Heads up: This email will not be a long as my last couple. Simply because today was not as exciting. We woke up, ate breakfast (which was a sort of hard bean and chopped green beans with a rice roll and a hardboiled egg) and then went to the building in which we will be teaching classes.
I forgot to mention: I was assigned teaching SPE, which means I am teaching the younger kids on the morning shift, 8AM-11:30AM, which is precisely what I wanted! I couldn’t be happier with it. I am teaching Arts and Crafts for the next four days and then Games for the week after that; I will rotate with the two other girls in my assigned group, Kate and Emily. There are three other teachers teaching in the morning on the 3rd floor; we are on the 4th floor. Then there are six girls teaching SPEs in the afternoon, 2-5:20. The SPEs are Games, Shop (building things), Drama, Arts and Crafts, Kitchen, and Gym.
Adam was assigned to the ELE classes, or the high school age kids because he speaks more Mandarin than anyone else in the ILP group. Three girls were assigned to the Korean kids, ages 10-15. My kids will be about 5-8.
We cleaned out our rooms and prepped them for school, which starts tomorrow (Tuesday). Then we stocked our Storage Room, where we keep the school supplies. There are so many; our head teachers are pleasantly shocked. The past ILP teachers left a ton of stuff, along with all the supplies we brought with us.
This was sweaty work, as it is very hot and humid here. Thankfully we’ve been blessed with cloud cover and a few rainfalls.
At lunch, they served us rice, roll, and…chicken feet. Whole freaking chicken feet. Perhaps in a couple months I will have the stomach to try it, but I could not today. It was complete with claws and ankle and skin and everything. I immediately lost my appetite and haven’t fully regained it. I haven’t been hungry since, despite not eating anything.
After lunch and some down time, we were supposed to meet the Chinese teachers and tell them about ourselves and then perform songs for them, but my roommate Abby and I got lost and wandered the entire grounds looking for our group. We walked up more than half a thousand steps (yes, we counted). May I reiterate, I will have amazing legs when I return to the States.
We decided to go to the Storage Room and plan our lessons for the week. Then we went to dinner and found our group. Dinner was great, with rice, roll, a tomato soupy thing, and a yellow squash soupy thing. Very yummy, but I still had no appetite.
Back at the apartment, Emily had purchased the rights to Facebook, Blogger, Youtube, and other websites and hooked me up with it for free. So now I have access to those sites, and will post many more pictures on Facebook than I will on my blog, simply because it’s faster. So if you’re my friend on Facebook, check them out. I will continue to blog, though MOLLY AND ALLISON, as of now you will no longer need to post my blog posts for me. Thanks anyway!
I have my lessons planned and approved, and I cannot wait for my first class tomorrow. Today, we ran across some young Chinese kids and they excitedly greeted us with an English hello, anxious to use their language skills on us. It was the cutest thing ever!
I am loving China, even though we were told today that we can’t flush our toilet paper, as it will clog the toilet.
Welcome to China, right?
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