summer school fun

my super sweet summer class. i only taught them for 2 weeks, but i had a lot of fun with them. since the class was so small, it was really nice to actually have time to get to know some of my students and talk about what they were learning.

the smallest girl in the front is hillary, and she is the craziest little girl that i have met in china. so much fun! we were very in sync with each other- if my energy level was very high in class, hers would be very high too, and if my energy started to wane, hers would as well. one pretty funny moment in class was when i was teaching them the word 'method'. the only example i could think of was to explain hillary's multiple methods of driving me crazy. we were all laughing pretty hard. then hillary made me go around the class and say each student's method of driving me crazy. she seemed to really relish the fact that they were able to have this kind of effect on me.

somehow she got the nickname 'chicken', which she gets mad about but i think she secretly likes, so there she is below with her chicken drawing.






i always like to start my classes off by asking a question to break the ice, so one day hillary decided to mock me a little and put up her own question on the board. the question asked, "what is your IQ number?" pretty funny. this is the kind of girl who would just say anything that's on her mind, ie, "teacher, your drawing is really bad." thanks. she is very naturally humorous and very creative. if i gave an in class writing assignment, she always wrote hers the quickest, and i always found hers the most interesting....by that i think i mean entertaining.






the girl to the left of me flashing the victory sign is betty. at 16 she was the oldest student in the class, and was very much the mother in the room- she would help the other kids translate, open their candy for them if they couldn't, lol. but she never acted too cool for the other kids. it seemed like her and hillary were actually friends! in fact, i got a little worried for a while that hillary was affecting her because all of a sudden one day she whined, "teacherrrrr, so much homework!" i called her out on it, i was like "no betty, don't do this, you are becoming like hillary!", and she laughed. i guess even the nice ones like to try to push their teacher's buttons a little. every day after class as she was leaving she would say, "thank you teacher!" it was a good way to end the day for me. she always did her homework, and she always did it well. one day i asked the kids if they knew where i could catch a certain bus and they didn't really know, but after class betty grabbed her cousin (who works there) to help me. such a sweetie. on the last day of class, she gave me a candle and a really, really nice note.

such good memories of my little class :)

if you catch dalian at the right moments, it can be very beautiful....




this is on a mountain that is basically right outside my apartment. it was a very misty day.

Before people get married here they go out and get really dressed up for their wedding pictures. poofy dresses and lots of jewelry. each person alone looks okay, but i think they made no attempt to match each other whatesoever? lol

in the picture below, there are like 4 sets of couples with photographers surrounding them. i don't know how we usually do our pictures, but each couple has like a crew with them. wedding photography must be big industry around here.


if you look at the couple on the bridge, at first it looks like they are walking together peacefully. then if you look closer you can see a guy pointing a camera at them. everything is so staged lol. and i honestly think people must all wait to take them in the spring because there were like hundreds of couples out there that day...everyone was doing the exact same pictures it was ridiculous!

kindess of the chinese people

i really do love the people in dalian. i was talking to one of my students, and he told me that the way people treated each other in southern china was not as well as the way people treat each other in northern china. he didn't know how to describe what the north had over the south, so he used his little handheld translator to translate a chinese phrase, which came out as 'code of brotherhood', lol. maybe there's just a rivalry thing going on like that between the north and the south, i don't know, but i do think it is a little bit like that in the north.

a day in the life here. 2 very kind things in the past 2 days-

first, there is a little shop on the first floor on my building which is not that well stocked (because it's so small) but you can find the basics there- water, juice, instant noodles, TP, candy, etc. i don't go in there very often but i am on friendly terms with the woman who works there. she is literally in that shop ALL DAY LONG. and night too. i swear it's only closed like 4 or 5 hours a day and she is almost always there. i can't even imagine, i would go crazy. she has a little bunk bed off to the side that i see her dozing in sometimes, and at night i see a few of them making food in there. she might live in there, i really have no idea.

i went in there yesterday to get some bottled waters because my big water cooler is empty. i asked her if i could have 3 waters. she gave them to me and i asked her how much that would be. she waved at me very casually and indicated that she did not want any money. i was very surprised and confused so i just sort of stood there and didn't know what to say. this woman sits in there all day long to make a little bit of money, how is she not going to charge me anything?! so i just said 'oh my god' (which is very fun to say by the way- wo de tian a!), and she started pushing me out of the store so there wasn't really anything i could do. i had a brief thought when i got upstairs that maybe the waters were bad and they had just filled them with tap water and closed them tightly (which i heard happens here sometimes) so they didn't want to charge me, but i checked them and they were all fine. still don't understand the gesture as i've paid for things in there before, but it was very kind.

second thing that happened yesterday- i had to take a taxi to a location i've never been before, and the taxi driver offered me a price rather than going on the meter. very rarely do taxi drivers do this in dalian, so i was a little skeptical, but i knew the place was pretty far away and the price he offered me (20 kuai) seemed about right. i had my eye on him though because he seemed a little smarmy.

throughout the journey i kept quiet, and 2 other people hopped in during it. the first person wasn't going very far, and got out soon thereafter. the second person also got out before me, and i noticed that the taxi driver asked him for 15 kuai. almost immediately after the 2nd person got out the taxi driver indicated that we were at the housing development i was going to. i guess he had to drive around it to get to the entrance though, because he didn't tell me to get out. since we had some time, i decided to be cheeky and asked him in a why he charged that guy 15 kuai and was going to charge me 20 kuai. the taxi driver looked surprised and laughed, and told me that it was because when he picked me up i was just one person. fair enough. i was thinking about asking him if i could pay 15 kuai as well, but decided to let it slide since he hadn't intentionally been trying to rip me off in the first place and i agreed to the 20 kuai. plus, the difference between 15 and 20 kuai is less than a dollar. then he started asking me the standard questions- where are you from, what do you do here, etc. until we got to the gate. i paid the 20 kuai, but after i got out he called me to come back to the taxi. he had my wallet in his hand- apparently it had dropped out of my bag when i was getting out. guess he wasn't smarmy after all. i was so grateful to him...

i think part of the reason this amazes me, especially now, is that when i was traveling through vietnam, cambodia and thailand this month, a lot of the time i felt like i was walking around with big dollar signs painted on my head. i don't get this feeling as much in northern china. i think about the first taxi ride i took out of the airport in vietnam and how bad the guy ripped me off and i have no doubt that if i had dropped my wallet in his taxi i would have never seen it again.

with the taxi example yesterday, i think there are 2 factors which saved my wallet. the first is that i was friendly to him. when i confronted him about the price difference, which was certainly called for, i did it in a "are you for real" kind of voice but i did it with a smile. if i had gotten very defensive about it and accused him of cheating me, i don't think he would have wanted to talk to me, and probably would have sped off with my wallet. the second thing is i showed him that i was attempting to learn the language. the assumption here is that foreigners can not speak chinese, so if you show them that you can (even if it's just a little), they feel very, very happy.

so, how is someone going to steal from a nice foreigner who is trying their hardest to learn your (very difficult) language?! lol

ka la OK (aka karaoke)

okay, last post about singing and dancing lol. it's just so entertaining. here is one of my students trying so hard to sing the lyrics to "baby" by justin bieber. in the next video though, you can see how much his confidence rises when it gets to the chorus.

hands in the pockets

this boy is doing the hands in the pocket dance from fat boy slim's 'weapon of choice' music video. oh so cute!!

new best team name

my new personal favorite team name: Team Defend Victoria. hahah

this summer i am working in an English academy that is predominantly Korean students. the Korean parents here are supposedly even more gung-ho about their children learning English than the Chinese parents are, so i have to teach them a lot of new vocabulary, and some the words are pretty hard- finicky, rely, gradually, confess, etc. the kids catch on to new words pretty quickly though, especially if i give them easy-to-remember examples that they can associate the meanings with. for example, for the word gradually, i told them, "gradually means slowly. at first hillary (one of the students) was very quiet. then, she started talking a little more. and then a little more. soon, hillary was very loud in class. hillary gradually became a crazy student." they all thought this was pretty funny, so now if i ask them what gradually means, they cite this example. and now i know they know what defend means! that was also one of their vocabulary words. i am so proud of them.



this team name was invented by the crazy girl hillary. hillary can be a pain- i think she has some adhd going on, but she is a clever little girl. at 11, she is by far the youngest in the class (1 student is 16 and the other 3 are 13) but she is not shy at all about it. we were playing a game today where they had to make up sentences using the vocab words, and even though the 16 year old was in her group, she was the one making up and writing the sentences! she's much braver than i would have been in that situation...that's probably why her english is so good right now.

fly little girl, fly! it's blurry and lopsided, but it captures her spirit well :)

my worst fear has been confirmed...

chinese lane swimming etiquette is much the same as chinese driving etiquette- it's kind of a free for all.

before today, i hadn't swam in china for many reasons, but the above reason was definitely up at the top of my list for reasons why.

i think the way chinese people interpret and act on their surroundings is very different from the western viewpoint.

for example, i was doing backstroke, and all of a sudden this guy must have popped up behind me and i ran into him. i stopped and looked at him, and then just kept going and finished the lap. i was confused why he didn't move when he saw me coming, but whatever, not a big deal, maybe he thought i would make it around him. when i got to the wall, i took another look at him to see what he was up to. he was just sitting there hanging on to the lap lane looking in my direction (there was only one plastic lap lane in the whole pool, and i made sure to get next to it so there was at least some order on one side of me), so i decided to just move over a little so i wouldn't hit him again. i set off again doing backstroke. 5 strokes in, all of a sudden i just full-on collide with something. i look up, and lo and behold, it is that same guy. i'm like, are you kidding me, what are you thinking?!? i'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he was probably trying to get out of my way, but how does someone miscalculate this timing so poorly, especially when we had JUST run into each other 5 seconds before that. i scolded him lightly in english (the only thing i could think to say in chinese is like the equivalent of saying "get lost!" which seemed a little too much lol), and he moved to the opposite side of the pool.

after this, i decided that it would be best to stick to strokes where i had use of my vision.

chinese reaction to yao ming's retirement

some translated comments. i especially like the last 2.

• When will we Chinese have the next Yao Ming?
  
• Yao really retired! From now on I only can watch him play on the NBA PC games! (i think this is all chinese people do now anyhow. i tried to look him up on youku- the chinese version of youtube- and all i could find was lengthy videos of him from video games. for real, don't they want to actually see him play....?)
  
• Yao retired. Will as many Chinese pay special attention to the Huston Rockets as before?
  
• All Chinese are proud of him! We have to try our best to watch the game without him from now on.
  
• Yao should have a tattoo "Made in China".I don't know whether I should feel sorrow that I can no longer watch his games or wish him well for his health.
  
• I am not a sports or a basketball fan, but the name Yao Ming draws my attention to basketball.
  
• Yao is only 31 years old. I believe that he will bring us more surprises.
  
• Yao, you will forever be my No 1. I wish you and your family a happy life.
  
• I am not a fan of Yao, but I feel more sorrow for his retirement than I did for Michael Jordan's.
  
• I have suddenly caught a cold! Maybe this is due toYao's retirement, which makes me sad.
  
• Yao's retirement almost made my Daddy burst into tears.