for this last month of the semester.

Shanghai

Last week we had three days off plus the weekend for a school event called "Sports Meeting", which is basically like field day for all the freshmen. For the past few weeks the freshmen classes have been running and exercising on their own in preparation for the competition. Some of the teachers also had to participate, but none of us foreign teachers were required to stay so I took a trip to Shanghai. This is my third time in China but it was my first time to go to Shanghai.

Shanghai is located in the eastern tip of China and about midway up latitude-wise. It sits right at the mouth of the Yangtze River, Asia's longest river, so it's been a major port city for a while now. There's also a river called the Huangpu River that branches off from the Yangtze and runs through the city.

On one side of the city are huge, modern buildings.


I never made it over there during my trip. Instead, I spent most of my time on the south side of the river. Unlike the north side of the river, the southern side is full of Western-style buildings built in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which was Western businesses really started getting interested in Shanghai. I've never seen anything like it in another Chinese city. There was a small section in Guangzhou that had a lot of Western architecture, but Shanghai is full of it. As you get further out of the city, of course, the buildings are more modern and less strikingly Western but the heart of the city looks very European.




I spent most of my first day just walking around some of the older parts of the city. Then it was either on the first or the second day that I met a couple other people staying at the hostel. One was a guy named Scott from Wales who was looking for a teaching job in Shanghai. He found one within the three days that I was staying at the hostel. Another guy I met, Matt, was from Chicago and had just finished a year in Afghanistan and was traveling around East Asia for a while before going back to the US. I hung out with Matt for a couple days until he left for Hong Kong.

I also met another American guy named Mike who was taking a break from work and traveling for a while, and a Polish guy named Mikhail who is a freelance translator for Polish MTV and Comedy Central. His most recent job was to translate Jersey Shore into Polish. I also got a chance to see a couple of my classmates from Davidson Chinese 101, Andrew and Whitey, who are teaching English in a city called Jiaxing, which is about an hour train-ride away from Shanghai. It was good to see them and I had a good time hanging out with all the people from the hostel.

On my last morning in the city I took the metro to what I found out was one of the ritziest parts of the city. But I knew where I was going. It took me about 15 minutes to walk there, deliberate for another 20 over a bowl of noodles, and finally make a decision. So here's what I got.



I tried it out in the driveway the night I got back and I've been going to the People's Square 人民广场 every day for the past few days to practice. I'm really liking it.

Exam time, already

I found out a couple weeks ago from the administration that all the third year students finish their classes and their exams earlier than the first and second year students at Xinyu College. Their last day of classes/exams is November 19th, after which they are supposed to find an internship or a job.

Seven of my nine classes are with third year students majoring in English education. After November 19th, many of them will return to their hometown to teach in a local elementary school. This means I have to finish classes and exams in the next two weeks. Since each class has close to 50 students, it is common for teachers to break up the exam into two class periods, where half the students come one week and the other half come the next week. I too will be using this format for my exam, which is going to be quite easy. The exam is simply a 3-4 minute conversation between me and the student where I ask questions and he or she answers them. There is no written part, it's all oral.

I was thinking about having the students make up and perform skits in English, but when I proposed that idea to one of my classes, they all made it very clear that skits would be boring. They pointed out that skits only require memorization, whereas a one-on-one conversation requires that they actually understand what I say and come up with a response. Thus I will be giving all of my third year students the conversation-style exam.

Since only half the students will be coming to class for the next two weeks, this was our last week with everyone together. At the end of each class we took pictures for about 5 or 10 minutes. I took some with my own camera and then a bunch of the students took pictures with me using their phones. Here are some of mine:










After November 19th, I will only have two classes of second year students majoring in Business English. Romeo suggested that the administration may ask me to teach English to students from outside the foreign languages department. (All college students, regardless of their major, must pass an English language test called the CET). I'm not sure yet what I will be doing after I finish with the third year students, but if the administration doesn't give me anything else, I think I'll look into teaching some tennis.

Lights out

Yesterday I left my apartment at around five in the afternoon to go downtown and shop for clothes. I bought a few things, ate dinner, and then took a bus back to the old campus. When I got off, things seemed a little strange but I wasn't sure exactly what it was. I started to walk in the direction that I thought was towards the apartment until I realized that not only was I going the wrong way, but also that none of the buildings on that street had power. I asked someone for directions and eventually arrived back at the apartment. I had walked for about fifteen minutes and still all of the buildings were without power, including our apartment. I put down some of my things in my apartment and went back outside to buy candles. The man on duty at the gate told me how to say "candle" in Chinese ("la zhu") and I went down the street towards some shops that sell household supplies. The first store I went into had already sold out of candles but the second one still had four left. I bought three of them before realizing that I had no candle holders. I asked the shopkeeper but he said they didn't have any. He did, however, have a solution.


After I got back, I lit a couple candles and then went to see what Bleisha was doing. Having the power cut off was perfect for Halloween night so we tried to scare Laura. Bleisha called her and told her to come up to her room to hang out. When Laura got to the top of the stairs I jumped out and yelled her name, but Laura had already seen me hiding so the attempt failed. Afterwords we hung out at Bleisha's for a while. Then I went back to my room and just as I was getting into bed the power came back on. I still don't know what caused it.

Orange picking

I went orange picking this morning with my Business English students as well as Laura and Bleisha. I've heard there are quite a few orange farms in the Xinyu area and oranges do seem to be the most common fruit eaten here in Xinyu. The farm we went to was about 15 minutes away by cab and Bleisha, Laura, and I met the students there at around 9 in the morning. It's, I think, about 7 to 10 yuan (1 or 2 US dollars) per person and you can pick up to 1 or 2 kilograms worth of oranges. I don't know exactly how much it costs because the students paid for us.

The orange picking mostly consisted of walking around the farm, picking some oranges, eating a couple, and maybe taking a few pictures with someone's cell phone.


I got a few of my own. Here's one with we and some of my students.


Michael taking a picture of Laura (in the top middle) and some students.


Bill climbing a tree to get oranges from the top.


Bill in the top of another tree, this time a taller one.


We walked around picking oranges for about an hour and then started to head back towards the entrance. Before we left, we took a few class photos. Here's one.


The characters on the flag "外国语系" mean "Foreign Languages Department". They took the flag off its staff for our class pictures.

And here are a few more of my students.


The flag was soon returned to its rightful position on the staff, and Bleisha led the way with it as we marched out of the farm, purses, backpacks and old grocery bags filled with oranges. Here's Bleisha with Bill to the right and Henry, who got lost during the trip and found us again at the end with some very unripe-looking oranges, on the left.


Because we were such a big group, the owner of the farm let us take up to 75 kilograms of oranges. But the students hadn't taken nearly that much, so Bill, Bruce, Tiger, and I went back with a couple big sacks to fill them up. We filled both sacks and came back to the rest of the students, all of whom had been waiting outside the entrance. We set the two sacks down and a mad scramble for oranges ensued. After that we walked a little ways to the bus stop where the students would catch a bus back to school. Bleisha, Laura, and I sad goodbye and took a cab back to the old campus.

Not a whole lot going on these days. It got a lot colder over the past few days. Actually quite cold really. I've gotta buy some more clothes. A jacket, maybe some sweaters, and hopefully some pants that reach all the way down to my ankles. That probably won't happen.

The sun came out this afternoon. This is the view out my window. The street below, the middle school on the other side of the street, and the vendors who sell their food through the fence to the students when they have a break from class.



Here's my new guitar that I bought the other day. I've been wanting to give it a shot for a while now.


But I have been doing some things, of course. Yesterday some of my students took me, Bleisha, and Romeo to the KTV (karaoke television) downtown early in the afternoon. We stayed there for a few hours singing songs (I could only sing a few because almost all of them were either Chinese songs, which I don't know the words to, or old American pop songs that I'm not familiar with, but I did sing a few, Britney Spears "Lucky" and "A Whole New World" were my top choices) and then went on to a hot pot restaurant for dinner. If you don't know what hot pot is, it's a style of food where there's a very hot pot of broth divided into two halves; one half is spicy, the other isn't. Then you order a bunch of raw vegetables and meats and put them into the broth. You wait a few minutes and then scoop out the food with a ladle, wait a couple minutes for it to cool down, and then eat. It's really good.

And today I went to play some tennis in the park nearby the old campus with a guy I met last week at the new campus. He graduated from Xinyu College last year and was a tennis/PE major. Now he lives in Xinyu and teaches tennis. We didn't get to hit for very long because I had to string a racket first, which ended up taking about an hour and a half (it usually takes 30 minutes). The machine was a bit hard to work with and my string broke when I was right at the end of the racket, so I had to redo the second half. But we got to hit a few before he had to give a lesson to a couple kids.

And tonight we, the foreign teachers, made dinner. Romeo made rice and Bleisha and I (mostly Bleisha) made some Japanese mushroom soup with egg and broiled turnips with chicken gizzards. It turned out to be a really good meal.




And here's the hall kitchen.


I think I'm going to start using this more often from now on. It's a lot more convenient than cooking in your room or in the hall like most of the teachers do. There are no lights in the hall so you have to try and chop things and add spices in the right amounts all in the dark. Not good. Having light should be nice.

Kung fu/gong fu/功夫

I went to my first kung fu class yesterday afternoon with Bleisha, Fujii, and a group of students, some of which were from Fujii's Japanese language class. After we had all arrived at the track where the class was to be held, the first thing we did was take a lap with the hundreds of other students who were also there to take various PE courses. We finished our lap and then got into lines to wait for instruction. Our teacher was a man in his forties who would stand at the front of the class and demonstrate the movements for us while explaining them in Chinese. I could understand some but not all of what he said so I stood at the back and just tried to imitate what the other students were doing. This was the third or fourth kung fu class so I already had to try and figure out what the students have been learning for the past couple weeks. Given that I was making so many mistakes, and that I was a lanky white guy trying to do kung fu, a lot of the students were having a good time watching me. I can see how it must have been quite funny. I finally started to get the hang of it a little bit and the students in the other classes had to pay attention to their own activities so things started to calm down.

But our kung fu class ended up being a lot of fun. We were basically just learning how to do a long series of movements involving punching, kicking, stomping, and lunging. We would learn one part, then another, and then another. Then at the end, we tried to put all the parts together. The class lasted for an hour and a half and they have it every Thursday afternoon. I think I will try to attend next week's class.