Well, here it is....my first blog while I'm actually IN China. I finally have access to this website so I will be able to keep you posted on my happenings here in Shaoxing.
I have been here 3 weeks and 1 day, and it sure has been exciting. Almost every day old women pet my arms or hair, I get stared at (to the point where people hit others on their motorized bikes), and people speak to me in Chinese all the time and I have NO idea what they are saying...so I just nod my head and smile.
I now teach 1st graders at one of the primary schools in town. I have 4 different classes of 1st graders, each having about 50 students making that a grand total of about 200 students. I teach 16 classes a week and each class is about 40 minutes long. At the end of the day, I usually have no voice.
The discipline here in China towards the students is much different than those in America. The teachers are allowed to hit the students on the head, hit them with rulers, and throw them around a bit when they are not being cooperative.
The food in China is pretty tasty (most of the time). I try to avoid all of the food that just happens to be staring back at me, I like picking the little shrimps with eyeballs out of my soup. I did try chicken heart, it was surprisingly very delicious. It tasted like chicken, who would have thought?
China has a Walmart. I had to throw that in there. It's underground, and nothing like the Walmarts in America. But it's a Walmart! Cool. It's going to be weird going back to Walmart in America and not seeing dead chickens and ducks hanging everywhere. :(
On Friday (the 30th) starts one of the Chinese holidays (I don't remember what it's called, that's probably not good), but for this holiday I'm going with a few others here in Shoaxing to the Gobi Desert. This little vacation includes a 36 hour train ride, hopefully a camel tour, and being up north, eh. It should be pretty entertaining, 4 of the 5 of us going have Ipods so we can keep ourselves busy playing games against each other on the train. We also decided it would be exciting to make a video of the soon to be long and tiring train ride.
I am going to be learning Chinese tonight with my new tutor! I'm very excited to learn some of the language so I can actually communicate with people here instead of having a blank stare on my face all the time.
I will try to update this blog a lot. How often is a lot? Meh, hopefully every day? But we'll see.
G0-d is doing wonderful things here in Shoaxing, I can't wait to see what will happen in the months to come!
And yes, I'm sure as you are reading through this you are wondering if I miss you! Of course I do! China is wonderful, but I think that if everyone that was reading this right now were here, it'd be a blast! *hint hint*...visitors are always welcome :)
That's all folks.
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