Everyday Life in China

Well on Monday all of the kids were back at school. We were invited to attend the back to school assembly. The kids were so well behaved! Then we all went up to the stage and introduced ourselves. It was so fun to see hundreds of kids happy to see me and saying my name. I love them!

Monday was our first day of teaching. Writing the lesson plans took a while, but they help a lot when you're actually doing the lesson. The first four weeks I will do the same subject. After the first month all of the volunteers will rotate between the subjects every week. I chose to do kitchen for this month. The kids are really cute, but they are really naughty. ILP wants the English classes to be fun so that they kids want to come and learn English. But it's hard to find the balance of fun and order. I know it will get easier as I continue to teach.

On Monday after our first day of teaching we all decided we needed to reward ourselves so we walked to the corner store and got ice cream! Yay! We then explored our neighborhood for a while until it started to get really dark. We found an awesome fruit market that we're going to have to go to some time. We also found some knock-off brand of Ugg boots! So funny.

Yesterday morning I skipped out on breakfast because I didn't want to get out of bed and I decided to make a peanut butter and banana sandwich, because I had all of that food at my apartment. But, today I decided to get up and go down to breakfast, and I'm really glad I did! This morning we had some sort of cake and what tasted like rice milk. Breakfast is the only meal where they have any kind of bread and anything that's sweet. The other two meals are very similar: rice, meat, and a different mixture of vegetables. And just in case you want to know: they serve every part of the animal, so I've eaten pork several times with the skin still on and I have found multiple pig hairs still attached to the skin! Gross!

Last night (Wednesday) we decided to walk down to an open market they have. I haven't noticed a whole lot of staring from the people here, but when we walked into the market last night EVERYBODY was looking at us. No matter what we were doing they would turn around or stop what they were doing to look at us. And they were legitimately staring. Hahaha! It's so odd being the minority.

The local fruit market guy with Kim and Caley

I also tried some weird flavored Oreos, because I'm only in China once, right? They were peach and grape flavored. I kinda liked them!

Tonight for dinner they had chicken wings and potatoes! Yay! This is one of the first meals that I've actually wanted to eat. The other meals I just eat out of necessity. But, everyone wasn't eating theirs and they were giving them to me. I ate 11 chicken wings for dinner! They were delicious!

Cassie and Caley were meant to be walruses

Hopefully all the pictures are showing up!