Monday: summer project visit

Today we had a lot of fun, especially this morning. We got on a mini-bus at 8:30 AM and rode to the middle of Chengdu to a teachers’ college where we observed the summer project of the China 12s (volunteers who arrived last year). I sat in on a class by Sarah and Phil where they read a great story, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. They asked the students, who will all be English teachers one day, to make predictions about what they thought might happen in the story after each section. Then afterward the volunteers explained about using predictions as a teaching tool for them to use in their own classrooms one day. After that they did a dialogue using the vocabulary words introduced in the story. Pretty good, although I can’t imagine someone using the term ‘stumps’ in a conversation except on rare occasions.

This afternoon was a technical session about teaching lower-level students, and then language class, followed by a quick birthday party for one of the other trainees. I would have normally attended a belly-dancing class after that, but tonight we ventured into Chengdu to have a “married couple dinner” with one pair of current volunteers and the other two couples in training. We were told that we could just catch a cab right outside of our campus, which is outside the Third Ring Road (= far away from downtown), but after five minutes and no cabs, we hopped on the good ‘ole 97 bus and headed for downtown. We have never ridden a Chinese bus and had forgotten to bring any phone numbers with us, but we made it just fine. We got off the bus near a busy intersection and snagged a cab over to the other training campus.

The dinner was great, and was facilitated by Michelle and Thad, whose blogs are listed to the right. (My favorite dish tonight was the qiezi ‘chee-edz-uh,’ or stuffed eggplant.) Then we went down to the local shaokao for a beer and some more conversation. My first Chinese beer besides Tsingtao (=Qingdao in current pinyin) was one called Snow, which Todd said was aptly mis-pronounced by his host family as ‘Slow’ beer because of its low alcohol content and bland flavor.

The night finished up with yet another cab driver getting lost on his way back to “Chengda,” or Chengdu Daxue (Chengdu University, or the "Duda"). Seems like no one really knows what’s out past the Third Ring Road unless you make them go there.

Also, Nick and I think that China should come with the caveat "watch your step." We have tripped countless times on curbs that would have been painted bright yellow in the U.S., but here, are left unmarked for people like us.

Off to another week ...