Happy Mothers Day to all the mama's out there, I remembered and wished both my Meiguo mama (aka Gail) and Zhongguo mama (aka host mom) a happy day.
The cold and rainy weather that I wrote about to not too long ago is just a distant memory at this point as the temperature and humidity here continue to rise. It's 7pm here right now and my computer says it's 81 degrees with 45% humidity, numbers that I'm not really accustomed to. Of course my house is equipped with A/C but we never use it, also it has become painfully apparent to me that there are no cold meals in this country, everything is served piping hot, not helping to relive the heat.
Whats funny to me now is that even though it hasn't rained in quite some time you can still find plenty of umbrellas, its just this time they're to keep the sun off. I think this probably has less to do with it being very warm and more to do with avoiding a tan, the pastier you are in this country the prettier. This also means that people (mostly women) wear an outrageous amounts of clothing. The other day we had a BBQ, courtesy of our program, and all of the host moms came wearing either pants or a long skirt, long sleeves, jacket, hats, gloves (I'm not kidding) and holding an umbrella; it was probably close to 90 degrees.
Just about three weeks till I fly home, starting to get excited about seeing everybody and eating lots of American food.
-AL
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Forgot something...
Meant to mention this in my last blog. I was out the other night wearing my "Rendezvous" t-shirt (thanks Grammy), and this guy came up to me and asked me if I was from Memphis. This of course led to the whole story about how I'm not but I have lots of people near Memphis and how we both loved Rendezvous and yadayadayada. I thought it was a good example of how small of a world it is.
Oh.... another similar story that is even closer to home. There's a girl in the program from Madawaska. And I thought I was from a small town. She's the only other Mainer I've found over here.
Anyways, I thought it was kind of funny.
-AL
Oh.... another similar story that is even closer to home. There's a girl in the program from Madawaska. And I thought I was from a small town. She's the only other Mainer I've found over here.
Anyways, I thought it was kind of funny.
-AL
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Back to Work
Hello all, sorry I've been neglecting my blogging duties, been spending a lot of time on Chinese and paper writing. In case you hadn't heard, I'm back in Shanghai (have been for a few days), and I'm back to the usual grind. Just to recap my trip for you briefly, spent time a few days in Chengdu which is in Sichuan province (also where the earthquake was last year) and then five days in Kunming in Yunnan province. Overall we had a great trip met some really cool people along the way, most of whom were passing through as they spent a few months traveling the world.
Really glad that I decided to go where we did just because it's so different from the big cities of Shanghai and Beijing. It was kind of fun to be the only white people and we certainly got lots of Chinese practice (I was actually complemented a lot on my Chinese) as very few people spoke any English. The way of life in both of these relatively "small" cities is also very different, people in Chengdu seem very content to sit and drink their tea as the day rolls by and in Kunming I've never seen so many people playing Marjiang, a game sort of resembling domino's.
Overall it was a great trip, had a lot of fun but glad to be back in Shanghai with my Zhongguo Jia (Chinese Family). Hard to believe that I'll be flying home in less than a month now!
Hope you're all doing well.
-AL
Really glad that I decided to go where we did just because it's so different from the big cities of Shanghai and Beijing. It was kind of fun to be the only white people and we certainly got lots of Chinese practice (I was actually complemented a lot on my Chinese) as very few people spoke any English. The way of life in both of these relatively "small" cities is also very different, people in Chengdu seem very content to sit and drink their tea as the day rolls by and in Kunming I've never seen so many people playing Marjiang, a game sort of resembling domino's.
Overall it was a great trip, had a lot of fun but glad to be back in Shanghai with my Zhongguo Jia (Chinese Family). Hard to believe that I'll be flying home in less than a month now!
Hope you're all doing well.
-AL
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
still going
Hello all, so we never went to Dali, just stayed in Kunming the whole time which has been fine. Went and saw this giant lake from some cliffs that over look it, went to a temple, and also stopped by an ethnic village but didn't go in because it looked more like epcot than a legitmate village.
I've caught a little bug in the last day here which isn't ideal but better now than when I'm back in Shanghai trying to get ready for finals. We fly out tomorrow, I'll supply greater details when I'm back home.
The weathers been perfect, hope all is well.
-AL
I've caught a little bug in the last day here which isn't ideal but better now than when I'm back in Shanghai trying to get ready for finals. We fly out tomorrow, I'll supply greater details when I'm back home.
The weathers been perfect, hope all is well.
-AL
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Travels
S'up, in Kunming right now in Yunnan province. Left Chengdu Sunday morning after seeing both pandas and the worlds largest Buddha (it's pretty big), spent the day walking around this sleepy little town of just over a million. Not sure what we doing today, but I think tomorrow we're going to try and jump on a train to Dali, which wasn't part of the original plan but turns out that Tiger Leaping Gorge is about 9 hours away, which is a little further than we thought.
Good trip so far (no ones cried), having fun, update you when I can.
-AL
Good trip so far (no ones cried), having fun, update you when I can.
-AL
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Chengdu
I made it. Got into Chengdu at abou midnight last night, found our hostel no problem (it's really nice, not what I expected at all). Think we might go see pandas today.
-AL
-AL
Monday, April 20, 2009
Migrant School
Taking this opportunity to be productive while procrastinating from studying for my Chinese test tomorrow.
Last week was my first week of going to the migrant school to teach English. I believe I wrote on this way back when I first found out that I was going to be able to do this, but I'll refresh your memories briefly. So the students who attend the migrant school are children of migrant workers, or persons from outside of Shanghai, these are the people who do the lowest level work as street cleaners, street vendors and other work. For them Shanghai, and other cities that have benefited from the economic reforms of the seventies, is an opportunity to find work. However, wages here are not quite what we're accustomed to back home and they make very, very little. Normally these parents would have to spend an incredible amount to send their kids to school, even more than for a Shanghai person (it's messed up). And of course education is a means to a better end.
This is where the migrant school comes in, I can't remember if the students don't pay anything or pay very little, but it's much better than if they had to go to another Shanghai school. The school itself is unimpressive, a cement building with a few levels that holds about 700 kids grades k-8 (I think). They have desks, a blackboard, chalk and textbooks... that's about it.
I'm teaching sixth graders with one other kid who speaks much better Chinese than I do, but he's never done any teaching and I've at least taken an education class, so I guess we're a good pair. There's probably at least 30 kids in our class, maybe closer to 40, all sitting two by two in neat little rows. It's one of two sixth grade classes, apparently ours is the more well behaved one while the other fails to cooperate frequently.
So basically we kind of just threw ourselves into it, they have textbooks (we each have a copy also), so we picked up where they last left off and started practicing words for that lesson. The words they are learning are not exactly practical, but in theory they've been learning English since the first grade, so they should have a decent grasp on the language. We started off writing the words on the board, words like "whale," "quarter," "crop" (they kept pronouncing it as "crap," it was pretty funny), and about a dozen more. So it would go I would say the word and they would repeat, then we go back over the words that they didn't pronounce quite right. Then we played hangman, which seems to be pretty popular.
All the kids are kind of like a small army, whenever we wanted them to say a word they would shout it, closer to scream in many cases. Also whenever we called on them to pick a letter for hangman they would first stand up and then tell us... a little different from my memories of the sixth grade.
Going to give them all English names next week, I think they'll enjoy that.
-AL
Last week was my first week of going to the migrant school to teach English. I believe I wrote on this way back when I first found out that I was going to be able to do this, but I'll refresh your memories briefly. So the students who attend the migrant school are children of migrant workers, or persons from outside of Shanghai, these are the people who do the lowest level work as street cleaners, street vendors and other work. For them Shanghai, and other cities that have benefited from the economic reforms of the seventies, is an opportunity to find work. However, wages here are not quite what we're accustomed to back home and they make very, very little. Normally these parents would have to spend an incredible amount to send their kids to school, even more than for a Shanghai person (it's messed up). And of course education is a means to a better end.
This is where the migrant school comes in, I can't remember if the students don't pay anything or pay very little, but it's much better than if they had to go to another Shanghai school. The school itself is unimpressive, a cement building with a few levels that holds about 700 kids grades k-8 (I think). They have desks, a blackboard, chalk and textbooks... that's about it.
I'm teaching sixth graders with one other kid who speaks much better Chinese than I do, but he's never done any teaching and I've at least taken an education class, so I guess we're a good pair. There's probably at least 30 kids in our class, maybe closer to 40, all sitting two by two in neat little rows. It's one of two sixth grade classes, apparently ours is the more well behaved one while the other fails to cooperate frequently.
So basically we kind of just threw ourselves into it, they have textbooks (we each have a copy also), so we picked up where they last left off and started practicing words for that lesson. The words they are learning are not exactly practical, but in theory they've been learning English since the first grade, so they should have a decent grasp on the language. We started off writing the words on the board, words like "whale," "quarter," "crop" (they kept pronouncing it as "crap," it was pretty funny), and about a dozen more. So it would go I would say the word and they would repeat, then we go back over the words that they didn't pronounce quite right. Then we played hangman, which seems to be pretty popular.
All the kids are kind of like a small army, whenever we wanted them to say a word they would shout it, closer to scream in many cases. Also whenever we called on them to pick a letter for hangman they would first stand up and then tell us... a little different from my memories of the sixth grade.
Going to give them all English names next week, I think they'll enjoy that.
-AL
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