The Teachers and Their Students

Teacher Jenna's Homeroom

Teacher Heather's Homeroom

Teacher Krista's Homeroom

Teacher Maddie's Homeroom

Teacher Morgan's Homeroom

Teacher Soren's Homeroom

The Plum Blossom Festival

This past Saturday, our branch had an unofficial activity to the purple mountain for the start of the plum blossom festival. At first I was like, "What's the deal with the plum blossoms?" But as it turns out, the plum blossom is the flower of China and it only blooms once a year.  Big deal!  And super awesome.

So we met at the metro station at 10 am.  We were pretty nervous when we first got there because we had no way to contact anyone if we couldn't find them.  Fortunately, a group of 7 white people standing outside the metro is pretty conspicuous.  Once we were all together (about 45 minutes later), we set out.

It was the first day of the festival and it was packed and the line to the ticket booth was about a mile long. We didn't have to stand in it because Sister Yu, our Branch President's wife, bought everyone tickets ahead of time.  There was a bit of confusion as to where to pick the tickets up, so we ended up waiting around for about another 45 minutes. Eventually Sister Yu came back. We gave her money, she gave us tickets, and we were on our way.

Me and Soren with our tickets

The different groups within the group split up almost immediately and we started to explore.  A few of the branch members gave us some good ideas as to where to go.  We started down the Elephant road which was lined with all kind of different animals.

I couldn't get on the kneeling camel and yet Soren managed to get on the standing camel.

A lot of our time was spent in and around Plum Tree Hill.  The blossoms were beautiful and it was fun to see the Chinese people having picnics under the trees.  Some of them had tents to shelter their skin from the sun.  Others had umbrellas to shelter their skin from the sun.  They love fair skin over here.

After a while, our grumbling stomachs brought us back down the hill.  All I wanted was a sandwich or a salad or something, but they don't really believe in cold meals in China.  All you could buy were warm bottles of water, corn on the cob, Chinese hot dogs, and cup o' noodles.  Soren and I ended up buying cup o' noodles out of necessity, but we weren't really happy about it.  First of all, it cost us 10 Quai (as opposed to 3.50 at the Suguo).  Second of all, it's a boiling hot meal and it was about 85 degrees that day.  But, we ate it and were happy.

Cup o' noodles

Once we finished eating, we made our way to the Ming tomb.  We went through many fun, beautiful buildings, saw little temples, and enjoyed the beautiful scenery.  Maddie and I also spent some time trying to ditch a crazy Chinese lady in a mask who was obsessed with taking pictures of us. It was crazy crowded though.  We had to go through a small, long tunnel with about a thousand other people.  Totally worth it though. We also passed by some giant stone soldiers.

Not to mention the hundreds behind us

We spent a while climbing around the Ming tomb area.  There were a lot of stairs, and a lot of walls pretending to be stairs.  Unfortunately, to leave the Ming tomb area, we had to squeeze through the same tunnel. 

Going back down

Climbing the wall to the tomb

And another wall

It was an awesome day. And to top it all off, on the way out we found some guys who found the perfect place to play poker...under the stone elephant.

  

Teaching

Our Classrooms

The Apartments

Our living Quarters in Nanjing

Highlight of the day...

Emily:

As I was observing Krista's class today I experienced one of those awesome moments that only happen to white people in China.  Honey, one of our students, gave me the strangest look.  Her mouth hung open and she started pointing at her eyebrow. "Teacher--yellow!  Teacher--yellow!"  I bent down until I was eye level with her.  "Yeah, my eyebrow is yellow, huh?" I said, "Do you want to touch it?"  She reached out her tiny finger and stroked my eyebrow.  "Teacher--yellow!" She exclaimed again, and recoiled her hand.  The fact that I have yellow eyebrows is apparently unnerving to Chinese children.

Soren:

So! I am in charge of walking the students from class to class at the end of each period. Today... who was it.... I think it was Cindy... but I might be wrong. (They all blend into each other.) (Eww... that's a strange image.)
ANYWAY! She took my had as we were walking down the hall. As I was thinking, "Oh what an iconic moment!" She looked at my hand and began to pull on my arm hair. "Teacher!" She said, "Teacher- uh!"
I looked down and said, "Yeah, my arm is hairy. Funky huh?"
She then proceeded to scratch her head with one hand and her armpit with the other and then chattered something in Chinese to the students behind her. They all answered with laughter. Apparently I have now become 'teacher monkey.'
In other news I have suddenly become immensely fond of bananas.

The Lantern Festival

 

Sunday turned out to be a day of adventure.  Although the plan had been that after church we’d come back and rest, we ended up navigating our way through the heart of Nanjing’s Confucius Temple.

Getting to Church is about an hour metro trip from our school.  We meet on the second floor of a snazzy hotel.  The hotel refers to us as the “BYU group,” since they apparently can’t post anything having to do with a church. The branch is basically made up of English teachers.  There’s us, a large China Horizons group, and several other freelance teachers.  One member of the branch actually teaches at our same school. 

During Relief Society, one of the sisters announced that the lantern festival would be that night at the Confucius temple.  (The lantern festival is the official end of the Chinese New Year).  Maddie, Morgan, Krista, Heather, and Jenna stared me down as if to say “we MUST go to that!”  Since it was the chance of a lifetime, we decided to go. 

I had one of the sisters tell me what metro stop to get off at and we headed out.  I was excited, but I had two concerns: 1. I was wearing weird Chinese tights that, although warm, were falling off me. And 2. I had high heels on.  But going back to the school for a change of clothes was out of the question, so I just decided to deal with it.

Getting to the right metro stop ended up being quite the debacle. The stop I had gotten from the sister at the branch didn’t match any of the stops at the token station.  We played a serious round of charades with the metro workers until Soren finally got one of them to come over to a token station to help us figure out where we were going.

When we finally got there, we emerged from the metro and got some food.  I shimmied out of my tights, since they were half way down my thighs and Soren put them in his jacket (I think I gave a few Chinese girls a good scare during this process). It was Soren’s birthday, and he was determined to get some chicken feet to nibble on.  He was really enjoying them, but loved me enough to let me have a quick bite.  After filling our stomachs, we entered the flow of Asians heading toward the temple.

Soren's birthday treat

The chicken foot

Me trying a bit

Nom nom nom

 

The temple was in the center of a whole temple-area thing.  It was a neat place filled with shops, lanterns, dragon decorations, and lots and lots of people.  We took pictures of the things around us, but the Chinese people took pictures of us.  One guy finally worked up the courage and asked to take a picture with us.  We agreed and for the next 45 minutes we were stuck there taking pictures with random Chinese people.  Some just wanted pictures with me and Maddie (the blondes), some just wanted pictures with Soren (the tall handsome man), and some didn’t care who they got their picture taken with so long as they were white.  It was hilarious.

Unfortunately, my feet had started killing me at this point.  I was wearing comfortable wedges, but I had been on my feet for about 3 hours, and I knew I had several more hours to go.  I tried to maintain a positive attitude, but I was desperate for a place to sit down.

We tried KFC, but there were NO available seats. We were able to snag one chair and we took turns sitting in it as we ate.

We hung around for a few more hours and finally found some empty “seats” on a round about.  It was a cool festival—we even saw a couple Tangled-style lanterns go up. One fun thing about the lantern festival was seeing all of the fun masks people were wearing.  Maddie bought a cute one, but the rest of us were content just looking at them.  While we were sitting on the roundabout, however, a few Chinese men approached me with a mask.  They indicated that they wanted me to put the mask on, so I did.  Why not?  The men then took a few pictures with me.  That started it all over again, and we were swept into another photo shoot.  This one didn’t last as long.

The man who gave me the mask eventually approached me again, and I took it off to give back to him.  He smiled and shook his hand, indicating that he didn’t want it back and that I could keep it.  It wasn’t as cute as Maddie’s, but hey, it was free!

Getting back to the school was really painful for me.  Soren was a dear and gave me a piggy back for a little bit.

Other than that, it was a wonderfully successful outing and lots of fun.  For Soren, it was a birthday he’ll never forget.  

Preparing ourselves for the festival

Soren is jealous

Soren and the dragons

My mask

The Adventure Continues...

 

Compared to my first China dorm room experience, we’re living in the Grand Hotel. Soren and I have a nice double bed with an actual mattress…I know, impressive.  The shower actually has hot water and there’s a toilet paper holder next to the toilet (this means that the toilet paper doesn’t get soaked every time we take a shower…kind of a problem last time).  Each room also has a flat screen tv, so we’re able to access Asian soap operas and Chinese Mickey Mouse 24/7.  We even have heaters!  Unfortunately, we froze for the first few nights because we weren’t able to figure out how they worked.

Our first morning here, we were introduced to the cafeteria food and Phoenix (our native coordinator for those of you with short term memory loss) gave us a tour of the campus.  It is a gorgeous school.  We have a bamboo forest right in the middle of it.  There are also ping pong tables and badminton nets set up all over the place.

When Phoenix showed us our classrooms, I was shocked.  We have our own bright yellow building for our classes.  It has a supply room with a printer, two drama rooms with stages, a gym room, several other classrooms, and two stocked kitchen rooms.  The only thing the building doesn’t have is a heater, which means we’re pretty cold by the end of the day.  I have to keep my gloves on the whole time. 

Our Yellow ILP Building

Soren behind the Bank of China desk for our students' store.

Typical Cafeteria food...don't ask what it is

Catfish Head...Soren's favorite

After Phoenix finished the tour, we decided to head back down to the ILP building to put some supplies away.  We basically dumped everything in there and then went out to explore Nanjing.  We found a fun area we can the smorgasbord where you can get all kinds of tasty Chinese treats like milk tea, meat on a stick, cane sugar juice, fruit, pretty much anything you could want.

Eating the amazing "burritos" China style

Squid, fish, veggies--all on a stick

 

 

 

The next morning was Saturday.  As the head teacher, I had scheduled a full day of meetings, classroom set-up, and supply room organization.  I had a bunch of copies to make, and the teachers had a bunch of lesson plans to write. Soren and I headed down to the ILP building early to unlock everything and get started. 

Let me just say, convenience is not China’s strong point.  The door to the ILP building turned out to be nothing more than a storage unit-type door.  To unlock it, you have to step on it with your foot and insert the screwdriver-like key into the inlaid lock.  We had not had great success with this the day before, but Soren approached the task undaunted.  He inserted the key into the lock as I held the door down with my foot.  He began to turn the key, but the lock didn’t turn with it.  The handle of the key popped right off, without much of a struggle.   Meanwhile, the blade of the key was stuck in the lock, and there was nothing we could do to get it out.

Soren and I stared at each other for a few moments before we burst out laughing.  We made the trek back up to our dorm rooms where I had to call Phoenix with the unhappy news.  She replied with an astonished, “Oh my Gosh,” and proceeded to tell me that she couldn’t do anything about it until Monday. 

I was not very happy.

I ended up conducting the training meetings outside in the warmth of the sun.  I got a killer sunburn on my nose, but at least we were warm.

I’m going to skip over Sunday for now…there will be a separate blog post about it (be excited).

On Monday morning, Phoenix had the repairman fix the door, but we still weren’t able to get into the classrooms until 1:30 pm.  Since the teachers had their first lessons with the kids at 2:30, there was a fair bit of scrambling going on.  All things considered, the first day actually went pretty darn well.

Now they have a whole week of teaching behind them, and I’m hoping this next week goes a lot smoother.

The broken key

The broken key and the sad Head Teacher

Training meetings outside

The Campus