I forgot

So I kind of forgot that I have this blog. But I remembered now. I know there's a lot to catch up on. But it's coming. I promise. For now, just know that I have Sarah here, and that this is great :)

太累 了! (tai lei le!) ((too tired!))

ok. So this weekend was a big one. On saturday I taught a class, surprise surprise! But on sunday I woke up early, watched the carolina game (YAY!) and went to 天安门 tiananmen square and 故宫 the forbidden city. Don't worry, I took lots of pictures. Then today, Monday, was a holiday. Will and I went to the Summer Palace with two of my other students. It was also very nice and I also took a lot of pictures. But, now I am too tired (太累了） and I can't write much about it. More to come, I promise.

!!

you can surf the net wineless here!

Today was quite the lovely Sunday. Woke up, cooked some tasty eggs and toast. Then Will and I took our chess board to a park and played a couple of games. I lost both-- I have still failed to beat Will-- but today was my best game so far. It was a nice warm 40 degrees so in the sun I was pretty comfortable. We did attract a crowd. There's a lot of Chinese chess here (I think it's the same thing as the game 'Go') but not as much guo ji xiang qi (International chess)! Little kids really liked to stop and watch, as did the laoshi (elder). Everywhere you go you wll see crowds of people playing chinese chess with big crowds around them. There's a little park that's on my walk from the subway to my house and it took me a while to figure out what the crowds were, but now I know!

Damjan and Annalies came to meet us after a couple of chess games. We walked around the park a little bit and then found a cafe in Nanluo gu xiang to play a different board game called Settlers of Catan. Nanluo Gu Xiang is a little area, near houhai (where we did the ice bikes), made up of cafes, bars, and little craft shops. It's an area of hutongs, meaning it's small little buildings, rather than big big big buildings. They're really cute, but the buildings don't have their own bathrooms so you always have to run outside to the nearest public toilet. This is what Nanluo Gu Xiang looks like:

We sat in a cafe, called xiao xin's, for a few hours with our game. It was quite relaxing. Rest assured that we were able to surf the net wineless-ly there.

Oh yeah, today...

So today, aside from writing a blog entry, reading, and making maps... I watched a LOT of sesame street clips on youtube. I'm going to use this one for one of my classes next week. But aside from that, there are some really great clips on there. This is one of my favorites:


Also, I'm reading John Irving's "A Widow For One Year". It's my 2nd book so far on this trip. Earlier I was reading "The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss.

Will and I are also playing x-box. Daddy! you should get these two games if you think about it: Afro Samuri and Street Fighter 4. They are fun :) I know it hasn't been the most strenuous day... but it has been fun!

making a map!!

I have been busy busy busy trying to establish a little bit of a routine.

Also, I have been working on a map! (you should zoom in to see Beijing a little bit better. I couldn't figure out how to get it to stay zoomed in on my blog page!)


View Larger Map

you can get to it in the future and see updates by following this link

I am teaching for a primary school in the West of Beijing. It's called CuiWei, if you look at my map it's icon is green :) I teach here 4 days each week (every day but Wednesday). I am part of a foreign teachers program that is pretty well established there. I have two classes every day, each class is 40 minutes long and has 40 kids. So basically I'm in charge of 8o seven-year-old kids. Don't worry, I have a Chinese assistant! Her name is Daisy, I think she's about the same age as me, and she speaks english-- she's a university student. She helps me when the kids need a little bit of translating (which is hopefully not often). She also helps me translate parent letters and homework slips into Chinese. She is also very helpful in keeping the kids in the back from fighting. And poking, and singing, and drawing, and talking, and whatever else you can imagine them doing. Yes, they stick things up their noses all day long too. I like to call on them when they have something in their nose because then they get really embarassed. Sometimes their head teacher, their normal chinese teacher, is in the classroom. The head teacher for one of my classes has already invited Daisy and me to her house to eat noodles at the end of the semester. I'm definitely excited about that!

Aside from this teaching job, I am also tutoring two children in the north west of the city. I tutor them once a week, on Tuesday nights. They are two 12-year old kids, one named jenny and one named jerry. I will take a picture of them next week when I tutor them. I go to Jenny's house and teach them. Jenny's mom doesn't speak English, but she's really nice to me. Jenny translates for her and I try to speak Chinese a little bit. I definitely like teaching my big classes, but I think I like tutoring these two kids a little bit more.

In addition to teaching, I have Chinese class three times per week. Each class is about two hours. I like Chinese class a lot. It's slow going but I am definitely making progress!! I have done some more things in Chinese now (in addition to talking to taxi drivers and ordering food). For example, the other day I changed money at the bank in Chinese. I also added more money to my transportation card (the card you use for the subways and busses). I even ordered a pineapple off of the street! Pretty sweet.

moon festival

Ok. So. There are tons of fireworks going off tonight... I'm not exactly sure why but I know it has something to do with the full moon. We've seen a LOT of good ones. But the real news is that the building next to the CCTV tower is BURNING DOWN. If you don't know what the CCTV tower is, but you watched the olympics, then you are wrong, you actually do know what the CCTV tower is. But in any case, here is a site with some pictures:

http://chineseye.com/path-users-usr_center&option=blog_show&blogid=559&userid=5.html

rumors abound about this fire.

Also, I got a job. I'm most likely signing a contract with FESCO on wednesday. yayyyyyy for having a job!!

I can't belive I'm still writing about Chengdu...

Ok. So I know that I said I would be back a lot sooner than this, but I’ve been doing big things! I will get back to the rest of the Chengdu trip in a bit. But first I want to recap my tiny victories from today.

I had my first demo class. After an interview with a woman at FESCO (more on FESCO in a minute) she asked me to prepare a short (10 min) demo class. I had to ‘teach’ 4 grown people (3 women, 1 man) a lesson on the subject matter of my choosing. I interviewed for a job teaching 8 year olds so I had to pretend they were 8. This was a daunting task at first… how am I supposed to talk to these grown, educated individuals like they are 8? I thought I would feel like a huge idiot, but really it was not that hard. I taught them about animals… I drew a land scene with a tiger, a fish, and a bird. I taught them words like stripes, feathers, fur, scales, fins, wings. We worked on pronunciation and structures for sentences: “A bird has wings.” “A fish has scales.” “A tiger does not have feathers.” I think that they enjoyed it. In any case, I will hear back from them on Monday. I am really hoping that it works out because it would be really steady, reliable work. I would be working in a school, 2 40-minute lessons per day, 4 days per week. The only downside to this is that it would require about an hour commute (on the subway). Not that bad, considering the pay, but not ideal.

On the way to my demo class I had another tiny victory: I chatted with the taxi driver (in Chinese of course!!). Even getting to the interview was a little victory… I didn’t have enough time to get lunch and make the trip via subway after my Chinese lesson. So, I had lunch and planned my demo lesson at a café near my house called the Bookworm. The problem is, I didn’t know how to tell the taxi driver where to take me. There are two solutions to this problem: one solution is to call someone who speaks Chinese and can tell the driver where to go and hand the phone to the driver. The other solution would be to show the driver the address or a map. So, I opened an email from the school with the address (which was in characters) and asked one of the servers at the café to copy the address for me. I handed the driver the address and said “please take me to this place” and “do you know it?” IN CHINESE. The drivers often like to chat so he was asking me how long I had been in Beijing, how long I had studied Chinese, why I was going to the place he was taking me. He asked me about jobs in America, he pointed out the embassies that we were passing, he told me what neighborhood he lived in, asked me what neighborhood I lived in. I told him that I like Chinese food and my new favorite dish is “Yu xiang rou si” (鱼香肉丝). Literally this means “fragrant fish pork strip” which is funny because it’s really a pork dish. It is pork strips in a sort of spicy sweet-ish sauce with strips of bell peppers. I was so happy with myself!! There were definitely times that I didn’t know what he was saying but it’s ok.

Also: I learned how to type on my computer in Chinese character. Google can teach you so much!

Ok, so that’s what I did today. Now more about the Chengdu trip!

After the big night of CNY we took it easy the next day. We hung out with our new friends at their house and played a lot of texas hold ‘em and apples to apples. Naps were had and beers were enjoyed. The day was pretty lazy, the main event was HOT POT. We went to a hot pot restaurant with 8 people. A hot pot is when your whole group sits around a big table with a stove in the middle. The stove keeps two kinds of broth hot: one spicy and one mild. The group orders all kinds of meats and veggies and you cook them in the broth. We ate various kinds of beef and pork (I couldn’t name them if you wanted me to), potatoes, mushrooms. The things were new: tofu skin. This is exactly what it sounds like… it looks like a long strip, maybe kind of like bacon, but it is obviously made out of tofu. My new favorite thing for hot pot is lotus root. It’s kind of starchy and super tasty. As I said, we took it easy on this day, hot pot was definitely the highlight. That and not much is open over CNY.

Good thing we took it easy because the next day we visited the Luoshan Da Fo, meaning the Great Buddha (Da Fo), located in Luoshan. We had to ride in a van for about 3 hrs to get from Chengdu to Luoshan. But it was definitely worth the drive. The Buddha is built into the side of a mountain and is 71 meters tall. Yes. 71 METERS. The Buddha’s TOE is 26 feet tall. Sooooooo big. To view the Buddha you can either take a boat and view it from a river or climb up a mountain. We climbed the mountain. When you get to the top of the mountain you’re at the Buddha’s head-level. You then stand in a line that snakes back and forth waiting to get to stairs that you go down, eventually ending up at the Buddha’s feet, looking up. Now, Luoshan is a much smaller town than Beijing. When we were at the Buddha we were almost as much of an attraction to the Chinese tourists as the Buddha! The whole time we were standing in line people were staring at us, talking to us, taking pictures of us… I guess it was kind of a weird mix of interesting and entertaining. I really really liked seeing the Buddha, it was incredibly big and set into the mountain which was really cool. But I think the stairs to the feet of the Buddha may have been one of the most amazing parts. Sadly, as I said, my camera was broken…I took some pictures of the stairs but Katie didn’t post them on facebook and I haven’t gotten a cd yet from her. I was trying to get some pictures from google but it looks like China is blocking my access to them… for some reason. If you want to catch the stairs you can go to google and do an image search for “Leshan Great Buddha Stairs”. Happy exploring…!

I am working on getting pictures from the Buddha but right now I only have tiny thumbnails... I saved them from facebook (I used Will's account) but for some reason they are tiny tiny. I will try to get Katie to burn me a CD. Pictures soon I promise!!

Ok, I need to go socialize and make some friends now so more to come later. Just so everyone knows—I picked up my camera, it’s fixed, so more pictures soon!!