random ramblings

This is the jiaozi place that we go to multiple times a week.  A few days ago I was sitting there, patiently waiting for my food and the restaurant owner came out and pointed at me and said something in Chinese.  I held up my hands and shrugged I don't know.  He went back inside and came out with a magazine in his hands.  He opened it up and pointed to a picture.  That picture was of me and the other teachers that are here with us.  It was a picture of the first day, at the opening assembly at our school (right before I almost passed out).  I had the microphone in my hand, giving my introduction speech.  There was a pretty good sized paragraph next to the picture.  I wish I knew what that paragraph said.  And I also wonder what other magazines or news papers floating around China have my lovely, or not so lovely, picture in it...

Most of you aren't familiar with hot pot, because I wasn't before I came here.  Well, it is fantastic and one of my favorite things.  There is a new hot pot restaurant on our street so, of course, we had to check it out.  It ended up being a lot cheaper than we thought it was going to be so we decided we needed to go back.  The menu is all in Chinese so, like always, we just point to what people have and they also just pick a few things off of the menu for us.  Everyone usually gets a kick out of it and it usually works out great for us.  Except for all of those times that it doesn't, but we won't go there.  Well, we really like these long white mushrooms in our hot pot but we didn't exactly know how to order them and not everyone gets them so we can't always just point to them.  We decided to go to the supermarket and purchase the mushrooms ourselves.  We would keep them in our purse and then just toss them into our hot pot once it was on our table.  It was a genius plan.  All until we got there and they actually decided to order these mushrooms for us.  Which is great but now we have a bunch of mushrooms just hanging out in our fridge and no hot pot for them.

We met a lady on the bus the other day.  Her name is Lauren.  She majored in English so we actually could communicate with her fairly well.  She invited us to have dinner at her house a couple days later.  Another example of kind strangers.  We hardly knew her and the next thing we know, is that we are at her house eating dinner (a dinner without tofu!) with her and teaching her how to braid hair.  We also had to walk around for about 30 minutes to find the perfect spot to take a picture.  In the meantime, the we ran out of light.  So really, the her perfect pictures turned out terrible.

The school never informs us of any of the activities that are going on at the school.  We are lucky if we find out that our kids are having a performance of some kind.  One of Shelby's classes was cancelled because they were practicing for something.  We were able to find out that they were practicing for a performance of short Chinese stories that they were going to put on that night.  We love to see our cute little students in action so we decided that we would go watch them.  I wish I could have understood what was going on but due to the language barrier, I had no clue.  It was almost like watching a silent film but with pretty terrible acting going on and words that I couldn't understand.  They were cute nonetheless.

This week I was able to teach a class of 8th graders because one of the other teachers that we are here with wanted to see what it was like to teach younger kids.  I quickly jumped on that idea.  But he didn't know what he was getting himself into.  He happened to ask to teach my worst class and I wasn't going to tell him that.  He was shocked at how terrible class went.  Apparently he couldn't control them at all and they were out of control wild.  This is not news to me and I am glad that he got a true glimpse of what Shelby and I do every day.  His 8th grade class, on the other hand, was actually fun to teach.  The students sat in their seats and there wasn't any yelling or fighting going on.  It was fantastic.  The students were sad when I told them that I wasn't going to be their teacher from now on.  A little part of me kinda wishes that I could teach them for the last month.  Even though, I love my little monkeys to death, it was a nice change of pace.