Zach's in China

Multiple old blogs!

2009-04-25T18:24:00.001-07:00

Hey everyone! Here are some old blogs from the past month that I wrote off-line and have been meaning to upload for a while. Sorry, I still don't have internet in my apartment or else they would be updated more often.

Another fun week, with a new Chinese friend!

So on my birthday, we met a friend (Chinese) at the bar who speaks English pretty well. He bought me a drink and also brought over a fruit bowl with a birthday candle in it for me. We thought that he actually worked there, at the time, because he was hanging out behind the bar for most of the time that we were there.

This week I actually got to know him much better. On Monday, Di and I went to the bar for a drink. Shanon was there with a few of his friends. Shanon recognized us, but did not invite us to join his friends right away which is kind of strange for a Chinese person not to do. But, eventually we ended up singing KTV and playing pool with them for a while for the night. I started to talk with Shanon and found out that he studies Chinese at university. So, he is qualified to teach Chinese. Therefore, I took this as an opportunity to have another person teach me Chinese. His English is ok, so I volunteered to teach in English in return. During our conversation, I found out that his Chinese name is similar sounding to the name Shannon. He said that he knows that this is a girl’s name, so he took out one of the “n”s this making his name Shanon, and therefore it is no longer a girl’s name. He is 25 and owns a video production company and is the lead singer in a band. He has also played guitar for eight years. So, not only have I recruited him to the another person to teach me Chinese, but he is going to help me with the Chiense songs that I am trying to learn. Furthermore, he is going to help teach me how to play guitar! I am very excited.

Tuesday, I went to dinner with Rosie, a couch surfer who was staying with Rosie (from Australia) named Kate, Meghan, Anderw and Shanon (I thought it would be fun for him to come along to join us). It is great having a new Chinese friend in the city. He took us to a hot pot that is owned by one of his “sisters”. Chinese use the label brother and sister for some of their very close friends. It was great. We had two different types of goat, potatoes, cabbage, and tofu skin. It was really good. Then, we headed to OK Bar. I was really impressed, because Shanon’s knowledge of American music is amazing! I have not met any Chinese person who knows such much western music as he does. He knows Eddie Vedder, Kurt Korbain, etc. We had a huge conversation about his favorite singers and guitar players. He then showed us some videos of his band. His band plays covers and Shanon also writes a lot of their songs. Furtheremore, while at the bar, Shanon pulled out his phone and asked if he had seen “Two Girls. One Cup”. I was SHOCKED that a Chinese person knew that video. Meghan and I looked at each other in complete shock when this happened. Rosie, who has been in China for a few years, “unfortunately” missed this video, and so did Andrew and Kate. So, Shanon insisted on them watching it. As expected, they could only get through about 5 seconds of the video. Afterwards, Shanon said, “I hate the video, I just like watching faces of people watching”. From that point on, I decided that he is going to be the coolest of our Chinese friends in Chengde!

For the rest of the week, nothing else really going on. It is a holiday this weekend, so I do not have classes on Monday at the university. However, I do have to teach Friday, Saturday and Monday at the private school for my classes with the younger students.

Tomorrow I am going to KTV with Chris, Megan, Travis, Di, Jerry (one of our favorite students) and Shanon (maybe, if he is not too busy). Should be a good time. It is always fun going to KTV with Chinese friends because it is a fun way to learn some new characters when they sing songs in Chinese.

Saturday I will spend the afternoon hanging out with Shanon. He is going to help me learn a few new Chinese songs. I will help with his English, too. Also, we are going to go to the guitar shop and hang out with some of his friends. Yay for Chinese, Chinese songs and guitar lessons!

That’s about it. Nothing to big and exciting planned for the week and nothing really too exciting has happened recently!

Hope all is well!

Friday was great. I taught from 320-5, but my class was just ok. This class is the lowest English level of all of my classes so sometimes it is rather frustrating.

After class, I went to dinner with Megan and Chris (two teachers from the teacher’s college. Travis, the other teacher from the teacher’s college joined us late. Megan and Chris brought two of their students who have great English, too. The students were Jack and Jerry. Jerry is the student who took me to his family’s home in Baoding last term. We went to a great dumpling restaurant and had some chicken and vegetable dumplings. After dinner, we wanted to do something else. So, we were debating about either KTV or going to OK Bar. We thought that since there were only five of us, that going to the bar would be a better option. So, off to the bar we went. Jerry and Jack left around 11 because they had to get back to their school. While at the bar, Shanon was there, so he came over and joined us. He was more comfortable speaking around the foreigners because we had two Chinese students with us so he wasn’t the only Chinese person. Chris and Megan left around 1230. Shanon, though, made me stay with him so we could continue to work on our songs and guitar. It was great, however he is a very mean teacher! Whenever I would do something wrong with my hands or fingers on the guitar, he would slap them and yell “wrong!”. My hands were so sore after the lesson!

Saturday was a very random day. I slept in until around 10:30, then moped the apartment. I met with Shanon for three hours to practice guitar and he also taught me a lot about Chinese music. I am still lost about some of the Chinese music he is teaching me about, but it sounds really cool. We decided that next time we meet that I would teach him about some of my favorite American music…including jazz and he only knows about American rock! After that, I did some errands around town, then was meeting up with Di to go to dinner and the bar for a drink. I was going to meet Di at the public square, because it is a close place to meet. While walking to the square, I saw a group of nine foreigners that were walking past me. So I made eye contact and said, “hello”. A few seconds later, two of the girls in the group came running over to me and asked if I knew where a good place to get food and a drink was. I said that I was going to get dinner and drinks with a friend and invited them to join. They did. It turns out that the nine of them study Chinese in Beijing. Six of them were from Spain, two from Vietnam and one from Morocco. Their English was all very good. It was a great time at dinner being able to have new foreigners to hang out with. This was the biggest group of foreigners I had hung out with in Chengde since the group of doctors in October and November! After dinner, we went to the bar. Yun the owner of the bar was very excited that we brought nine new foreigners to the bar. Also, everyone was at the bar, I ran over to the little store really quick to get some peanuts for us to munch on. While walking to the store (one block away), I saw a group of five foreigners. They asked me if I lived here and what bar was the best. I told them that I did live here and I was just going back to the bar. These five foreigners were from France, but were also studying Chinese in Beijing at Beijing Language and cultural university. So, I came back to the bar with five new foreigners. Yun, when I came back was even happier that even more foreigners came to the bar. He, later that night, through Shanon, told me that he appreciates when we suggest his bar to the foreigners who visit the city. He also gave us a discount on our drinks. While at the bar, some of the Chinse people were asking us to sing some songs in English. The bar doesn’t have the best selection of English songs, so the group of us rocked out to the songs that we knew such as, “Country Roads”. “Hey Jude”, “Seasons of Love”, “A Whole New World”, “My Boo”, and my personal favorite, “My Humps”. There was also one Spanish song, called “Ole” by Ricky Martin. The group from Spain sang the versus while the entire group sang the chorus which included us yelling “Go! Go! Go! Oley! Oley! Oley!”. Eventually by the end of the song, we had the entire bar (the 15 foreigners) and 20 Chinese people and Yun and Shanon singing the chorus and yelling “Go! Go! Go! Oley! Oley! Oley!” with us. It was crazy fun! We stayed at the bar until around 11:30. Then we went back to the hotel where the foreigners were staying at we hung out and watch a movie and just chilled. It was great having such a large group of foreigners to hang out with!

Sunday was an eventful day! The new foreigners who were visiting Chengde called me at 10. We met at KFC for coffee, then we went to two of the eight outer temples. We spent about five and a half hours going through these temples. They were absolutely beautiful. We also had a little picnic at one of the temples. I was supposed to meet with Shannon again in the afternoon, but he had to cancel. He was performing in a show in another city in the morning, but it went so well that he was asked to perform again in the afternoon. So, instead of having another guitar lesson and a Chinese lesson with him, I stayed and hung out with these new foreigners. After the temples, I suggested a good hotpot to go to. It is very close to our apartment. The hotpot was very excited when 10 foreigners decided to come and eat there. I had been there numerous times before, so the owner of the hot pot knows who I am. We were put into a private room because of the size of our group. The restaurant gave us some free vegetable dishes, one free large meat plate and a free fruit desert plate because they appreciated our business and were very happy to have so many foreigners eat the restaurant. After dinner, we debated about what to do. They caught on quickly that there is not a lot of night life within the city! So our three choices were to ktv, OK Bar, or either my apartment/their hotel to watch a movie and hang out. We decided to go to OK Bar…again! So, on the way to OK Bar we did cause a couple scenes on the street! While walking to the bar (which is about a 20 minute walk from the bar), one of the foreigners needed to stop at the ATM. While we were waiting for him, we head that a store across the street was playing the Backstreet Boy’s song, “I want it that way”. Backstreet Boys are huge here. Everyone knows them. So, the ten of us stood on the sidewalk of the very busy street (one of the main streets in the city), singing that song as loud as possible. There because a large group of Chinese people surrounding us to listen and watch what has happening. After we were done singing, one of the foreigners took of his hat to collect money, as a joke. The people who were watching then quickly left and some were laughing about how some of the foreigners were jokingly asking for money. We then continued on to the bar. This time at the bar, we decided that signing KTV was not going to be something to do. So, we played some cards instead. While at the bar, the Chinese like to play a game that looks like the drinking game played with dice from the movie “The Prirates of the Carribbean”. Well, we got some dice from Yun and decided to make up our own version of the game. After that, one of the foreigners pulled out her deck of Uno! Cards from her purse. We played Uno! It was a lot of fun. I had not played that game for so long! We had a lot of Chinese people watching while we played, because they had not seen the game before. After we finished playing. Shanon invited me over to learn how to play some Chinese card games. The foreigners left around 12 midnight, but Shanon would not let me leave because we were in the middle of the game. Playing the card games was Yun, Shanon, Jennifer and Harry. Jennifer is Shanon’s girlfriend (she is Chinese) and Harry is a Chinese friend of Shanon’s who hangs out at the bar often, too. So, I ended up staying for a few more hours to continue to learn these games! Also, Shanon knows how to play Mah Jong, so he is going to teach me to play this!

Monday I didn’t not have to teach at the university because it was a holiday. That is why I was willing to stay out so late on Sunday night learning the games from Shanon. I met with Shanon at 2 in the afternoon to work on singing One Night in Beijing and Bu De Bu Ai. We started off by having him print off the lyrics in Chinese, then we started with One Night in Beijing. He wrote the words in pinyin (which is English letters with the symbols for the four tones), and taught me how to say each word. We practiced his English by having him explain the meanings of the words to me. We did not get very far, as after going through the lyrics of One Night in Bejing, I put the papers in my bag and Shanon saw that I had my computer. He then asked to hear my music and to look through it. We spent the next two hours talking about American music. Oops! Looks like we didn’t get through Bu De Bu Ai! We decided to do it next time we meet. We decided it was a good thing, because know I won’t feel overwhelmed having the words of two songs to learn at once. After I was done hanging out with Shanon I had to go to the private school to teach. I was teaching the little kids, but it was very fun. I was very happy because it was obvious that they had all practiced between classes, this making my job much easier. I had suckers in my bag, so they all got a sucker for practicing their English between classes! After my class ended, I met with Di for dinner. Then we headed to the bar for a drink. Dinner with nothing exciting. We went to BBQ. WE got some grilled veggies and some chicken and lamb. I love the cheap eats at the BBQ! Luckily the weather is getting consistently nicer to the BBQs are open on a nightly basis now. We then headed to the bar for a drink. We were just going to stay for one drink. Once we got there, Jennifer came over asking me to play pool with her. Luckily she is not very good at pool, so I am able to win about half the time. Shanon just stands in the corner and laughs at how bad both of us are. We were then trying to leave, but Shanon asked us to stay for one more drink so he could talk with us, because he want to continue practicing his English. Di decided to leave, but I stayed for about another hour.

Sorry, kind of a long Blog entry, but it was a really fun weekend! Nothing too exciting going on this week. Tuesday is my long day. I have: teaching from 820-10, Chinese class from 1010-1150, lunch with Mr. Lei, chill for a little bit on campus, teach from 320-5. I then have to clean the apartment again. It is getting to be a huge mess. Nothing else really is going on for the rest of the week. I am going to continue learning the songs, guitar and Chinese from Shanon and then also will continue to teach him and Jennifer English! Also, on Thursday I will make western dinner for them as they have not had a western dinner before. Shanon said he wants to try a lot of different American foods, and he doesn’t care if they are necessarily foods that we would eat together for a normal meal. So, I will make one box of mac and cheese, one package of speghetti, mashed potatoes, steamed veggies (carrots, potatoes, celery and egg plant), Hamburgers (with all the fix-ins!) and some devilled eggs. Yea, I know..random collection, but with the ingredients that I have from trips to Beijing and that I took with me back to America (and the few ingredients that I can get here in Chengde), that is all I can really make. For desert, we will have Cheesecake. As a late birthday gift, Rosie made me a cheesecake that she gave to me on Saturday. I put it in the freezer as I knew I wouldn’t eat it very fast. So, we will have some of it on Thursday.

Alright, hope all is well.

This past weekend was great. I taught on Friday at the University, nothing really too exciting there. Then went and taught my little students at Dong’s school. After that, I had a guitar lesson with Shanyn. We changed the way that he spells his name, too. Because Shanon is normally a female’s name, but his name sounds like Shanon, we thought that changing the spelling would be cooler. So, we decided that since he is the lead singer in a rock band and because he plays guitar, that his name needed to be more “rocker”ish. So, we changed the spelling to Shanyn. Our lesson started at about 715 and lasted for about 4 hours. We worked on guitar for about two hours, then worked on singing Bu De Bu Ai and then practiced some Chinese. Next week I will give him an English lesson. Then we went to the bar and we met Chris and Megan for a drink. We played Never Have I Ever with Shanyn and Harry. We left around 12:30 though, because we were tired. Also, Shanyn and Harry along with some of their friends were leaving at five am to go fishing the next day, so we didn’t want to make them feel like they had to stay up with us. So, after we left the bar, I went home and called it a night.

Saturday was pretty uneventful. I met with Chris and Megan and we hung out around the park for a little while. We then went to the Tree restaurant for dinner. I love that restaurant. It is Sichuan style so the food is very spicy. They also have the best egg plant and potatoe dish in the city, I think. Geez, I never at this much egg plant before coming to China. Then after dinner, I went to Megan and Chris’s and we watched “Election”. Gotta love that movie. Then, I got a text from Maggie and Laura that workers were coming to my apartment so I had to go back to my place in the middle of the movie, unfortunately. After the workers left, I met up with Meghan and Ceceilia who were just leaving a bbq with some of Cecelia’s Chinese friends. We then headed to the bar for a drink and some KTV. We hung out at the bar with Cecelia, her friends, Shanyn, Yun and Harry until around 1.

Sunday Di had some couch surfers stay. One was from Korea and one was from California. David and Andy were their names. They were both studying Chinese in Beijing. Their Chinese were very good. So, I me them for dinner. It was a good time. We went to the Korean BBQ. Following dinner, we went to the public square for some dancing with the local Chinese people and to play some shuttle cock (Chinese hackey sack). Then we headed to the bar for a drink. Shanyn was very excited, because he was able to practice his English with two new foreigners. He was nervous at first because there was a Korean and it is an accent that he is not used to, but he grew more confident after time went on.

Monday was pretty fun. I met up with Di and his couch surfers at Punning Temple at 7 in the morning. I did not know that there were monks that actually lived at the temple. So we were able to observe some of the morning rituals and prayers of the monk community living at this temple. The other cool thing about this site is that it has the largest wood carving of the Buddha in the world. It is amazing. I think one of the workers said it is 66 meters tall (but I might have misheard because my Chinese is awful). After that, I headed to school to collect salary and then go to the bank. I taught in the afternoon at the university. This week in my classes, I am playing a game with my students called Tuerettes. For this game, I have made sets of cards with all of the letters of the alphabet on them. Each group received 150 cards with one letter on each card. Then the students got into groups of five. One person would be the “dealer” and would be the person to flip over the card. Everyone would then see the letter, lets say it is “P”. Then, the students must race to see who can say the first word to start with P. However, there are some rules. You must say a noun. You cannot say a proper noun or a bad word. If the students was first, then they got to keep the card. The student with the most cards at the end won. This was just kind of a way to see how many words my students really know and to make them try to think quickly in English. They seemed to enjoy the game, I think. We also did a preposition activity to learn the correct ways to use prepositions and prepositional phrases. With my little kids at Dongs school, we learned things in the kitchen. Their vocabulary words were:. Chopsticks, fork, forks, knife, knives, spoon, spoons, glasses, cups, plates, oven, microwave, toaster, bowl and bowls. We then also worked on “there are”, “they’re”, “there is” and “there’s”. After I was done teaching, I met Di for some hot pot. The hot pot that we went to had the BEST carrots. It was delicious.

It’s now Tuesday and that’s my busy day. I teach from 820-10, then I attend Chinese class with the students from Pakistan from 10:10-11:50. After that class, Meghan and I are having lunch with our friend Mr. Lei. He is the coolest guy ever. He is a teacher in the international teaching department and is a very good friend to Meghan and me. After lunch, I will then do some work and then I teach from 320-5. After that, I am going to go tback to my apartment and clean a little bit.

That’s about it. Hope all is well….

Another update!

2009-03-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

Hello from Beijing! Once again I have ventured over to Beijing for some western culture and to see my Chinese friends who live here. It's always a fun time when in Beijing.

So, I will start where I left off in the last blog entry. Really nothing too exciting going on.

This past week in my classes I have been showing my students Spellbound. I decided to show this one movie in my class this term. If you are unfamiliar with this movie, it is a documentary about the National Spelling Bee. The movie follows eight students, between the ages of 10 and 13, I believe. It shows how these students study their words for spelling bees and also shows some great hints for learning and remembering English words. I thought it would be a good movie to show my students, because I know that studying vocabulary and new words is one of their least favorite things to do. Some of these kids use very creative ways to study words involving post-it notes, homemade crossword puzzles and games involving scrabble boards and tiles. I thought that maybe if my students saw some creative ways of studying words, then maybe they would be "inspired" to spend more time studying. I don't know if it will work or not, but if nothing else at least it is an entertaining movie with an educational purpose. Overall, it seems like most of my classes enjoy it. There are some students who seem bored during it, but oh well. Not everyone can like everything.

Teaching at the private school is going very well. My little kids (ages 6-8) are working on sentences with the words, "I like", "I don't like" and then working on using the words, "He", "she", "his", "hers", "mine", "ours", "my", "we" and "us" and so on. We will spend a few weeks on this as it is very hard for them. I have some games and activities we are doing to help make sure that they are able to use these words. My older students are working on a story in their text book. The story is about two thieves that climb into an apartment through a window and get scared by a talking parrot. So, we have been learning the new words and then reading the story out loud in pairs. Then, each pair has to act out a couple sentences of the story. This way everyone reads, hears and sees the story to help them understand fully. Then, I quiz them with questions and they get candy for answering correctly. They seem to enjoy acting out the stories alot!

Other than that nothing else really is going on. Our summer mountain resort passes expired at the Chinese New Year and so we will get our new ones on Monday. I am excited that the weather is going to be warm enough to start going back there. There are some thai chi classes that take place in the mornings and I would love to join those classes. Also, there are a group of people who dance in the public square in the evenings. I know Meghan and been joining some with one of our Chinese friends, Cecelia. I am thinking it would be fun to be a regular there. Also, at the park there are a lot of kids ages 16-20ish and then adults who play with the Chinese hackey sack type toys until late in the evening. It is really fun to go and watch them for a few minutes, then they will invite us to play. It's great fun for me to interact with some of the local people, and to improve on my Chinese hackey sack skills. It's also a fun way to work on my Chinese, as it is still not very good.

Speaking on Chinese, we are still taking classes with the students from Pakistan. It is very hard, because their class is too advanced for us. However, next month the first year Pakistani students will start Chinese, and then we will be able to join their class. It is nice because they start with the characters (reading and writing), along with conversational Chinese. This way we can work on our characters too, because I still do not know very many.

Last week I took some of my students in my Monday night class for dinner. We went to Korean BBQ. It was great. Then we stopped at KTV for about 30 minutes after. It was a great time. I really like hanging out with my students outside of class. The Monday night class, however, is very big because it is two classes combined. Oh well...they are a really good class.

I am know getting ready and excited for visitors to come! In the middle of June my sister and her fiance (she just got engaged!!!) will come. They will stay for almost 2 weeks. While they are here, we will spend time in Beijing, Chengde, Chengdu and Guolin. I am very excited to travel with them because they are both a lot of fun. Then, the my best friend Jess will be visiting. She will stay for almost two weeks, too. While she is here, we will go to Beijing, Xi'an, Chengde and then one or two other places. We haven't exactly decided yet. We still have some time. So, if anyone else wants to visit, this is your invitation.....!

Hope all is well,

Birthday, back to teaching and a new job!

2009-03-14T01:29:00.000-07:00

Hello!

Sorry it has been so long since the latest post. There is a lot to tell.

Well, as you know, I am back in China and have been back in Chengde for a couple weeks.

The classes at the university are basically the same. Same classes, same students, same problems at the school. Our schedules changed a couple times because the teaching department decided to change aroun the student's schedules without telling the English teaching department. Well, it's kind of hard for students to learn Chemistry in Chinese during the time that their Oral English class is supposed to be happening. I told my waiban that I would comprimise and the other teacher and I could work together, thus making the class English Conversational Chemistry...but no such luck. At least, I hope, our schedules are now set. Meghan and I, this term, are also taking some Chinese classes. It is a little challenging, becuase we are taking the class with the international students from Pakistan that are much more advanced in Chinese than we are. So, we have some catching up to do. However, it's cool that the university is alright with us joining the classes. It meets three times per week, and we've attended most of the classes so far.

I am also teaching at a private school. I am teaching three classes there, possibly four. Two of the classes are of older students (upper middle school), so 5-7th graders. Then one class is very young students mostly second and third graders. They are alot of fun! I will tell more about the classes once they get going. I have only taught one week at this school so far. Things seems to be great there, and the students are a lot of fun. They haven't tested my patience too much, yet.

The birthday here was a lot of fun. I spent the weekend before my birthday in Beijing with some of my Chinese friends. We did some KTV, went to dinner and hung out. It was a great time. Then here in Chengde, on Tuesday (my birthday) we went to tree restaurant. We got some great spicey foods including chicken wings, spicey mutton, bucket of fried rice, egg plant and potatoe dish (which I think is the best in the city), salad and then these rolls (half are steamed and half are fried) that are served with sweetened condensed milk to dip it in. It was great. Cecilia, our Chinese friend who was with us, ordered me birthday noodles too. There are pictures of me eating it. It is tradition on your birthday to get a very long noodle that you must try to slurp, basically and it's like attached to a hard boiled egg in this hot water. This is to signify a long life. So, it was fun having that Chinese tradition at my birthday. Then we went to OK Bar for a couple drinks and to use their free KTV machine. While we were at OK Bar, there was a very happy drunk Chinese guy who danced with all the females that came with us. He was very funny, and was not innapropriate with the girls the way that some Chinese guys are. We later found out that it was his birthday, too! One of the highlights was singing the YMCA at the bar (on the KTV Machine). We were all dancing and doing the arm motions and yelling while the Chinese people in the bar just stared at us like we were crazy. It was rather entertaining. The bartender, because this is the only bar that we go to in the city, brought out a birthday treat too. A large bowl of fruit with a candle in the middle of it for me, then the bar sang "Happy Birthday". It was very fun.

Oh, and jumping to earlier in the day, I had to teach two classes on Tuesday and then also attended the Chinese class. In my first class, they found out it was my birthday somehow, so they had the chalk board decorated for me and the entire class sang "Happy Birthday" when I walked in. Then at lunch, when we were eating with some of our favorite students, they sang "Happy Birthday" in the dinning hall to me. Luckily we were eating off in a corner, so not everyone was able to hear this and cause a big scene! Overall, it was a good birthday!

Here are some pictures of the past couple weeks, too:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2058742&id=34000178&l=84af2

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/album.php?aid=2058741&id=34000178

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2058209&id=34000178&l=d1331

Back again!

2009-02-27T07:41:00.000-08:00

Hey,

This is going to be a short post. I arrived back in Beijing yesterday afternoon. The trip over was relatively painless, and a lot of fun. The flight to Beijing arrived one hour early which was awesome. I was also sitting next to some players of the China National Baseball team. They were a lot of fun, and we spent basically the entire flight talking.

Nothing else too fun or exciting here yet. It is nice to know that my Chenglish hasn't escaped me. The second I arrived back in China, my English turned horrible again!

More updates to come. Hope all is well...

Sorry!

2009-01-18T06:52:00.001-08:00

Sorry for the long amount of time it has been since the last blog posting. I still have no internet in my apartment.

Nothing to exciting here. In Beijing for another day (been here a few already) and am leaving tomorrow to head back to the states for a quick visit.

I will make sure that my internet works as soon as possible next term and continue updating my blog as much as I can.

Sorry again!!!

Thanksgiving in China

2008-11-29T19:58:00.001-08:00

Well, this was the first Thanksgiving that I have ever celebrated outside of the United States…so obviously it was the best Thanksgiving I’ve ever celebrated outside the United States!

We had all the normal foods except for turkey and cranberry sauce. We had chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, a corn dish, sweet potato dish, green been dish, pumpkin pie, wine, etc. It was fantastic. Meghan did a lot of the cooking. Rosie brought over her convection oven along with some cooking supplies and cooking staples, then also baked the pumpkin pie. I was amazed that Rosie had never made a home-made pie before and her pie turned out looking, smelling and tasting amazing. Everyone kind of pitched in on something and we had a great time. When we cooked the dumplings with my students a couple of weeks ago, we learned that cooking and eating in my apartment doesn’t work because it’s too small. So, we cooked in Meghan’s apartment, then ate in mine. It worked out really well, because I have more space in my apartment for people to sit in than Meghan does. Everyone came over around 7:30 and then left close to midnight. It was a great time!

Friday we kind of took it easy. There was no English Corner this week on campus, because of another activity that was going on. Friday, during the day, there was an AIDS show on campus. Students organized a show, like the other art festival activities that had happened the previous months on campus, to help raise money and awareness for AIDS. The students who performed in the show did a great job. I, however, had to leave the show early to teach a class. Friday night Meghan and I went to donkey restaurant for dinner then we watched Wall-E. I, unfortunately, was so tired, I think I slept through half the movie. So, after the movie it was time for bed.

Saturday was another really fun, random night. At first we planned on going to dinner as a group then heading to OK Bar to play some free pool and hang out. Ok Bar is our favorite place to hang out because the staff knows us and we normally always sit at the same table. There is a western toilet, toilet paper and free pool table, so that makes the place awesome. However, not everyone was able to make it to dinner. So, Megan, Chris and I went to donkey restaurant (yea, one of our favorite restaurants) and got some food. We were then on our way to the OK Bar to meet up with everyone, when Meghan pointed out a Chinese arcade on the way to the bar. I was amazed and wanted to go in. They had all these way cool looking Chinese games, including DDR, of course…there were a bunch of people who seemed to be between the ages of 16-25 in there hanging out and playing games (and staring at the three Americans walking by) when we were in there. I think I found a fun new place to go with students, as I am kind of amazed by some of the games that are in there. I didn’t have my camera on me, but next time we go back I will have it and take some pictures. Then, after leaving the arcade, we got a call from Matt. He was at the KTV across from my apartment with some of his Chinese friends and they wanted us to join them. This KTV is the one that wouldn’t let us in twice, because apparently there is a membership fee…I don’t know. But it also is a very expensive KTV. So, it was nice being able to see this one…however I think I like our regular one more! Matt’s Chinese friends were great. The guys that were there did not know much English, but they were very sociable and spoke to us with their limited English and we attempted to use our limited Chinese. There were three girls there two. One’s name is Cecelia, and she has AWESOME English, then one of the other girls English was pretty good. It was a good time, but we left the KTV around 10:30.

After the KTV we decided to go to OK Bar because it was too early to go home. So we went for a little bit. When we walked in, we all immediately noticed there was a foreigner in the bar. It is always fun meeting a new foreigner. He is from Germany and is working for the German based company in our city, however last night was his last night in the city. He had a lot of Chinese friends with him too (all of which worked at the same company). His Chinese friends were from Shanghai and spoke very good English. I also met a Chinese guy, his English name is Chris, who lives in Chengde part of the year and also lives in Auckland, New Zealand for the other part, due to his work. We had an awesome talk about New Zealand, as I studies abroad there. It was a great time. Always fun meeting random new people at the Ok Bar.. The best part about this trip to the OK Bar was this married man who was very flirtatious with Megan and Meghan while his wife was at the bar. He was dancing with him, calling them beautiful, etc. He was a very entertaining, nice guy…we were just shocked that his wife was cool with him dancing with two random American girls at the bar. Oh well, all in good fun, I guess.

Today is lesson plan day! Yay for leaving lesson plans for each week to Sunday. This seems to be the Sunday afternoon ritual now, creating lesson plans.

I hope that everyone had a good Thanksgiving…photos from my Thanksgiving will be posted soon.

Another Trip to Beijing!

2008-11-27T00:59:00.000-08:00

So, I spent 5 days in Beijing, Meghan spent about 5 hours in Beijing! Meghan was off to Thailand almost as soon as we arrived, however, some of the foreign teachers from the Shiz were going to meet me.

Thursday morning at about 5:30 am Meghan and I headed off to the bus stop to catch the 6:30 bus to Beijing. We hoped on and luckily it wasn’t very full. We each had an extra seat by us so it was easier to sleep! Yay for that!! We arrived around 10:45, and got a taxi to go to the central train station. From there, we met our friend Hooligan Mike (who is Chinese) and he assisted us with purchasing train tickets back to Chengde on Monday morning. From there, we went and got Papa Johns Pizza. MMMMM…..so delicious!

After that, we headed to the sketchy DVD store. Meghan was able to get all the seasons of the TV show 24. I grabbed some movies, including the NEW JAMES BOND MOVIE which is still in theaters in American! I was so excited! After that, we went to the non-sketchy dvd store to try to find some specific movies for our classes. Meghan found what she needed, I just kind of looked around. After that, we went to the silk market, because we needed to get some heavy winter clothes as it is getting COLD in Chengde. Meghan stayed for about an hour, then I saw her off into a taxi to head to the airport. She was off to Bangkok to visit her brother-in-law for the extended weekend. I then went back into the silk market where I got some boots, a heavy hoodie with fur lining, and lots of Hannukah/Christmas gifts for family and friends! After that, it was time to go to the hostel to store everything! I just had dinner at the hostel and had a relaxed night. I hung out in the common area that night and met some guys from Iceland, Germany, Britain and Russia. They were all a lot of fun to talk with. Most of them were just traveling around, but the guys from Iceland were graduate students in Korea. They were really cool and fun to talk with.

Friday I met up with the teachers from the Shiz. I met them at the West Beijing Train Station. We then went to eat at Grandma Max’s . We had to take two taxis, because there were so many of us. The taxi I was in was me, Alissa and Jane. I had yet to meet Jane, but we became good friends over the weekend. She is from England and is a lot of fun. So, we were in the taxi catching up, then we realized that our taxi driver decided not to follow the other taxi as we instructed them too. So, we were driving around for nearly an hour. The taxi driver kept stopping and asking pedestrians were this restaurant was. It was ridiculious. So, after going up and down nearly every side street in Beijing, talking to the restaurant twice, and asking about 8 pedestrians on the street where to go, the taxi driver finally found the restaurant. At this point, we called the others, because we were not going to pay this entire taxi fare…it was nearly 80 yuan! We called Bence (who was in the other taxi) and is fluent in Chinese to come out and help us argue with the taxi driver. The driver was being stubborn and not willing to budge. We were being nice and offering to pay the total of the fare from the other taxi (which was 50 yuan). Finally, he agreed. However, this was not the end of the situation. Alissa thought that Jane had stuff in the trunk, and Jane thought Alissa had stuff in the trunk. So, they told Bence we wouldn’t give the money to the driver until he opened the trunk. The driver wouldn’t open the trunk. So, Bence took our money and said that he would hand it to the driver as soon as he opened the trunk. This negotiation went on for a couple minutes. Finally the driver agreed. He opened the trunk and Bence handed him the money. Then, we realized that none of us had anything in the trunk. Oops! That was a fun situation!

We then got into the restaurant and had an amazing dinner! After that, it was back to the hostel to hang out and catch up with everyone.

On Saturday, I went with Angela and Josh to the Forbidden City, once again. I really wanted to see the Emperial Garden, as I didn’t get to see it on our last trip to Beijing. Everything was dead when we were there, but it was still very beautiful and fun to see. We strolled around the Forbidden city for a couple hours, then decided to go to the silk market to finish our holiday shopping. At the silk market, we figured out that we would get better prices if we negotiated in Chinese with the people. Clearly we don’t know Chinese fluently, but we do know numbers very well along with simple phrases like, “too much”, “we are teachers” “we are friends”. “We are American” etc. So, we were having some good luck with the shopping and had fun just walking around and looking at all the cool things that were there.

After that, we met up with the rest of the group and went to a restaurant called The Den. This is in the middle of Western Street, as I like to call it, because there are a whole bunch of bars and restaurants where foreigners like to hang out. The food was great there. However, there was one strange moment at the restaurant. The waitress wasn’t super attentive to us, and we were wanting to order some appetizers as we were really hungry waiting for our food that we knew would take a while to cook. So, I yelled in Chinese for the waitress to come to our table. This is very common and expected to happen in China. That is what people do when they need something. Well, clearly everyone at this restaurant, besides us at our table, were not foreigners who lived in China. Everyone around us just stopped what they were doing and stared at us, because they thought we were so rude for yelling at the waitress. It was kind of funny! Also, Megan V (who teaches in the Shiz) had her boyfriend come in on Saturday. His name is Mike and is a really cool guy. He is an actuary from Chicago and was going to be visiting for 10 days. It was fun to have another new foreigners to talk to!

That was about all the exciting parts for the night, so I thought.

After I got back to the hostel, I was hanging out in the common area, and met a guy from Cedar Rapids, Iowa! He is teaching at a high school in an outer island of Japan and was in Beijing for an extended weekend to travel around. What are the odds of meeting another Iowan randomly in China! It was exciting. He was a very cool guy. He was there with a friend who is also a teacher in Japan, but not on the same island as him. So, the next morning I did join them for breakfast.

Sunday, after breakfast, I met up with Alissa, Megan and Mike to go back to the silk market. I felt bad for Mike as he just got done traveling like 20 hours to China, had a 14 hour time change to deal with and now was being dragged around the silk market which is super intense. Incase you forgot what the silk market is like, go back and read my blog entry about my last trip to Beijing. Today at the silk market was a different story than last time, however. The people were not being very polite to us. I was called “stupid teacher” from my counter offer that I offered to one person. And as we were walking away, he kept pointing at me and screaming, “stupid teacher! Stupid teacher”. I know think it is kind of funny, but at the time I was really annoyed. There must’ve been a lot of tourists that day that were not bargaining down on prices because none of the shops were going as low on prices as I thought they should’ve. Darn tourists!!!

After that, I headed with Alissa to the western grocery store. I got some mac and cheese, spaghetti o’s, soup, bagels, cream chese, etc. Great things that I was totally missing in Chengde. I was so excited to pick up these items. It was then time to say bye-bye to Alissa, because she had to head back to Shiz on her train. I then went back to the hostel to wait for Megan V and Mike to finish their side trip to the Olympic stadium before dinner. Unfortunately, Megan and Mike got held up trying to book a tour for the great wall, because they were staying in Beijing until Tuesday. So, I ended up going out for a quick dinner with my new friend from Cedar Rapids. It was great. We went to one of the restaurants on Western Street and met a few guys from Australia and England who were all really entertaining. It was then time to head back to the hostel to pack everything up. A few hours later Meghan arrived back from Thailand. Then, unfortunately, 5 am came around very soon and we took the 6:30 train back to Chenge.

We arrived in Chengde around 10:30 and headed back to our places. Then, we had about 2 hours to relax before going to teach!

Everything this week has gone by pretty smoothly. We are having a Thanksgiving dinner tonight. It is going to be Meghan, Megan, Chris, Rosie, Matt, Jimmy, Lotus and me. Meghan is doing a lot of the cooking in her apartment, then we will bring the food over to mine and eat here because I have more space than she does. After that, I think we might head out. We have all the normal Thanksgiving food, except for a turkey. We are having chickens in place of the turkey. Oh well, though, I love chicken. So, I have decided that the unofficial theme of our Thanksgiving dinner here in China this year is going to be, “No Turkey, No Chopsticks!”. I will write about the Thanksgiving dinner later and will post pictures.

Hope all is well. I miss talking with everyone! You all should get skype and add me as a contact on there. My skype name is: zasinchina. Also, send me some e-mails and let me know what’s going on!!!

Dumpling Party!!

2008-11-17T01:37:00.000-08:00

Sunday (yesterday) I had a few students/friends over to my apartment to make dumplings. Arwen, Winter, Max, Lance, Michael, Vince and CiCi all came over around 4:30...Meghan was there, too! It was a great time. However, during the process I learned that my apartment is way, way, way too small for that many people to try to cook something that has so many steps! It was very entertaining, and I have included a link to the photos later in this blog entry so you can enjoy those. One funny story that happened during the dumpling making...the students were giving each other instructions in Chinese. I told them that this is an English only apartment and that they needed to give the direction in English. So, everytime one of them would start to speak in Chinese, everyone would yell at them to speak in English. After one of the incidents where we had to remind someone to speak in English (in the tv room of my apartment) we heard Winter (from the kitchen) yell, "shit" really loud. It was awesome! Our students are now even using bad words in English (only in our apartments though...not on campus or in class!!). We kept making dumplings as we were eating them, and after about half of the ingredients had been used, we all realized how full we were. We didn't even get through half of the dumplings that were made. Not only that, we still had dough and fulling left to make more! So, we had Max take the left over dough and filling to his family's house (since they live here in Chengde), and then I froze the alread made dumplings in my freezer. It was ridiculious how many dumplings we made!

Here are the pictures of the dumpling party!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2053382&l=c724e&id=34000178

This week in my classes, we are doing something a little bit different. I am leaving for Beijing on Thursday, thus meaning that I have rescheduled my Thursday and Friday classes to Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. So, we continued on with tenses, becuase this is very confusing to my students. Then we played a game called, "To Tell The Truth". It was based off of the old TV show. I had my students write down on a sheet of paper a secret that no many people in the room would know about them. I also warned them that these should be secrets that they are comfortable sharing with the class. When they were finished writing their secrets, three volunteers were selected to come down to the front of the room. These volunteers gave me their secrets and I read one of them outloud. Then, the three students up front had to pretend that this was their secret while the class asked them questions. The students sitting in the class were to ask questions to try to figure out which student is telling the truth. It was a lot of fun and my students were really getting into it. I thought they were going to start throwing things at each other!! It was crazy!!

This weekend, Thursday through Monday morning, we are going to Beijing. It will be a good time, I hope. We are meeting up with some of the Drake teachers from the Shiz. It is alwasy fun to meet up with other Americans. I think that trips to Beijing are going to have to be a monthly tradition. We have already planned our first meal in Beijing. On Thursday we will arrive at approximately 11 am, and we will head straight to Papa Johns for some pizza! There are no places in Chengde to get pizza, so this is a treat for us! I don't care where we eat for the rest of the meals, as long as I get pizza at least once while in Beijing!

That's about it here. It is starting to get pretty cold. Today the wind was awful. The bad thing about Chengde is it gets biterly cold, but it doesn't snow very often. I wish that were not the case and it would so a little, but do it often. That way at least their seems to be a reason for it to be this cold! Oh well....

A busy weekend!

2008-11-15T07:23:00.000-08:00

The rest of the week went fine, with no real surprised. This week in my classes we were working on tenses, as I realized that my students are having a very hard time with that. So, first we did a discussion on different tenses (with candy, of course!). Then, they did a quick writing activity that I will use for a game for next week. They made columns on their sheet of paper with the headings, "Time", "Verb", "Now", "Yesterday" and "Tomorrow". They then had to go through and list the things that they do on an average day. So, they might put:
Time: 8 am
Verb: wake up
Now: I am waking up
Tomorrow: I will wake up
Yesterday: I woke up

Then they did this for all the things that they do during the day on an average day. Doing this I was able to see the difficulity that many of my students have with tenses. So, next week we are going to have some games and activities to work on this. Then, we did vocabulary. Each week, I give the students 10 new vocabulary words that are words that very well could appear on their large departmental English tests. It takes about 10-15 minutes to go over these new words. Then, sometimes we move on to other activities and sometimes they do activities involving the vocabulary words. This week, I divided the class into 10 different groups and they each had to make skits to peform in the class. Each group was assigned one vocabulary word and they had to use it correctly. Also, each member of the group (each group had 3-4 members in it) had to speak at least once. The students really like creating things and acting stuff out infront of the class. I have some very creative students.

This weekend, so far, has been a lot of fun. Friday, yesterday, we went to Serena's house for dinner. Her parents made a chicken dish, beef stew dish, dumplings and a few other dishes for us. This was the first home cooked meal that we have had in China. It was amazing. At their home was Serena, her parents, her uncle and neice, who is 12 and nows a little bit of English. Serena taught her parents a little bit of English before we came over. They were able to say, "please have a seat", "Do you like dumplings?" and "Welcome to our home". Her dad is an amazing cook. It was a great dinner. I know it sounds horrible, but after dinner, Serena turned on the tv and we were so excited that they put on the English channel. We watched it for about half an hour. We have tvs in our apartments, but we don't get any tv channels. We just use our TVs to hook up the dvd player to watch movies. So, this was the first time, really, with the exception for when we were in the Shiz and Beijing that we had been around a tv in 10 weeks! After dinner, we headed home and called it a night. We were at their house for over 3 hours!

Tonight was Lotus's birthday, so we went to the KTV. It was Meghan, Chris, Megan, Travis, Matt, Jimmy, Lotus, Lotus's three roommates and me. It was a great time. We met at around 6 at the KTV and stayed for about four hours. It was a pretty relaxed time, but it's nice to have a weekend that is relaxing every once in a while. So, around 10 we called it a night and now I am back here.

Tomorrow morning Serena is going to meet me and come with me to the train station. She is going to help buy our tickets to go to Beijing via the train. We are taking the Thursday morning (630 am train) to Beijing, which takes about 3.5 hours. We will be in Beijing through Sunday, then will take the early morning train back on Monday so we are back in time to teach Monday afternoon.

After that, some of my students/friends are coming over to teach me and Meghan how to make dumplings. So, it is going to be Max, Michael, Vince, Ted, Winter, Arwen and CiCi. They are going to arrive around 4 and then we are going to make dumplings and maybe watch an American movie. Hopefully I will be a good dumpling maker, so I can cook some dumplings for you all when I get back to the States. Luckily, for you all, once they teach me, I do have many months to perfect my dumpling making skills before I have the opportunity to cook for you!

Hope all is well and that it isn't too cold where you are yet!! It is starting to get cold here, but it's only going to get colder. At least it doesn't snow nearly as much here as it does back home in Des Moines.

The Doctors have left Chengde...

2008-11-08T21:51:00.001-08:00

So, as mentioned in my last blog entry, there was a group of American doctors here for the past 10 days working at a private hospital and volunteering their time for some surgeries. They were all awesome. There was one day last week where we went to meet Adam and Rom (the two youngest doctors in this group) and they invited us up to the hospitality room where the other doctors were having a glass of wine. Meghan and I were in a room with 12 Americans. It was so exciting! This is the largest group of Americans we have been around in over 2 months. It was also weird, becuase we have gotten used to speaking so slowly. I felt like I was speaking so incredibly fast when I was talking at my normal speed with these doctors. I actually stopped once and said, "I feel like I am speaking so fast...can you understand me?" She thought it was hilarious once I explained why I felt that way.

For the past days we've been meeting up with Rom and Adam and recently Alan (one of the other dcotors). We took Rom one day around the summer mountain resort, which was a lot of fun. The doctors all left today though. So, that means that the foreigner population in our city is back down to 12.

Classes and everything are going really well. Meghan and I have been doing English corner on fridays and have been enjoying a great turnout of enthusiastic students that want to improve their English. However, we have requested that in the upcoming English Corners that we have a computer and projector so we can do some multimedia presentations too becuase our students are very interested in American culture. The student who helps organize English corner every week (her English name is Amy) has told us we will move it into a large lecture room for the remainder of the year. According to some of the students that have come to English corner, we are the first foreign teachers to regularly attend. That made me excited, becasue it shows that the students are coming to the event becuase they are eager to practice their English with Meghan and me.

At English Corner a couple weeks ago, a student named Candy, asked if she could help teach me Chinese. I agreed and told her that I would help teach her more English in return. So, I am meeting with her tomorrow for lunch and we are giong to set up a time. We are going to work on my Chinese for two hours per week and her English for two hours. That means that I have Candy as a private teacher along with my group of friends on campus (Vince, Ted, Arwen, Michael, Winter and Max) that are helping with my Chinese. This is a hard language, but I am really eager to learn as much of it as possible. It is great that so many students are willing to help me learn Chinese!

That's about it here. It's Sunday afternoon, so that means that I will have my weekly trip to the super market. Then, dinner with Meghan and the rest of the night finishing up lesson plans for the week and getting all of the materials ready. The nice thing is that since I am only teaching Enlgish Nursing students now, and all of my classes are at a similiar English speaking level, I really don't have to change my lesson plans very much from class to class. It makes preparing for my classes a lot less time consuming.

Oh yea, so for Election day I watched the results and live news feed from MSNBC and CNN.com. It was kind of a fun experience watching American election results from a foreign country. Meghan received her absentee ballot in the mail, but it came too late for her to get it back to the US on time. Oh well....I guess.

Hope all is well...

Halloween...Chinese Style!

2008-11-08T21:49:00.000-08:00

It was a good week. Nothing really too exciting happened during the week, but the weekend was a different story!

So, the week was pretty typical. We celebrated Halloween in my classes by telling jokes and “trick-or-treating” in class while I played Halloween music like Thriller and The Monster Mash. The students seemed to have a good time. I even had a group of students in one class make a skit to perform in class, even though I didn’t ask for anyone to do that. The skit was hilarious. It was a mix of Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Kung Fu Panda. Wow…I have some creative students.

Then on Friday night, Halloween, we (Meghan, Megan, Chris, Jimmy, Lotus and me) all met at my apartment and we hung out for a little bit. We then went to Ok Bar just to get out for a while. When we were at the bar, two foreigners, that happened to be American walked in. Their names were Romtin (Rom) and Adam. Rom was an orthodontis and Adam a plastic surgeon. They were here volunteering at the hospital doing some basic medical procedures for some under-privilleged Chinese Youth. They were really cool guys. We also met a couple of students from Matt’s school (although they don’t actually have Matt as a teacher). They knew a little bit of English and were very nice.

So, on Saturday I had some friends/students come over and we watched an American movie. They chose to watch The Interpreter. It was a good time. They then helped to translate things in our apartments that were in Chinese so we could stop being confused about them. We then got a text from Rom and Adam to meet up at the bar because they wanted to get out of their hotel. So, we went to the bar for a beer and to hang out. It is really nice having some other foreigners to hang out with, even though they are only here for one more week.

That’s about it for our Chinese Halloween weekend!

Hope all is well…

My students are awesome!

2008-10-26T06:42:00.000-07:00

So, Friday started off like normal. Woke up, went to campus. Once I got to campus, I bumped into Meghan and Laura who were walking back from lunch. I was then informed by them that Meghan and I would only be teaching oral English to English Nursing students from this point forward. This means I would no longer be teaching my classes of anesthesiology and medical imaging, clinical medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, and nursing and psychology students. At first I was rather disappointed because my favorite class was the section of anesthesiology and medical imaging students. However, once I thought about it, I am now going to have a lot more time to help the English nursing students which are the only ones of our students that can actually study and work in America in the medical field. Also, this means that instead of over 1,000 students, I know have like 150. Apparently, the university may also add one class of oral English that will be open to any student that wants to take it with either Meghan or I. That was the big news on Friday.

Saturday was a fun day! I woke up and started to tidy up my apartment a little, because I was having some students over. I am going to go ahead and give the English names of these students, even though not all of them had English names at this point. So, I invited six of my favorite students to come over and then go out for dinner and to hang out with us. All of these students were either in my anesthesiology and medical imaging class or clinical medicine. So, I got to campus and met my students (Arwen, Winter, Ted, Vince, Max and Arwen’s friend CiCi). Meghan invited one of her students, who is also an awesome guy named Michael. So, I met the seven of them on campus, then we took the bus back to my apartment. After a short while, Meghan, Megan, Travis and Matt met us at my apartment. Jimmy met us later on at the restaurant. It was really funny, on the bus, because two of my students (err…former students, now just friends) were telling me how nervous they were to meet other foreigners because I am the first foreigner they’ve ever talked with. I was telling them that it’s cool, because they are teachers too and one of them (Matt) knows a lot of Chinese. They were worried that they were going to have to speak perfectly because they were going out with six foreign English teachers. I had to keep reminding them on the bus that we were not going out to dinner with the intentions of having an English lesson.

So, we got to my apartment and hung out for a little bit while we waited for the other foreign teachers. After everyone arrived we headed to a restaurant that Meghan and I had not been to before called The New Red Lantern. When we arrived, we were given a private room because there was going to be 13 of us. It was really nice being able to hang out with students/friends off campus and get to know them better. So, during dinner we had a discussion about English and Chinese names. Three of my students already had English names that they liked. Those students were Arwen, Ted and Winter. Arwen’s friend CiCi already had an English name, too. So, through speaking with my other two students, the other foreign teachers and I came up with the names Vince and Max for my other two students. They seemed to be happy with those names. Then, Meghan’s student, Michael, already had an English name (and I think that name fits him very well). I will be getting together with some of these students for lunch next week and they said they will have some choices of Chinese names for me at that time. I am kind of excited to see what they have chosen. At dinner we also had a discussion about the differences of American and Chinese college students and then social differences (“cheers”ing at dinners, etc).

After dinner, we headed to the KTV to do some karaoke, because that is very popular in China. We went to the one that we’ve been to twice so far. Our students were very impressed that Matt was able to sing a few songs in Chinese. We attempted to get our students to sing some songs in English, but with no success. They did, however, sing some Chinese songs. During the night they did sing along with some English songs, but they were a little too timid to do English songs by themselves, I think. About 10 pm all of the students, had to head back. Meghan and I covered the small cost for their taxis (20 yuan). The residence halls close at 11, and it is normally a 45 minute bus ride, so we made sure that they were all back well in advance of that curfew. They all texed me when they got back around 10:30, so everything worked out fine. Max, however, lives in the city (not too far away from the KTV) so he stayed and hung out with us until around 11:30, then left for home. About midnight, the KTV staff came in announcing that they were closing. We decided that this would be a good point to end the day.

Today has been an incredibly lazy day. I woke up and went to the store real quick, then immediately put on sweatpants and a hoodie and watched a movie. I also finished lesson plans for the week. I, then, for dinner decided that I wanted mac and cheese, so I made that up. Yay for Mac and Cheese leftovers!!!

Tomorrow I don’t have any classes, so I have no actually reason to go to campus, but I still am. I am meeting some of the students from Saturday night for lunch! They are very eager to help me with my Chinese, plus they are very fun to be around. I have been texting them back and forth tonight about lunch tomorrow. Ted texted me that Vince and him have thought of the perfect Chinese name for me. I asked him what it was, and his response was, “I not tell you now. Wait for tomorrow!”. I will keep you updated…

That’s about it! Nothing else new here at the moment.. Hope all is well wherever you are reading this from.

A crazy week....

2008-10-23T03:41:00.000-07:00

So, nothing really too exciting this week, just a bunch of mishaps which are making my life stressful because I am very schedule oriented.

Everything went well on Monday. I had my class of first year traditional Chinese medicine students and we played some games and spoke.

Tuesday is when everything kind of became crazy. Mr. Li teaches a class of biochemistry before Meghan and I teach on Tuesdays. Mr. Li's biochem class, after his class finishes, splits up. Half the students go to Meghan's class and about half stay with me. Well, Mr. Li's class is supposed to end at 10:00 then our classes are to start at 10:10. Mr. Li, however, never likes to end his classes on time. He also likes to sit in my class and speak Chinese to students throughout my whole class. So, on Tuesday at 10:15 I waslked into the room (while Mr. Li was still teaching) just to let him know that I was waiting and rather annoyed that he is now eating into my class time. He then turned to me and said, "My class is more improtant than yours" and he conitnued teaching. At shortly after 10:20 am he decided to stop his lecture (10 minutes into when my class was supposed to start) and then proceed to answer questions from students outside in the hallway. It was about 10:30 by the time I had everything set up and ready to go for my lecture, and I was just starting to beging class. Then, Mr. Li decided to walk in and collect his belongings and told me that I should stop teaching while he does so. So, five minutes later, he left the room. Way to go Mr. Li...thanks for using up 25 minutes of my classtime!!

Then after our class Tuesday morning Meghan and I decided to get lunch becuase we had a 3 hour break until our next classes started at 3:20. So after lunch we realized that there was the same stage set up as two weeks ago for the arts festival opening ceremonies. We decided to ask Laura and Maggie if there was a show going on and if they were going to be cancelling our classes again. They didn't know. They tried calling other people who also didn't know. So we waited, and waited and waited and then the show started at 2:30. The show was go0d, there were 12 choirs that sang. Also, I was able to have a really nice conversation with a group of my students for about an hour. However, it would've been nice to know that we weren't going to have class in advance.

Then, we figured, alright, the rest of the week will be better. Well when I got to campus on Wednesday that really wasn't the case. I went to go to my favorite class, which is the Antheisiology and medical imaging students. Their class was originally on Thursday afternoons but their was a scheduling conflict so the class leader (Arwen) moved the class to Monday the second week of school then wednesday afternoon for the rest of the term. However, we realized today that these students were supposed to be in another lecture at this time. Arwen apologized, even though it wans't her fault, and sid that this class would join my next class. I had no choice but to let that be alright for the day (I'll get into that in a minute) but we would find a new pernament time later.

So, my next class, which I haven't had for the past two weeks was interesting. The class was originally supposed to be just 130 clinical medicine students (first year students) whom I have only taught once, due to class being cancelled the past two weeks. So, needless to say, this class was behind. Then, I had one of my more advance classes joining them. That made for nearly 220 students in this classroom. It was ridiculious. Enough said.

Then today (Thursday) was another fun day! On Tuesdays I originally was supposed to have a class of two english nursing sections and a psychology class all together. I found out last week that the psychology sudents could no longer be in that class and that they were going to join Meghan's Thursday afternoon class. Well meghan already has 100+ students in that class and doesn't need another 45 to join. So, I volunteered to teach the psychology students thursday afternoon by themselves. So, last week that was fine. That was actually the class that Kirk came in and said hi to when he was here. This week, was another fun story. There was a teacher that was in the classroom before me and hadn't stopped teaching yet and it was time for my class. I popped my head in at 3:30 (when I was supposed to start teaching at 3:20). She appeared to be not even close to being finished. I called Laura and asked what to do. She said for me to walk in and give the teacher my cell phone and she would tell the teacher to leave. So, there I am walking into a classroom handing my cell phone to a teacher I have never met before, who doesn't not know any English, trying to motion to her to talk on my cell phone. Clearly she was completely confused and the classroom full of students were laughing very much. So, after the conversation, the teacher gave me back my phone then ended class and took her students somewhere. Then, I realized there was another problem. None of my students were there. It was now nearly 3:40 and my class was supposed to begin at 3:20. I called Laura to make sure that this was a pernament change and that it wasn't just for last week. She said that it was, but the students must've misunderstood that they need to continue to come to class. Which makes me think, "Why do the students need to be reminded that they need to come to class?". So, I got on the bus and heading back home.

What a crazy week so far.

However, I am looking forward to tomorrow. I have two classes back to back then I am going to English corner with meghan. This is a time where the entire campus (undergrads, graduate students, teachers, faculty, etc) all get to come and hang out with us and practice English. Yea, we are not exactly sure how many people to expect, so it will be fun...

Then, Saturday I invited a group of some of my favorite students out for dinner becuase I want them to help translate the menu for us so we can have more choices when eating out. Then we might come back to my apartment and watch and English movie...depending on how long dinner lasts. Should be fun. These are students that I am going to be able to hang out with often and ask for help when I need it. There are 6 comming. Two have very good English, and the rest of the student's English is good, but they just don't have a lot of confidence speaking I think.

Alright, well that's it! Hope all is well...

A visitor!!!

2008-10-20T17:32:00.000-07:00

So it’s been an eventful week!

This past Tuesday when Meghan, Maggie and I were leaving lunch from the cafeteria on campus, we were stopped by Ms. Yee, who is the head of the English Teaching Department on campus. She asked if Meghan and I were doing anything the next way (Wednesday) in the afternoon, because she wanted us to be judges in the English Speaking (speech) competition. Meghan and I at first tried to object stating that we would have to cancel a class. The reason why we were objecting at first, is because the previous Wednesday we had no class due to the opening ceremonies of the arts festival; thus we would be cancelling two weeks worth of class (since each of our classes only meets once per week). So, by cancelling class for the competition means that we would have only had one class session with our Wednesday classes instead of the three that we have had with the rest of our first-year classes. Ms. Yee did not think this was a big deal, which is somewhat typical for over here. It was apparently more important for us to judge the English speaking competition. So, we gave in.

The next day, Wednesday, we arrived to campus and went up to the 8th floor of the library where the competition was. It was nice and the students did a very good job. None of my students were in the competition, but two of Meghan’s were. There were 21 students who participated and each had three to five minutes to deliver their speech. It was not required for students to write their own speech, they also had the choice to read a published piece or article. So, we were not exactly sure on some of them if these were their students own work or published, but on others we were able to tell by the content of the speech. Overall, I was impressed, they did a fantastic job. The one strange part of the day was at the end they were giving out the awards. They had one first place winner, I think three second place winners and like 5 or 6 third place winners. With no notice, a student who helped organize the event gave Meghan and Me folders (to put certificates in) to award to the students who came in third place. We had no idea what to do, since we had no notice as to what was going on. It was a little awkward with a couple of long pauses/delays. Oh well….

That was basically the main excitement for the week.

Then, on Thursday and Friday of this week Kirk, the director of my program came to visit. Kirk head up the program that I am here in China through, which is called the Chinese Cultural Exchange Program. He is a huge resource and help for us back at Drake, and conducted an intensive training program on Mandarin Chinese, teaching and cultural aspects of China. Without Kirks help this summer, my transition here to China would not have gone as smoothly as it did. So, it was time for Kirk’s big visit to China. During this visit he goes around and visits all the schools where Drake alum, who are participating in this program, are teaching. He stayed in Chengde for 1 night. He arrived on Thursday. We were told by one of our Waibans that it would be lunch with her, Kirk, Meghan and I at 11 am on Thursday, and we were to meet outside of the hotel where Kirk was staying (luckily, about 5 minute walk from where we live). We met there, and hopped in a car and went to lunch. Little did we know that this was a banquet. It would have been nice to have some advance notice, as Meghan and I were in what we normally teach in (jeans and sweaters, nothing too fancy). Oh well, we will learn for next time I guess. In China, in formal situations, the distance you are from the door is important. We were eating in a private room, and there was an university employee who was the president or director of something (I don’t remember) who was the first person we were introduced to. He then took the seat furthest from the door (meaning the most important guest) then told everyone where to sit. He sat in the middle of Kirk and I, then Meghan sat directly to my left. The food at the banquet was very good. There was tofu, donkey, some pork dish (which I didn’t eat), dumplings, a lot of good stuff. It is also customary at these event to drink Baijo (I can’t spell), which is a white alcohol. It is very strong. Meghan and I both had class so we asked for coconut juice instead. We have heard about how banquets can result in a lot of drinking because each person will want to have a drink, or cheers, with each individual person. However, this banquet was very tame. Only a couple of the eightish people in the room had Baijo and they were seemingly not drunk. They just sipped it, instead of downing it cup by cup.

After that, we headed back to the car and went to campus. Kirk went up to the Foreign Affairs Office with Laura, to talk shop. We were invited to come up, but instead we decided to sit outside in a shady spot and listen to some music because it was a beautiful afternoon outside. Kirk, however, did arrange to come into each of our classes to say hi and meet our students.

So, I went to my class, which was a small class. It is only like 40 first year psychology students. In that class, I started it off like I do the rest of my first year classes, Meghan and I actually got the idea from Matt who is a more experienced teacher here. We call up five students (randomly) and give them a pretty simple word in English. Then, without any time to prepare, I asked the students to speak for approximately 15-30 seconds about that word. This helps build confidence and let students know that their English is actually much better than they think it is. So, Kirk came in the middle of that. After the last student went, Kirk came in and asked if he could speak about a word. So, I said sure, and we asked the class which word Kirk should speak about. One of my students suggested the word, “Chengde” which is the city that we live in. Kirk spoke for a few seconds about it, then received a piece of candy. Before Kirk came, I told the class that a very important friend of mine was coming. I also warned them that he understands Chinese so they need to be mindful of what they say, however they must address him in English. I then opened the floor for questions, and in the middle of questions (when their was a long pause as we waited for students to ask questions) Kirk said that he is not leaving until he has been asked five questions. Most of the questions were pretty basic such as does he have a Chinese name, etc. They were all very impressed that Kirk was able to speak and write Chinese. Two funny questions/answers that came from the class. One of my students asked Kirk was THE major difference between China and US was. The first thing I thought was, “like there’s really just one difference?”. Kirk had an awesome response. He asked my class “How many years of history does China have?” The students answered about 5,000. So he wrote that one the board. Then he asked the class how many years of history does America have? There was a wide range of answers with this one. Kirk then wrote, 232 on the board. Then he asked the students, “So what’s the difference?” After a few seconds, the students understood that this was a math question. The came to the answer of 5768. So, Kirk then said, “That’s the difference between China and America…5,768”. I was standing in the corner laughing when he said that. The last question came from an entertaining student in my class who is kind of a smart-ass as times, but still a very nice kid. His name is Johnniey. It is pronounced like Jonny, but I think he must’ve been trying to include every possible way to spell the name “Johnny” in his spelling. He stood up and asked Kirk, “how did you get here?”. Kirk’s response was somewhat sarcastic, but fitting given who asked the question. His response was, “I kissed my wife goodbye, I left my house, got into a car, when to the airport...” and literally walked the students through every step, but in a very entertaining way. After that, Kirk left my class and we continued on. However, after Kirk left, Johnniey raised his hand. He said, “Kirk speaks Chinese very well, better than you do”. I told him, “Yes he does. You should remember though that Kirk lived in China for three years and I have only been here about seven weeks”. To which Johnniey responded, “He must be smart…smarter than you.” I laughed, and we carried on.

After class was done, Meghan and I headed back to our apartments to get ready for dinner. We met Kirk outside his hotel and then walked over to the restaurant to meet the other Drake kids who teach at the Teacher’s College. We went back to the BBQ where our friend serena took us. We had a great meal consisting of Spicy chicken, beef, rice, fried dough balls that you dunked in this milky sauce stuff, potatoes, onions, etc. At this restaurant they bring all the food out raw, then there is a little grill in the middle of the table and you cook your own food. We also had an assortment of drinks that I hadn’t had before. We had the standard tea and coke, but then we got a couple different flavors of this flavored milk stuff. It was good.

Then, it was off to the western restaurant for some crazy deserts. You will have to see the photos to understand what I am talking about, but these were some of the craziest deserts I have ever seen. It was really funny because they had names like, “lust” or “together” but there were no descriptions (or even notes of what flavors of ice cream were used). When Kirk asked the waitress about this in Chinese, she responded, “It’s whatever the cooks give me.” You know it’s bad when even the waitress has no idea what the deserts are. We all attempted to order different deserts so we could see what they looked like. I won’t write about each one, but when I post the photos of the deserts onto my photo page, I will include the name of each. A few are worth a good laugh.

It was a great trip, and nice to have a visitor! Sorry for the long note, but just thought I’d let you know everything that happened last week!

Hammer Hill

2008-10-13T06:44:00.001-07:00

This weekend was great! On Friday Meghan and I went out with two other foreign teachers (Matt and Jimmy) and then Lotus. We went to the tree restaurant. I don't actually know what the restaurant is called, but it has a huge fake tree in the middle...thus the name of the restaurant to us is the tree restaurant. While we were out for dinner, we found out from Jimmy that his Birthday is on Wednesday. So, we figured that we should call Friday part of his birthday weekend and continued hanging out after dinner. We went to a bar on bar street called "ok bar" for a drink and to play some free pool. While we were there, we met a photojournalist from outside of Philly. He was a really cool guy.

Then Saturday we took it easy and got stuff ready for the week.

Sunday morning Meghan and I woke up early (8 am) and went to meet Mr. Lei. He is one of the teachers in the English Nursing department, and is an AWESOME guy! He is one of the nicest, most helpful and incredibly connected people that I have met here in China. He took us to a sight called Hammer Hill. I will be trying my best to have photos put up of this trip this week. Mr. Lei (pronounced "lay") has a pass from the government to get into all tourist sites free, so he was able to get Meghan and I on the lift up the Hammer Hill and the entrance free to Hammer Hill for no cost. Hammer Hill is this HUGE rock that is very tall at the top of this very large foot hill. We took a ski lift to the top of the hill then went over to Hammer Hill to touch it. It is said that if you touch Hammer Hill rock that you will live for a very long time. There was a man selling t-shirts there that said, "touch hammer hill, live to be 130". After that, we went on a little hike over to the frog's leg (it was the frog something) which was another really cool rock that you could see under and through. It will make more sense when I have pictures posted. It was a really good time, and we lucked out with how nice it was. The weather was absolutely beautiful for October, becuase it starts to get colder here in October (justl like back home in the midwest!). After our trip to hammer hill, Mr. Lei treated Meghan and I to lunch at a hot pot. It was fantastic...but like all of our Chinese hosts so far, Mr. Lei ordered WAY more food than we actually needed. It was an amazing meal, though.

While at lunch, Mr. Lei, Meghan and I had a great discussion on ways that we can be utilized more on campus. Meghan and I are looking into the possibility of having our English classes be like a "lab" for the English classes that our students take with Chinese professors. For example, if the students are learning about adverbs and proverbs in their traditional English classes (with Chinese professors) than we can have activities that will make the students work on these new skills in our Oral English classes. This will really help our classes have more focus than what they are having know. Also, it will allow us to interact with the English department faculty more. There is obviosly alot that Meghan and I can learn from them and hopefully there is alot that the other faculty can learn from Meghan and I.

Also, Meghan and I are looking into trying to create/join some other activities on campus that are focused around English. We want to have an "English club" on campus where students can join us for English movies, games, conversations, etc. One of the problems that we are having with our students is that they don't practice their conversational English outside of class. It is understandable that English is hard for them and they would prefer to speak to each other in Chinese. Therefore, they only practice their spoken English in our classes. If we were to have a fun, non-academic environment for our students to practice their English this would really help them alot. Plus, this would be a great way for us to get to build better relationships with our students, too. It is always great being able to interact with students outside of class.

That's about all that's giong on here. The advisor of our program, Kirk, is going to be visiting this week. We are excited for him to be here, as this is the first visitor that we've had.

That's about it! Hope all is well back in the US!!

Zach

My students changed my class time...

2008-10-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

So, the begining of this week we got a new schedule from Maggie. Due to a scheduling conflict with another teacher, they switched one of my classes on Friday with my class on Thursday. I didn't think anything of it, and just continued on teaching when they told me to.

Today, in my class, there were supposed to be 125 students in there. I was shocked when there were only 35. I asked where everyone was at. The leader of my class told me that they were all in another class. Well, clearly this was the best time for my class to be moved to. So, then the class leader said that this class will be moved to Monday afternoon next week and then will be switched to Wednesdays. I was a bit stumped as to why a student would have this information and not me. Oh well...hopefully this means that all of my students will be able to attend this class in the future.

After class was done, Meghan and I came back to our apartment and went out for dinner. Nothing really to exciting.

Life is kind of dull here right now. We are just trying to play catch up because we did not get through all of the paper grading/correcting that we should have over break. Therefore, we somewhat have double work for grading becuase we have more papers being turned into us this week! Oh well, that means an uneventful weekend full of lounging around in pajamas and grading assignments! I guess a lazy weekend once in a while isn't too bad of a thing.

I did borrow an idea for my midterm exams for my students. I will be giving this out to my students next week, and then the midterm will be the middle of November (3rd week of November). This midterm was actually an idea that one of the other foreign teachers in the CCEP program presented during our training session. It is where a student will research a famous person (either past or present) in America. This can range from a celebrity to a political leader. Then, they will present a first person speach and will give the speach acting as that person infront of the class. They will be someone a "wax figurine" of that famous person. Each student will speak for 45 seconds. I will allow my freshman students to write out their speech for the midterm then at their speach (which will be a different style) at the end of the semester they are only allowed to use note cards. Then, my sophmores are able to use notecards for the midterm and no notecards for the final. So, this weekend I will be creating the rubric for this midterm and then discussing it with students. I will be doing one as an example for my students. I have the weekend to figure out which "famous person" I want to "be" to show my classes the expectations that I have.

That's about it. Hope everything is good for all of you.

I did add about 50 photos onto my photo site (www.zasinchina.shutterfly.com). I know that I promised more, but I was having difficulty getting them uploaded. Hopefully more to come this weekend.

New Photos...

2008-10-09T06:43:00.001-07:00

Hello everyone,

I am working on adding more photos. I apologize for the delay, I am just not patient enough to deal with slow uploading times on pictures. However, tonight I am going to be watching video of both the second presidential debate and then the first vice presidencial debate. Therefore, that leaves me lots of time to upload photos. More photos should be added under a folder titled "Beijing" on my photo page.

Again, the address for that page is:

www.zasinchina.shutterfly.com

Hope all is well. Another blog update will be posted by the end of the week!

Zach

You may or may not have class today...

2008-10-08T02:14:00.000-07:00

So, today was an eventful, and somewhat random day.

Today we arrived to campus at about 1:20 and stopped by the Foreign Affairs Office to meet with Maggie. She helped me with a problem I am having with my cell phone, then told Meghan and I that due to the art festival opening ceremonies we may or may not have class today. We asked her what that mean, and she said, "You may or may not have class today..."

So, on that note, we left to meet with Ms. Yee who is the head of the English Teaching Department. The first thing she asked us was if we were having our class today. We told her that we didn't know. So, she made some phone calls to find out. The profound answer we were given was, "If your students come, see if they want you to teach or if they want to go to the Opening Ceremonies. If your students don't come, then dont' teach".

No students came to either my or Meghan's class. Therefore, Meghan and I went outside and watched the opening ceremonies. There were alot of performances which included dances and singing. They were all very good, although we did not understand anything of what was said or sung during the show.

So, we are now back at our apartment. Let's see what other excitement happens for the rest of the week...

Back from Beijing

2008-10-04T01:05:00.001-07:00

Hey everyone!

Wow, what a fun Holiday we had in Beijing. It is easy for me to mix up days, so I am going to try to recap as close as I can to each day, but just may end up making it one gigantic story!

So, Meghan and I left on the Saturday 2 pm train to Beijing. There were other Drake CCEPers going to Beijing (3 others from our city plus 4 others from the Shizz) so we were going to be hanging out and sight seeing with them) during our time there. Once Meghan and I arrived to Beijing, we found a hotel to stay in for the night which wasn’t too far from the train station. However, no cabs would stop for us, because we think they thought we wanted to rent the cab for the entire day. When the cabs would stop, we told them “Tiananmen Square”, because the hotel we wanted to stay at was right by there. The cab drivers thought we wanted to rent a cab for sight seeing. So, we hiked it the 25 minute walk to the hotel. Oh well!

We put our stuff away at the hotel and then decided to walk around Tiananmen Square and see what it was like at night. Oh by the way, I will be putting a lot of photos up on the photo site in the next day or so. I took like 400 photos so it is taking a LONG TIME to get them all uploaded. I apologize for the delay.

The next days, we did a lot of the typical sight seeing in Beijing. We did two days at the Forbidden city, Tiananmen Square, summer palace, Olympic buildings (water cube (?) and Birds Next), western street (I can’t remember the Chinese name of it, I’ll explain it later) and the crazy food market. We did not do the Great Wall because first Meghan and I both were not feeling 100% because we were both getting over bad colds and it was also expensive for the tour. We figured that we have people coming to visit us and that they want to go to the Great Wall, so we will have many other opportunities to go! This way I can experience the Great Wall for the first time with my sister and her boyfriend (and possibly two other friends) when they come to visit next year!

While we were in Beijing, we ate A LOT of western food! It was really nice, because the only western food we have in Chengde is McDonalds and KFC. So, we had Outback Steakhouse, Papa Johns, Hooters, etc. It was nice. We also found some fun places to go out at night with some of the other Americans.

One of the most exhausting things that we did while in Beijing was go to this giant silk market. It was four floors all of this giant market. There was an entire floor of jewelry (watches, necklaces, jade, etc)., floor of clothes, a floor of coats and other random things and the basement was all like purses, belts, handbags etc. The rule of these markets is that whatever price the worker offers, you should counter-offer 10% of what that price was. Then, don’t pay any more than 20% of their original offer. For example, Meghan and I each got new North Face winter jackets. For both, the lady wanted 3500 Yuan. Meghan and I offered her 300. She laughed and acted like she was insulted. So, then Meghan and I started to walk away. After about 5 minutes of negotiating (repeating to her, “we will only pay you 300”, we agreed on a price of 400 yuan total for both coats. Therefore, Meghan and I each paid 200 Yuan (about $30 US) for North Face winter jackets. It was great. We got a lot of other cool stuff at this market including face Rolex’s, purses, wallets, etc. It was very tiring and frustrating at times, however, because the workers at the market would literally grab you by the arm and pull you into their store. Then, they would literally trap you in their little shop while you negotiated prices so you couldn’t walk away from them. They were very tricky! They all spoke very good English too. It got very tiring having to keep trying to avoid eye contact with every worker there. It would have also been nice to stop at the shops and look around without feeling obligated to make offers on products. They had everything there though, from every designer purse you could imagine, designer watches, designer clothes, knock-off DVD’s….it was amazing the amount of stuff that was there. Meghan and I spent about 3 hours there and that was with us knowing exactly what we wanted and skipping past all the stuff we didn’t want. I could totally see people who love shopping (and who are extremely patient) being able to spend 6,7,8 or more hours at this market. Next time I go to Beijing, I will give you all advance notice and if you want anything let me know!! I can get it then ship it back to you. Shipping is pretty reasonable if I take the 3-4 week option for the arrival date.

One of the other highlights was going through the crazy food market. This market was kind of similar to the Chinese BBQ’s that I have mentioned before. The were outside markets or shops that were just lined up one after another for probably about 3 blocks. They had everything from grilled mushrooms, squid, star fish, etc. It was crazy and so incredibly busy. When any of you come to visit, we will for sure stop there for dinner one day. There is something for everyone from vegetables, crazy fish, meat, etc. Plus coming to Beijing and not going to this market is like going to Orlando and not going to Disney World.

Oh, a few other random stories that were kind of fun from Beijing. First, one day Meghan and I were leaving our hotel room and at the front desk were this mother and daughter who were from Spain and asked us if we spoke English. We helped them with what they needed, then found out that they were having literally the worst vacation that you could ever imagine. I could write 10 pages about all the things that had gone wrong for these poor people on their vacation. They saw that Meghan and I were comfortable with getting around on our own and asked us for some simple help on a couple of occasions. It was really nice being able to help other foreigners who were visiting China. It felt like we had learned something about China for living in Chengde for the past month. They were such nice people too. The last night we were in Beijing, we ended up going out for coffee/tea with Barbara, the daughter while the mother went to bed. She studies genetics in Madrid and her mother lives in Barcelona.

Also, you can only buy your train tickets five days in advance in China. So, on Tuesday Meghan and I headed over to the train station to buy our tickets for Saturday to go home to make sure that we got back in plenty of time to rest up and be ready to go back to work on Monday. So, we got into a line and ended up behind two Americans. We got to talking and found out that it was a daughter, named April, who has lived in China for two years doing some kind of journalism and the mother was just over visiting. We exchanged numbers with April and shared some travel stories. Luckily, we got into line behind her, because she was fluent in Chinese and helped us get our train tickets. We could’ve done it on our own with our phrase book (plus we had our old tickets too), but it was really nice that she did all the work for us! Hopefully we’ll stay in contact with her and maybe meet up sometime.

That’s about it. We kind of did just the whole tourist thing in Beijing and had a great time.

We got back to Chengde about 11:30 this morning. Today I went and got some groceries and also added more minutes to my cell phone. Nothing too exciting. While we were in Beijing, we got some knock-off (ripped) DVDs so we will probably stay inside tonight (because it’s cold and rainy) and watch a movie. Yay for noodles and movies on rainy days!!

Hope all is well!

A busy, busy week!

2008-09-26T07:03:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone, I am sorry that I have not made a post in like a week or so. This will be a long one to catch you all up. Really nothing too exciting has happened.

This past Friday we took Sarina out for dinner. We took her to one of our favorite restaurants, the one with the picture menu and goat dish. Sarina, apparently is not a big fan of goat...but we had ordered other dishes that she liked. After dinner, we took her bowling. It was a fun night. The bowling alley was a lot of fun. I think that a group of five Americans going to the bowling alley was the most fun that the staff had their all night. They kept taking photos on their camera phone and standing by our lane clapping. It was very amuzing. After this, we called it a night.

Saturday Meghan and I took it easy. We watched "A Few Good Men". Good old classic American movie!

Sunday we prepared to each for the upcomming week.

This was the first week that we had our classes with freshman. I won't go into great detail about each individual class, because I did the same thing basically in each class. My freshman classes are bigger than my sophmore classes. I have five classes of freshman. Two of them have approximately 50-60 students. One of 90 students, and the other two have around 120 students. So, first, I introduced myself and talked for a couple minutes about class. Then I numbered off my students and broke them up into ten groups. They were very confused because this is not something that they were used to doing at all. They are very used to just sitting in their seats, listening and speaking when they are called on. Fortunately for both them and me, that is NOT the way that my class is!

Once they were in their groups, I gave each group an item such as a GQ Magazine, chopsticks, power cord, earphones, etc. Each group had two minutes to work together to write as many words about their item as possible. Then each group shared their item and words with the class.

After this, they returned to their seats. Then we played a game called scrambeled egss. This game is to get them used to speaking in class and also different ways to start conversations. I would start off and walk over to a random student and introduce myself. That student would say hello back, and we would have a short little, 5-10 second conversation. I would then take that students seat, and that student would go and do the same with another student. We played this for about 20 minutes, as all of my classes have enjoyed this game.

Following that, I put a couple questions on the board for my students to answer. They put their responses on a sheet of paper that they handed into me. This is how I take attendanc each day...but making them give me something with their name on it.

After that, we played a few more games. Then, class was done. The first day was just about games and having fun.

All and all the classes went very well. My freshman have are at a very good level of speaking and listening, it is just they aren't comfortable speaking in class. Many of them have never had a foreign teacher, so we just have to work on letting them know that I won't "call them out" infront of the class and that I want them to have fun. Therefore, the students are more eager to participate. The more they are willing to talk in class and listen, the better their oral English skills are going to become.

Now that the week is over, it is time for National Holiday. That means that we have a week free to travel!! We were going to go to Guilin, which is way south from where Meghan and I are. However, the train tickets were booked. so, we are goign to spend some time in Beijing and do the toursty things. Also, there are a few other Drake CCEPers who are going to be in Beijing. It will be fun to meet up with them and exchange stories so far!!

Oh, yesterday was Megan's birthday, which was fun. We went out for dinner at the tree restaurant. It is this restaurant that is half way between where Meghan and I live and where Megan, Chris and Travis live. Matt joined us for dinner too. When you walk into the restaurant, you have to cross a little bridge and there is this HUGE massive fake tree through the middle of the restaurant as well. It was kinda crazy, but cool at the same time. We had some great food (with no chicken heads in any of the dishes). It was a good time. However, we couldn't have too crazy of a night because Megan, Chris and Travis had to be at their bus stop at 7 am the following morning.

That's about it for now. I will write more after we are back from Beijing. Hope all is well...

A New Friend

2008-09-18T19:54:00.000-07:00

Hey! Sorry it's been a few days since the last post. This new post basically takes place entirely at an outdoor Chinese BBQ. Basically, it is tents that are set up along the sidewalk with chairs and tables, then there are grills just along the sidewalk where the food is being made. We haven't had a bad meal at one yet, and they are not very expensive.

To, Wednesday night Meghan and I went to the Chinese BBQ while I had a load of laundry going, becuase we were hungry. We were planning on having a movie and laundry night. Then, while we were eating Megan and Chris walked by and decided to join us. We then made friends with the owner of the BBQ, nimed Gin Tz (I am horrible at spelling Chinese names, sorry!). He is 28 and his brother owns another BBQ here in the city). He is working very hard to speak English to us, but unfortunately his English is as bad as our Chinese. So, we handed him one of our phrase books (that has a Chiense to English section in the back) and then we had a conversation through our phrasebooks. What we thought was going to be a quick dinner, turned into a two hour dinner! While we were eating, and talking, Gin Tz had to go to his brothers BBQ to pick up some more meat, so he grabbed Chris's hand and took him to the back of the motorcycle and they were off. We had no idea where they were going, or what was going on. Chris came back in one piece about ten minutes later, though. Soon after that, we paid our bill and left. We then went to a Chinese Disco Club, that was nothing too exciting. Loud Chinese techno music, flashing lights, etc.

Yesterday, Meghan and I were walking toward the hotel where the others are staying. To get to the hotel, though, we have to pass by the BBQ. Gin Tz was there and grabbed Meghan and I and gave us a beer. We sat down and I called the others to come and meet us here then we would thank Gin Tz for the beers and head off. It didn't exactly work out that way though. He kept bringing us more and more food and just putting it on our table. We kept making the mistake of eating everything, so he brought back more. When eating with friends, or at a dinner, etc. one should leave something on their plate when they are full, this way it shows there was too much food (compared to having too little food by cleaning your plate). So, we eventually caught on as to why he kept giving us more food, so we left a couple lamb skewers on our plate. Then, ofcourse, Matt walks by! He sits down and joins us, and it turns out that Matt knows Gin Tz, too. Also, not only does Matt know Gin Tz, but he knows a group of three other guys who were sitting at another table. So, these three Chiense guys invited us over to talk. They didn't know much English except for the words: beautiful, USA, and friend. They were hilarious. We also tried some new foods. These foods include: silk worms in their cocoons, and crawfish. There were chicken feet on the table, but only Matt ate a foot. After this was done, we headed back to our place and called it a night.

That's about it! New foods, new friends and a hilarious story!

Uneventful day...

2008-09-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone,

Just thought I'd make a post to say hi. Nothing too eventful here...pretty boring Monday.

I woke up and Skyped with the family...always nice to talk with them! Then, went to the grocery store and got some stuff to have around the apartment for lunches, etc. I got some things that look like ramen in a cup. It is all in Chinese, so I am going to have my students transalte the packaging for me and give me instructions on how to make it. Maybe this way I can learn some of the Chinese characters, too.

Went out to dinner with Meghan, Megan and Travis. Chris wasn't feeling well, so he stayed behind. We went to a restaurant we had been to before, that had a picture menu. We ordered some lo mein, then a pita bread type of a thing, a spicey chicken dish and a dish that we think was lamb. It was all really good. Minus the lo mein, these were dishes we had never had before. I'd totally get them again. We then went back to Meghan's and watched the movie, "Saved". I knew that bringing a travel CD booklet of DVDs would come in handy.

Tomorrow I teach one class from 1010-1150. Before class, however, I am going to get to the library and work on creating some teaching materials from the English copy of the Chinese newspaper. Also, I am going to speak to Maggie, one of our waibans, about movie viewings. Many of my students wanted to watch movies, but also many said that they wanted to spend class time working on their English and not watching movies. I completely understand both. So, I am going to see if it's possible to reserve one of the large lecture halls one evening a week and show movies in there. This way, everyone is pleased. I don't have to use class time to show movies, but can still offer it to my students. Another nice thing is that I won't have to watch the same movie seven times! Hopefully we are able to do this. Keep your fingers crossed that this works out for me!

That's about it. We are trying to finalize plans for our travel during holiday from Sept. 29 to Oct. 5, but don't have anything finalized yet. We've bounced around ideas, as I have previously mentioned, but haven't yet confirmed anything. We discussed at dinner tonight getting everything planned by the end of the week. We worry if we wait too much longer we might not get train tickets and hotel rooms due to it being a holiday.

Hope all is well...

Don't Smoke, It's Bad for the Furniture!!

2008-09-14T06:55:00.000-07:00

Hello, everyone! It's been a fun last couple of days!

We'll start with yesterday. We met up with Matt and the other foreign teacher from his school named Jimmy (from Long Island). It was just Meghan and I, because the others were out with Dee (another foreigner who owns a private langauge school here in the city). So, the four of us went to an outdoor BBQ joint where we had a beer, chicken wing (on a stick), and lamb skewers. I felt like we were at the state fair because everything we got came on a stick. The food was really good and not very expensive at all. Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention that one of Jimmy's friend, Lotus (this is her English name) came along with us to dinner.

After dinner, we met up with Megan, Chris and Travis and we went to bar street. We went back to Ok Bar and had a couple drinks, played pool, darts and sang some songs. It was a good time to be had by all. The funny quote of the night was when Matt and Jimmy started smoking, Lotus informed us all that "Smoking is bad for the furniture". I thought it was hilarious. After we left the bar, we walked to McDonalds for soft-serve ice cream and then called that a night.

Today was a lot of fun. Lotus, Jimmy and Matt invited us over to their apartments (on their campus) to celebrate the Mid-Autumn festival. Lotus and a few of her friends made really good dumplings for us. Some were beef and some were pork. I stuck with the beef ones. They were FANTASTIC!! We then played Chinese Hackey-sack with some of the Chinese students who made us the dumplings. Six hours later, we left and went back on our way. It was a really fun way to spend the Mid-Autumn holiday....food, friends and games.

I will be putting more photos online here in the next few hours, so make sure to check out the website: www.zasinchina.shutterly.com.

Ready for another week....

2008-09-13T01:53:00.000-07:00

Nothing really to exciting from the rest of the week. Meghan and I each had one class on Friday. I did the same thing, with a few minor changes, in this class as I did with Tuesday's class. It went well. I did, however, talk a little bit more about the Olympics in my class. I told the class how Shawn Johnson goes to the high school I graduated from. Then, immediately, one girl raised her hand and said, "Do you know Michael Phelps?". Figures.

After class was over, I was waiting for Meghan inside the doors of the building where she was teaching. While I was waiting, a very friendly man who was apparently completely fluent in English came over and starting speaking to me. He started asking if I was a foreign English teacher, where I was from, if I watched the Olympics, and so on. After about five minutes of our conversation, Meghan came down and she joined us. This man then asked, "So, what do you think I teach?" I laughed and looked and Meghan and made her guess first. She guessed "Biology". The man laughed. I guess "Chemistry", the man laughed again. He chuckled and said, "I am also an English teacher". Then, I asked him once again what his name was. He said his Chinese name so quickly I couldn't catch it, but then he said, "In English, my family name is 'right'. Therefore, I am Mr. Right". Meghan and I laughed. He then asked us if we knew what his first name was. We both looked at him confused, to which he responded, "always. My name is Mr. Always Right, and please don't forget it." Then he walked away. This man was hilarious. It takes an awesome person to be this funny in a second language. We can't wait to get to know this man better, and really want to sit in one of his English classes. We think he will be a good, and extremely entertaining, resource for us.

We then took the 40 minute bus ride back to our place. Oh, at school that day, we got our season pass to the Mountain Summer Resort. This is awesome, because we paid 52 RMB for a pass that gets us in for a year to the resort which normally costs 100 RMB (for foreigners) to get into once. Here's a little bit of information about the summer resort, so you know what I am talking about a little later: http://www.chinaplanner.com/gardens/imperialgarden/imp_smr.htm

Meghan and I decided that we should change into more comfortable close and go and start walking through the mountain resort, because it was a beautiful, sunny late afternoon. We spent about two hours in there, and seriosly didn't even get through 1% of the grounds. It is huge. It will take about 3 full days to walk through the entire place. We are planning on doing that. This way, when anyone comes to visit, we can show the highlights and do the abbreviated tour, unless you're down for spending multiple days in the resort. I will post pictures of what we saw later.

After we left, we started to walk along the river to the hotel where Chris, Megan and Travis are staying. We, like little kids, got side tracked by something on the other side of the street with loud music and flashing lights. We walked over to it and realized there was dancing, pool, snack and an outdoor roller skating rink. We decided it would be fun to roller skate, so we started then called the others over to join us. We skated for about an hour, then proceeded to a restaurant.

We made the mistake of going to a restaurant that had English sign outside of it. It also had a menu that was in English. Therefore, the food was WAY WAY WAY more expensive than it needed to be. Oh well, we learned. We won't be making that mistake again.

After dinner, we proceeded to bar street. These are where the bars are. Chris said that Dee, this New Yorker who owns a private language school was possibly going to be around a specific bar, called Ok Bar. We thought we'd give it a try and see if we can find him. We went to the bar, sat in a private room, and we each had a beer. Dee never came, and the drinks were expensive, so we paid and left. Not too eventful of a day.

Today nothing really has happened. The others took a second job at Dee's private school. I didn't want to because, 1, our waiban said no to a second job and also it meant I had to teach on weekends. That doesn't make it easy to travel when I want too. So, I will be offering private tutoring to students for some extra income. This is what Chris and Meghan are doing for extra income, too. Maggie said it would be alright to do this.

Tonight we are meeting up with Matt and a couple of his friends. We are going for some street bbq and then going to hang out after that. There really is not much of a night scene here, that we've found, so maybe Matt can show us.

Hope all is well...

Oh, I have started to post photos. They are all going to be at this site:

zasinchina.shutterfly.com

Sucking the Marrow out of Life...

2008-09-10T20:18:00.001-07:00

So, yesterday was a slow start to an eventful evening. During the day, Meghan had construction workers putting in new pipes in her apartment. This is what I had done last week. Meghan didn’t want to sit in her apartment alone with these workers, so I went over and entertained her. After about 5 hours of pounding, hammering and sawing, the construction workers left. One problem though, they left her apartment a huge mess (much like they did mine). They did not push back any of the furniture, and also there was a 3 inch wide trench going across her entire kitchen with a pipe in it. The workers did not fill this back in. So, we called Maggie and told her to have someone repair this. A worker came and put cement in the trench, and immediately after he was done, I suggested that Meghan wrote her name in the cement before it dried. She did, and know her name will always be on the kitchen floor.

After this, we decided that pizza sounded really good. We called Maggie and asked where a pizza joint was. She gave us somewhat confusing directions, but we thought we’d try to find it. On the way, we bumped into Chris, Megan and Travis who were just getting back from their campus. They decided to join us for dinner. After walking around for what seemed to be an hour looking for this pizza place, we gave up and ate at a Chinese restaurant. We were taking to the dinning room upstairs. It was hard to order because none of us felt like being decisive and ordering stuff for the group. Finally, we ordered two chicken dishes and some beer.

While we were eating, we noticed everyone at the tables around us eating what seemed to be a delicacy at this restaurant. It was a plate completely filled with pork (still on the bones). There seemed to be like five pounds of pork on the place. This pork was served with a plastic glove and a straw. First, those eating this place would suck the marrow out of the bones with the straw. Ofcourse, this is done making as loud of sucking noises as possible. Next, you put on the glove and eat the pork. It was, um, an interesting experience happening around us while we were trying to eat.

After dinner, Meghan decided that she needed soft-served ice cream from McDonalds given the way that she had. None of us objected and followed her for ice cream. Now, I feel it is important to remind everyone of the fact of how many foreigners we’ve seen here in Chengde since we’ve arrived. I’ve seen about 6. So, while we were in McDonalds, we saw two guys from Germany, two women from France and two older guys from the US. That means that there were 11 FOREIGNERS in McDonalds. At one point, there were more foreigners in this McDonalds than Chinese. It was crazy!!

After our wonderful McDonalds experience, we headed back to the hotel where Chris, Travis and Megan are staying and just hung out. Nothing else really too exciting is going on.

Today we are going to meet Megan for lunch (because Travis and Chris are on campus). I think I want to go shopping this afternoon. We passed some cool stores while we were wondering around for the pizza place last night. Then, tonight, I assume we will all go out for dinner. I teach tomorrow at 1:30 pm. Another spoken English class with all English nursing students is what I have to look forward too! I am using the same lesson plan for all my classes (since they are all spoken English), so that makes my life easier. I just have to change around a couple of activities that weren’t as popular in my first class. So, tomorrow shouldn’t be too stressful of a day.

We are going to try to get together with Matt, a foreign teacher from Drake who’s been here for three years, this weekend. We need to ask him some questions about booking travel, so we thought we’d buy him a couple drinks while we quiz him with our questions. He seems like a nice guy, and helpful, so hopefully we’ll be able to get a time set to go out this weekend.

We have a school break that goes from October 1-7 and we are looking into traveling. Right now, we really want to go to Mongolia, or Lhasa, Tibet. However, plane tickets are too expensive on the sights that we’ve been looking at. We are hoping that Matt has some good suggestions for us. If we can’t find any cheaper to those cities, we are going to find someplace cool within China to go to. I really want to go to Chengdu, to see the pandas, but they are still cleaning up there after the horrible earthquake. So, that is going to have to wait until the spring. However, that’s cool, because that means we might see some baby pandas!

Hope all is well….

First day...success!

2008-09-08T22:54:00.001-07:00

Hello!

So I had my first day of teaching today. I had one section of oral English with the English Nursing students. My class was supposed to be 38 students, but somehow I magically had over 50 sitting in my class (along with another professor). It turns out that the biochemistry professor told some of his students that it would be ok to stay for my class and to join it. The way I figure it is, if there's enough chairs...they can stay. There were plenty of chairs, so I let them join my class.

We started off with an introduction and course description. Pretty simple. Next, I asked the students to go around and state their Chinese name, English name (if they had one) and three things about themselves. After hearing all of my students speak, I was very impressed with their speaking level. I just have to work on diction and having them speak more loud.

Next, I went over the way the class was going to work. We would be doing group activities, homework assignments, vocabulary and exams. Nothing too hard. Should be a fun class. They all seemed to be ok with this....

Next, we attempted to play a game called, "What would you do if...". For this game, I would call on a student and ask them, "What would you do if..." then give them a crazy scenario and see what kind of story they came up with. The students who I called on were not very willing to be creative, so I thought that it would work better if I did this in groups. So we jumped to another activity while I set up doing this in groups.

I asked each of the students to spend about five minutes writing their names and some specific suggestions for what they would like to learn/gain from being in this course.

While they were doing this, I wrote vocabulary words on the board. This is the way that I would be splitting them up into groups. The vocabulary words for the day were some different emotions. So, I wrote the following words (and definitions) on the blackboard:
-Excited
-Exhausted
-Overwhelmed
-emotional
-traumatized
-Thrilled
-Energized
-Eager

Then, I told the students that these are the vocabulary words for the day. While they wrote down the words and definitions, I used them all in a sentence and talked about which part of speech they are.

Then, instead of numbering off the students, I went through the class and said, "You're eager", "Your energized", etc. Then, poined to sections of the room and said, "If you're eager, please go over there" and broke them up into groups this way. The first thing they had to do as a group was to come up with a sentence using this word. Each group then had to have one person read their sentence.

Next, I gave each group a what if scenario card. This is the activity I tried to do earlier without them being in groups. Some of the scenarios were, "What would you do if..."
-You found $1,000,000
-You had a tear in your pants and you were meeting someone famous
-Your umbrella broke and you were in the middle of a rainstorm
-You came home and your father's hair was blue
and a few others.

The groups had to come up with a story given that situation. They also had to use atleast three of the vocabulary words in their story. I gave them all 20 mintutes to do this. Then, another person from the group had to stand up and share that story.

After they were done sharing their what if stories, the groups had to come up with their three favorite aspects of the Olympic games. Then, another person from the group had to share that.

When this was done, the class came back together and we continued on. I then gave the class a homwork assignment. They were to think about an experience that they've had, and answer a few questions about it. There were five questions and I wanted them to write 2-3 sentences per question for next class. Then, these assignments will fit into one of our class activities for next class session.

After they were done copying down the questions, we played one last game. This class seemed to love games. We played a game called Scrambeled Eggs. This was a game that I used so we could get to know one another. I started by going to a student in the class and saying, "Hi, I am Zach. How are you?" The student then responded with, "I am fine, thank you". Then, I took his seat. That student then had to go to another student in class and start a conversation with him/her, then take that persons seat. This continued until everyone was in a new seat. My students seemed to love that game. We are going to have to play it more often, and I am going to have to come up with other things we can do with it.

Before I knew it, the class period was over. Really, the class went really well and I am looking forward to the rest of my classes. It makes it easier that the seven classes that I'm teaching are all Oral English. Therefore, I only have to create one lesson plan per week and I can keep all of my classes at about the same place in the material.

After class, Meghan and I joined Maggie and Laura for lunch in one of the cafeteries. We got a couple chicken dishes and shared them. The cafeteria wasn nothing special. It looked like it belonged in a hospital...but the food was ok.

Nothing really going on tonight. We are going to meet up with the other foreign teachers for dinner.

Hope all is well...

A very productive day

2008-09-08T02:28:00.000-07:00

Today was one of the first days that I’ve been here where I have felt like I didn’t waste away the day. It is finally nice knowing that I am back to my usual self of staying very busy during the entire day,

I have my first class tomorrow, so I spent some time trying to get ready for that. I finished my lesson plans for the entire week, and came up with some activities to play incase I have extra time in each class. Then, went to the bookstore. This seems to be the only place in town to get decent school supplies. I picked up folders, index cards, etc. Things that are good to have on hand for when I make activities. Followed by this I went to the market and picked up some candy. I figure that if all else fails, I will bribe my students to participate in class with candy. Hopefully I won’t have to resort to that, but I am making sure that I have multiple back-up plans.

After this, I stopped at the post office. I found some awesome Beijing Olympic post cards, stamps and other awesome keepsakes. I haven’t really picked up too many keepsakes yet, so I figured that now would be a good time to start.

After this, Meghan and I attempted to find a cheap printer at the electronic square. We had heard from previous foreign teachers that it is very difficult and frustrating to make copies on campus. Therefore, Meghan and I decided that it might just be easier to split the cost of a printer so we can do it ourselves. We, unfortunately, were not able to find one for very cheap. So, tomorrow we are getting to campus extremely early in hopes of being persistent enough to get some copies made. Keep your fingers crossed for us, please.

It’s now 5:30 pm on Monday and I am finally having my first bit of downtime for the day since 8:30 this morning. In about an hour, Meghan and I are going to make some dinner and watch a movie. I think we are going to make some beef and noodles and watch Children of Men. It’s one of the few movies that we have over here because either one of us only brought a few. It’s one of my favorites…

That’s about it. I have my first class at 10;10 tomorrow morning, and so does Meghan. We are going to catch the 8 am bus to campus, and arrive around 8:30. That will give us a little over an hour to be able to make copies before class. Hopefully that is enough time to do it, and also that one of our waibans is available to help. This could, unfortunately, make for an interesting (and frustrating) story. I’ll keep you updated….

Chinese BBQ

2008-09-06T19:07:00.001-07:00

Last night was probably one of the most fun nights that I’ve had here in Chengde. The previous day, as I mentioned, Maggie’s friend (Sarina) called us to go for Chinese BBQ. At first, I was a little worried about going. The reason was that Matt, the foreign teacher who met up with us at the KTV, asked if he had been to Chinese BBQ yet. He laughed when we said no, then said that we have to go ASAP. That made me worried that there was something he wasn’t telling us.

So, last night around 6 we met Maggie at the Affiliated hospital (about 5 minute walk), because that is half way between Meghan and my apartments Sarinas. Chris, Megan and Travis came along, too. Maggie then hailed two cabs and we were on our way to the BBQ restaurant. The cab dropped us off of a very nice looking restaurant. The place met our standard…it had people in it.

When we walked in, we noticed that there were little grills in the middle of each table. It kind of reminded me of a Bennie Hanna (or any other restaurant where there is a chef cooking on a grill in the middle of a long table), however, there were no cooks throwing food and knives in the air! We, once again, were escorted to a private room. The waitress handed us a menu, and it was great because there were pictures on the menu. We ordered a few different kinds of beef (each beef dish had a different flavor and spice) and a couple chicken dishes. We also got some fried bread (will explain later), onions, mushroom and sweet potatoes. After a few minutes, the waitress brought it plates of the raw foods that we ordered. We then starting throwing it on the grill and letting the food cook. The only food that came to us prepared was the fried bred and mix rice dish. The fried bread was awesome! It tasted just like French toast, and they had their own version of syrup too. Meghan was very excited, and wants to come to this restaurant on Christmas morning for the French toast!

The food was absolutely wonderful. For anyone coming to China to visit, this is a restaurant that is on the list of places to go! Sarina’s mother also joined us halfway through dinner. Her mother is a very sweet lady who speaks no English, but loved trying to teach us some simple Chinese. We worked on our counting and colors. It was a very good time…she’s a good teacher.

After dinner, we decided that we could walk back. It is only a 20ish minute walk. On the way back, Sarina purchased a lotus flower for each of us. Then, she showed us how to eat the lotus seeds (the only edible part of the flower). It was very good. A lotus flower was something I thought I would never eat…but I totally will eat more. They seeds didn’t have much to them, but they were kind of a fun snack.

We then stopped at the People’s Park. This is a big open park with some flower beds and a giant TV that people were watching. On the giant tv was the opening ceremonies for the paraolympic games which were starting. Sarina then bought us a Chinese version of a hacky sack. It is a little ball on the end filled with rice, or seeds, then feathers on the top to help it float down easier. We formed a circle and tried to play. Sarina basically showed all of us up! We need some practice. It was great, though, because as we played for a half hour, some Chinese people (who were all awesome) came and joined in with us. It was great being able to interact with others this way.

Oh, and also while we were at the park, we saw five other foreigners (white people). It was awful, because we all found ourselves staring at them too, even though we hate the fact that we are stared at by the Chinese over here. As they were walking by, Chris said, “Look at the foreigners”, and two of them turned around and waved. It was very funny. This brings the total amount of foreigners I have seen here in Chengde to 9 (not including us teachers).

After that, we came home and that was about it. This was for sure one of the most fun nights that I’ve had here in Chengde. Sarina is really fun and we all liked hanging out with her. She is going to show us next month where to get bikes (once we get paid) and some other useful stuff around the city. She will be a very fun host and tour guide for us.

Well, I think that’s it. Nothing much on the agenda for today. All I have to do is figure out my washing machine and do some laundry. Gosh, where’s mom when you need her….

Chicken heads and skype.

2008-09-06T01:44:00.001-07:00

We'll start with yesterday....

I was woken up at 9 am by contruction workers who were instaling new heating pipes in my apartment. Terrific.....

Maggie came along and stayed in the begining to help translate information that the construction workers needed to give to me. Good thing she was there in the begining, too, becuase the construction workers were smoking in my apartment. I asked Maggie to inform them that smoking in my apartment was far from ok. She did, and they stopped smoking. After a while, Megan came over. She was comming over to use my internet to download movies to her computer for the movie class that she is teaching at Chengde Normal College.

Maggie eventually took off and went back to the medical college. She did call periodically to make sure that everything was ok with the construction workers. Once Maggie left, the construction workers kept trying to smoke in my apartment. I kept telling them in Chinese that, "Smoking is not ok". I think they thought I was scolding them about smoking in general, and just laughed. They continued smoking and throwing the butts on the floor. It was very aggervating. They also made a HUGE mess in my apartment that ended up taking me four hours to mop up. Oh well, I guess, I have heat for when it gets colder.

After the construction workers left, Megan and I went to Meghan's apartment to meet up with Chris and Travis. We decided that we should find a restaurant for dinner that was less akward than the hot pot restaurant from the previous night. We walked down restaurant street and found one. Restaurant street is a street near our apartment that has about 10 restaurants on it that all look decent. I can't pronounce the actual name of the street, so Restaurant Street works well. The place we chose to eat at started off very well....

We sat in a small private room that was along the side of the restaurant. We ordered the spicey chicken and peanut dish that we all liked. Also, we ordered some noodles and beer. We decided to try a soup like dish, too, that had chicken, cabbage and other vegetables in it. When we were about half way done with this soup dish, the head of the chicken (eyes and all) floated up to the top. It was, um, well, disturbing. I think that my sister Dori and her boyfriend Ben really would apprecaite this dish when they come to visit. (Sorry Dori, I had to throw that comment in there.)

After dinner, we decided to go back to the hotel where Chris, Meghan and Travis are staying and pick up a couple beers along the way. Meghan and I stopped at my apartment to get her computer while Meghan, Travis and Chris stopped at a convient store to pick up five cold beers. We met up at the hotel. Of course, however, half way to the hotel it started to pour. Megan and I continued to walk toward the hotel but figured that if we saw an empty cab along the way, we'd flag it down. We found one. We got in, and told the cab driver the name of the hotel. Not until half way there did I realize that the cab driver never started the meter. When this happens, that means that the cad driver is planning to over-charge us. Meghan and I have taken a cab to this hotel before, and the cab ride for the whole distance was 6 RMB (or $1 US). This time, the cab ride was approximatley half the distance, and the cab driver was trying to charge us 10 RMB. I at least got him to come down to 5. However, from now on, we will make sure that the cab driver starts the meter right away each time we get into a cab.

We all met in the lobby of the hotel, and tried to get onto the elevator which also had about 10 Chinese people on it. When we all got on, the elevator starting beeping and saying overloaded. Therefore, the five of us, plus a couple of the chinese people got off. However, the elevator kept saying it was overloaded. It was hilarious. Two hotel employees came over, had everyone get off the elevator, then get back on one by one until the elevator said overloaded again, then made that last person get off. We just stood outside the elevator (waiting for the next one) and was entertained by the entire scene. It was quite the production just to get the elevator to move. Oh well, something always entertaining here in China, I guess.

We stayed for about an hour at their hotel having a beer and chatting. We tossed around some teaching ideas and started to make some tenative travel plans. We have some school breaks in October then our holiday break in January. We are planning some trips to Mongolia, Handan, Beijing, the Shizz, and Thailand. I am extremely excited for Thailand and Mongolia.

Chris, Meghan and Travis had to go to their school today to go and help welcome the freshman. It sounded like they had to stand with the rest of the faculty and shake all the incomming freshmans hands as they arrived. Chris said that he feels like he is just being shown off to the incomming freshman...that they are only there to show these students that the school has foreign teachers. It will be interesting to see how that went for them!

Oh, and also, Maggie texted us saying that her friend (who we met the night we invited them to the KTV) wanted to take all five of us for Chinese BBQ. We are all meeting at 6 outside the Chengde Medical College affiliated hospital (about five minute walk from Meghan and my apartment) at 6. I am very curious to see what Chinese BBQ is like. We were told by Matt, the foreign teacher we met at the KTV, that we have to try it soon! I am not sure if it was a good or a bad thing the way he was sayin it, so we'll see how it goes.

Also, I got Skype hooked up in my apartment on the computer that is running. I am trying to set up times to talk to everyone, so please let me know when you are going to be on skype and we can try to set up times weekly, biweekly, whatever for us to chat and catch up.

Hope all is well over where you are....

Hot Pot = Hot Spot

2008-09-04T09:22:00.000-07:00

Today started off as any other uneventful day in Chengd when Meghan and I were not teaching. We went to the electronics square, but it was closing. So, we ventureds to the market where we bought some groceries. We thought it was funny how even though we had graduated from college, but we were still buying college food. When we left the store, we had the following items in our sacks:
-Bread
-Jelly/jam
-ramen noodles
-fruits (watermelon, bananas and kiwis)
-lays potatoe chips
-bottled water
-sprite

Really nothing different from what we bougtht while we were in college. Oh well, I guess first step is the "big person" job. next step is the "big person" shopping list!

Tonight, however, dinner was eventful. We went over to the hotel where Chris, Megan and Travis were staying to meet up with them for dinner around 7. Travis decided to stay behind to work on lesson plans. So, Meghan, Megan, Chris and I went on an adventure for a restaurant. We thought that a hot pot (will explain later) sounded good. So, we walked to a restaurant that was about 7 minutes away from the hotel...half the distance between our apartments and their hotels. We were seated in the table in the main dining area. Then, what seemed to be the entire restaurant staff came to our table to help us. This restaurant was what we call a hot pot. There is a pot in the middle of the table with a open flame/burner underneath it. Then, the wait staff pours hot water and spices into then. Then the dinner party chooses raw food ingredients to go into the pot, and the hot water cooks it. Then, you pull out the ingredients, dip it into the sauce provided to each person, then enjoy the food. After a few minutes of confusision while ordering, the main waiter helping our table asked us if we wanted to move to a private dinning room. We said yes, because, as usual, everyone in the restaurant was staring at us. We follwed him to a room in the basement of the restaurant with a round table and place settings for seven.

Inside the room, at the table, was a lazy susan, and an individual pot for each of us. We ordered beef, white Chinese cabbage, garlic, lettuce and noddles for our hot pot. Then, a beer for each person, as usual. The food came in, and the wait staff poured hot water into each of our pots and started the flame under each. Then, the akwardness continued. There were two waiters, one who tried very hard to use his limited English skills, and one waitress in the room with us. As we continued eating, they kept putting more food into our boiling water pots. Then, they continued ot try to wipe our mouths with napkins. Chris and I kept eying each other, while trying not to laugh. It was by far one of the most akward dinners we have had. However, the food was very good. The waiter who kept trying to speak English, had a toast with us. We found out that he had been learning English for approximately 2 years. Given this time-frame, his English was very good. He kept apologizing for how bad it was, however we kept telling him that his English is far better than all of our Chinese skills put together.

After dinner, we headed back to our own places. Chris has 8 am class to teachin the morning and Meghan and I have repair men comming to our apartments sometime in the 9 am hour to fix the heat. We were complaining about how early they were comming, but at least we will have heat when the weather starts to get cold.

Looking forward to the weekend....

Donkey!

2008-09-03T06:08:00.000-07:00

So, this afternoon/evening ended up being more eventful than I had planned for it to be. As you all already know, we had our meeting at the university today. So, picking back up where I left off.....

The afternoon was spent creating course outlines and discussion/activity ideas for class. Then, Megan, Chris and Travis came over to Meghan's apartment. I met up with them. Maggie then stopped by with Meghan and my schedule. We are teaching seven periods of oral English to different medical classes. Each class meets with us once per week for 1 hour and 40minute class sessions. Here is my class schedule:

Mondays- 3:20-5 pm

Tuesdays: 1010 am - 1150 am
320 pm - 5 pm

Wednesdays: 320-5 pm

Thursdays: 1010-1150 am

Friday 130 pm - 310 pm
320-5 pm

Then, after Maggie left, we decided to go and get dinner. We walked around aimlessly using the same standard for restaurant choosing as previous days. It must have guests in it and look relatively non-sketcy compared to the surrounding restaurants. We chose one that ended up being a fantastic choice (mostly). As we walked in, all of the female waitresses said "hello" to us. We were surprised that they knew that much English. Then, a waitresstook us to a private room with a round table, air conditioner unit and a lazy suzan on the table. And guess what!?!? She spoke English very flunetly. Also, the menu had pictures. It was more than we could've asked for! We asked the waitress for recomendations. She recomended two dishes that were like a stew. One had donkey and potoes, the other had pigs feet and potatoes. We also ordered cold noodles. The dishes came and the food smelled terrific. I did not eat the pig feet. The donke was amazing. It was very tender. The potatoes were fantastic. Being a meat and potatoes boy, this was an amazing meal. It ended costing each of us 17 rmb, which is less than $2.5 US. Not bad....

After this, Chris, Travis and Megan were saying that they have found our new Perkins for while in Chengde. It is a 3-story McDonalds that was open 24 hours. We decided to go for desert. It was fantastic. They also had star-wars toys, so I had to get one for fun. (Dad--if you want it when I get home, it's yours!!).

While at McDonalds, we were discussing teaching ideas and found some good ones. Chris mentioned an idea that I think we are all going to run with. He thought that it would be fun to break our classes into groups of 4 or 5 and have them make commercials. We would give each group a random item (such as a McDonalds toy) and have them prepare a 1-minute "infomercial" type speech, to persuade us to buy that product.

After this awesome brainstorming session at McDonalds, we decided to head back to our apartments and call it a night.

Oh yea, since ive of my classes are freshman classes, I don't have to teach a full schedule next week. Freshman arrive to campus tomorrow, then have military training. Therefore, their classes don't start until Monday the 23rd. Therefore, next week I only teach one class on Tuesday and one class on Friday. Pretty nice, huh?

I have a "real person" job!

2008-09-02T21:02:00.000-07:00

Today Meghan and I met with Maggie, from the foreign affairs office of our university, and took the 45-minute bus ride to our campus. It was a very scenic ride, as we passed the outside of the Qing Emperor's summer palace. It seems very beatiful with may palaces, monastaries and temples.

The campus is surprisingly modern from the outside, we noticed as we arrived. The new campus opened in September 2006. They are still constructing, too. The buildings still being constructed are a playground (yea, a playground for a college), swimming pool, and teacher's apartments.

When we first arrived to campus, Maggie showed us where the Foreign Affairs office is. It is located in the administration building, which was very nice. We went upstairs, met Laura, and signed our official contracts. No new surprises in that. From there, we went to the English department and met one of the Chinese English teachers. We was a very animated person who gave Meghan and I some very good, but broad, teaching ideas. From there, we saw what the lecture halls look like. There were some big ones and small ones. We will be teaching a few small classes (35-50 students) and a few large classes (100-125 students). The larger classes will be Oral English for clinical students. The smaller classes will be oral Engish for nursing students. Should be interesting....

The freshman arrive on campus tomorrow, but then have one week of military training. Therefore, next week Meghan and I will only be teaching the sophmores and juniors. We then saw the library which was very interesting. It was divided into what seemed to be separate libraries for what you needed. There was the periodicals room, natural science room, English room, etc. When one wants a book, he or she will have to check it in/out from each individal section. In the periodical room, I saw that they had an English version of a national Chinese Newspaper. I was very excited. I will probably come up with some activities involving current events for my students, as I am teaching oral English. I think it might be good to have them try to present/pose questions based off of current events. Possibly debate some non-controversial topics in the newspapers, too.

That's about it for now. We are back at our apartments. Meghan got a sandwhich from a street vender that we've stopped at a couple of times. I am going to each some of the fruit (bananas and watermelons) that I got from a vender earlier today. We are waiting for a repair man to come to Meghan apartment to fix her showerhead. Then, Maggie is come to come over and we are going to take the washing machine from Jeremy's old apartment and move it to Meghans, because hers is very small. Other than this, I think we are just going to try to come up with more teaching ideas. If you have any ideas, please don't hesitate to send them my way!

Another day of vacation...

2008-09-02T03:40:00.000-07:00

I think we are starting to get more used to the time change. I thought I had been for the past day or two, but kept waking up very early. I heard a statistic that it takes your body one full day to adjust to each hour of a time change. I am beleiving that statistic.

Warning: This day was not too eventful. Chris walked over and met Meghan and I around 1:00. We thumbed through Meghan's National Geographic Magazine that was devoted completely to China and came up with some more areas that we would like to travel to in China. After this was done, we realized we were hungry. So, we did what we normally do for lunch. We walked around aimlessly to find a restaurant that we assumed looked good. Our standard for looking good is that there is people in it, because if people eat there the food must be ok. Therefore, with these low of standards, it isn't too hard to find a restaurant.

Eating out is kind of interesting in China. They basically serve everything family style; everone just eats off of the large serving plate with their chopsticks. When we eat out, we normally order one meat dish, one vegetable dish and a soup. It was just the three of us, so we shared everything. We played it safe today and ordered a chicken dish that we've already had. It was the spicey chicken with peanus, carrots, pepers, etc. Then we ordered some weird vegetable dish that had mushrooms in it along with what seemed to be a soup similiar to egg drop soup. Overall it was ok. I am still loving how cheap the meal it. Each of us payed 15 RMD for the meal, which is approximately $2.50 US.

After the meal, Meghan and I needed to find an electronics store, so Chris came with us. It is still a challenging finding things here, becuase none of us speak or read Mandarin. However, we refuse to call our waibans for something that we could find on our own. Plus, it's always more fun to have an adventure. Meghan and I were looking for a cord for our DVD player. The apartments that we are in had a DVD player in mine along with some Chinese versions of American movies such as Field of Dreams, The Day after Tomorrow and about 20 others. However, the cords that hook up the DVD player to the television are no where to be found in either apartment. Therefore, that was our mission today. Luckily, we accomplished this mission with about 30 minutes.

On the way back, we celebrated finding our item by stopping at a fruit vendor. Even though we knew we were going to be over charged, we wanted bananas. So, we paid 6 RMB for 4 bananas. That is approximately $0.25US/banana. We then got some ice cream from a street vender. We got ice cream bars, which were really good for 1.5 RMB which is about $0.30US. Not a bad way to celebrate finding the electronics store.

It's about 6:45 now, and I think we all might watch a movie in Meghan's apartment, since we purchased the cord for the DVD player. I think Meghan wanted to watch Robots, which is cool because I have never seen it.

Tomorrow we have a meeting at our school with the rest of the faculty in the English Department. We have an one-hour bus ride to school each day, so Meghan and I are hoping that we don't have any 8 am classes! We will find out our schedule tomorrow. Maggie is picking us up and taking us to school in the morning. This way we know what bus to take. Apparently, it's really easy...just the blue number 10 bus to the last stop. The hard part is going to be finding the right academic buildings. Oh well, we're just going to have to learn.

That's about it for the day! Expect an update tomorrow about how the university is.

My Address

2008-09-01T17:23:00.001-07:00

Just thought I'd give everyone my address incase you decide to send anything over. My address is:

Zachary Smith
Foreign Affairs Office
Chengde Medical University
Chengde, Hebei, P.R. China
067000

Helpful things to include in any carepackage would be:

1. Disinfectant wipes (Mr. clean, or whatever brand).
2. PEANUT BUTTER
3. travel packs of klenix

Thanks!!!

KTV = Cock Block

2008-09-01T08:20:00.000-07:00

So, Today was an eventful day....with a slow start.

I rolled out of bed around 10:30 this morning, then scrubbed the floor of my kitchen, which is still completely gross. Then, after completing that horrible task, decided to shower and get back into bed and continue my book. Well, reading my book turned into an hour nap. Oh well...what's done is done.

So, about 1:30, I ventured over to Meghan's appartment and found out she was on skype talking to the GK RA's, because her computer (provided by the school) has a microphone and camera. So, I joined into the conversation. Approximately 2 hours later, the conversation ended.

Then, the other Drake teachers (Megan, Chris and Travis) came over and we decdied to go to get dinner around 6. We found a restaurant that had pictures. We ordered a really, really good spicey chicken and peanut dish, steamed veggies and a soup that had squid, shrimp and some other fish like meat in it. Overall, a very good meal.

We then continued ot try to get into a KTV (Kareoke bar). The first one didn't let us in, saying it was full. So, then Meghan grabbed my cell phone and decided to call one of our Waibans, Maggie. Meghan invited Maggie to come out with us. So, Maggie, along with one of her friends Andy came. Andy is also a foriegn teacher and is from Korea. He spoke English very fluently. Then one of Maggies friends joined us (who worked form a Chinese-German company based in Chengde) and also spoke very good English; her mother joined too. We then got into a KTB. It was a lot of fun, however much different that we expected. When we heard it was Karoeke, we expected a bar wth a stage. Well, not exactly what we got. We were given a private room with a tv screen and kareoke machine. It was a lot of fun! Then, Maggie invited another American named Matt to join us. Matt is starting his third year of teaching. He was a Drake graduate, and tought through the CCEP two years ago. He liked China so much that he is in the start of his third year. We had a great conversation with us, and he is going to be a good resource. He knows pretty much all the other foreigners here, too. In this city of about 2.5 million, he said there are about 25 foreigners (who are white) here living at any other time. So, hopefully we get to now them well.

The akward part of the evening was that all of us (Drake people) got the impression that Maggie was on a date with Andy. Meghan was not pushy at all on the phone. All Meghan did was ask if she (Maggie) was close by, becuase we were going out and wanted to invite her to come along for a drink. Maggie then said she'd be by our apartment in 20 minutes, she was at the park. Oh well, I guess we will just have to plan in advance becasue we learned that Maggie will even bring a date along if we call her for something!! She is too nice!!!

Travis, one of the other foreign teachers, had his first day of teaching today. The other two teachers (Chris and Megan) at the teacher's college start on Thursday. Travis' first day was interesting he said. It was hard for him to keep the attention of the students for two hours and they were not very up to voluntering in class. We are going to have to brainstorm and come up with ideas to help prevent this from happening in our first classes and throughout the rest of the semester.

Tomorrow Meghan and I have another full day off. I think on the agenda is trying to get my macbook hooked up to the internet here in my apartment so I can finally get on skype. As for the rest of the day, no one knows! Things have seemed to all randomly fallen in place so far....so why change what's working well?

Hope all is great back in the States!!

Still on vacation...

2008-08-31T05:23:00.001-07:00

So, it was an eventful day. Meghan and I decided to go shopping to try to get spongues, airfreshners and a comforter.

We got sidetracked and purchased none of the above items. Instead we walked past the market (which was the furthest from our apartment we had ventured away since arriving in Chengde). We then found the outside of the summer resort and palaces of the Ching Emperor. From what our travel books have said, this is massive. It apparently has multiple palaces, monistaries, etc. and is just completely beautiful. Outside of the palace/park were a whole bunch of venders selling crafts, food, etc. Meghan and I each bought an item.

We then hurried back to our apartment where we called Chris to come meet us so we could show him what we found. Figures, though, that after we got there, Chris had already been by there. Oh well. We are very curious to get in there, however, we are going to wait untilwe have a full day and it's as nice as it was today. We have 11 months for this to happen.

So, we have quickly learned that there are about 10 KTV bars in Chengde. KTV is Kareoke. They would not let us in our first night in Chengde. We are very confused as to why the five of us were not allowed into the one accross from Meghan and my apartments. We asked our waibon today and she thought it was because they had already announced last call. So, tomorrow we are going to try to get in!

The other three teachers (Chris, Megan and Travis) went on their campus visit today and met their other faculty. Travis starts to teach tomorrow, so I am anxious to hear how it went for him. Meghan and I don't start teaching until next Monday, however we do have to meet our Waibon Wednesday morning. She is taking us to campus to meet the faculty and president of the English Department. I am getting anxious to find out our schedule, etc. I enjoy just hanging out, but I still feel like I am on vacation. Maybe once I start teaching, the "vacation" feeling will go away.

We're in Chengde

2008-08-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

Meghan and I are in Chengde! We arrived here on Friday. It was a great drive, about 6 hours. It was very scenic. I will make sure to add photos as I can.

So, alot has happened in these two days. First, Meghan and I moved into our apartments. With a little bit of cleaning (and throwing a whole bunch of stuff away), our apartments are comming along well. They are pretty spacious. When you walk in there is a tiny kitchen to the left and a small space with a China cabinent. Then, to the right is my bedroom with a desk and computer and king size bed. Across from my room in the living room with a tv, couch and four chairs. The bathroom, is, um...interesting (to put it nicely. It is the size of a closet. There is a toilet (thank God for that!), and a shower heard that comes off the wall. There is alos a sink and mirror. So, basically when I shower, it gets the entire bathrom soaked. It is the most akward shower I have ever seen. But, I have runing water, a working toilet, and have had a hot shower every day so far. So, I guess I don't have too much to complain about.

Our apartment is right off of a main street where there are a lot of shops, and KVT bars. KVT is Kareoke (I can't spell!), here in China and is very popular. We are going to go there one night with the other Drake kids who are in Chengde.

Meghan and I walked over to the hotel where the other Meghan, Chris and Justin are staying for a month, because their apartments are not ready yet. They found a great dumpling restaurant. The five of us had dinner and each had a beer. It was great. The total cost of the dinner was 52 RMB (Chinese Currency) all together. That is about $9 US. Therefore, each of us had dinner and a beer for under $2 US. I love how cheap food here in China is. We also found a KFC and went into it just for fun. On the walls it said, "finger licking good" and "Natural, organic, KFC". We took photos of it, I'll post them later.

There is a lot more to say, which I will do later, but Meghan and I are going shopping now, then to get some lunch. Hopefully we stop at a good street vender.

We made it!

2008-08-27T07:17:00.000-07:00

Meghan and I made it to China.

Our flights went well, minus one technicality on our flight to Beijing. First, Meghan and I flew from Minneapolis to Denver. Then, a 45 minute lay-over and we were off to Vancuver, British Columbia, Canada. That was nice, but the airport was extremely odd. As we were walking through customs, there was like a fake forest set up with recorded animal noises. It was one of the strangest things I had seen in an airport.

While we were in Vancuver, we met up with Chris, who is also living in Chengde but teaching at the Teacher's College. He was on the same flight with us to Beijing. So, the flight to Beijing wasn't too bad. It was only 10.5 hours. On the back of each seat there was a tv screen for each passenger so he/she could choose from the list of movies and tv shows to watch. They weren't working. The head flight attendant restarted the screens numerous times. Then, everyone's tv screen start working, but mine. Oh well. Good thing I brought a travel CD case of movies. It was nice, because last time I flew internationally, there wasn't a power adapter on the back of each seat and also a usb charger. Therefore, I was able to keep my computer and ipod charged the whole plane trip.

Then, Meghan and I met with our foreign officer in Beijing. She is so nice, and has so far completely gone out of her way to make Meghan and I feel comfortable. We grabbed our bags and loaded up the car. We drove to the Shiz, about 3.5 hours away from Beijing, becuase in the morning we are having our physical examinations and so purchasing cell phones. Then, we will head to Chengde (the city we will be living in).

We checked into our hotel and walked around the block to find a place where we can get some additional passport photos for when we go to get our physical. It was closed, so we will have to go there in the morning before our appointment.

Sorry, not a very exciting entry, but thought ya'll should at least know that we have made it to China, and lasted through our first day.

Almost ready to leave

2008-08-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

This is just to make sure that everything is working.

It's Sunday and I am all packed and ready to go! It's weird thinking that in just a few days I will be living in the People's Republic of China....

This is the site where I will be blogging all about the "adventures" that I will be having in China. Please feel free to contact me during my time over there by responding to this blog, e-mailing me (zas001@gmail.com) or talking to me on Skype (zasinchina).