This past week was a lot of walking. My Monday was a mess and I'm nervous because I wanted to be better with classroom environment by the time of my next observation. However, it actually seems worse and I can't seem to clamp down on the noise or the homework or anything. So I asked the assistant field director to come to one class in particular where students stand by the door when class is nearly over and students sometimes stand up and stretch in obvious defiance of me before slowly sitting down.

So teaching was rough, on Thursday, the school held its annual long walk. I was told to come to the school at 7:30AM. When I arrived, I was asked which class I was with. I had no idea and said "I was just told to be here at 7:30" and they told me to go find grade 7, class 13. In the end, a very kind English teacher walked me over to a class where the head teacher was their English teacher so I got to walk with class 8 for 33km (though the little passport we had to carry and get stamped at various checkpoints said 38). We talked, we ran, we snacked, we listened to music, I talked to the teacher some, and after a long sweaty, at times frustrating, walk in which we were accompanied by parent volunteers, staff, a mobile toilet truck, and water stations all along the way,we finally arrived at Fantawild, the amusement park here in Northern Zhuzhou. 

I think we stayed here for about an hour to rest, eat lunch, say hi to friends, take pictures, and get harassed by giant candy canes on stilts and a few clowns. Class 2 asked if I liked them because they're head teacher had told told them that I didn't. I said I liked them, just not the noise I deal with everyday. I wonder if that's part of the problem. We walked another three hours where there were buses for each class waiting and rode back to JingYan. I was sore, and didn't want to walk anymore but somehow made it back home and up all 6 flights of stairs to get to my apartment. Then I realized I didn't have much to eat and debated going out to get a foot soak. I just got some hot and sour noodles and sat with as much cushioning for my feet as possible. On Friday, the students had some event going on so we had no classes. I rested, cleaned around the apartment a bit, took a nap, listened to the Sporkful as they discussed the best way to make bacon and oreos (Do you put the bacon inside? Oreos on a plate with bacon to make a smiley face? Do you wrap the oreo in bacon? Maybe you wrap the oreo in bacon and then deep fry them both.), did laundry, read, worried about the flight I booked to Japan (because I requested a refund online but sense that I may need to call to clarify things because nothing's happened), sent my resume to a woman I knew was looking for English teachers in Zhuzhou (but now have to give her more information about myself and proof of my education), and didn't do much otherwise. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my feet aren't too sore the day after. Then again, I went to bed pretty early so I wasn't standing on them for at least 8 hours.

It was pretty satisfying to see how happy my students were when I remembered names and when I asked why class 8 always answers my questions with "Zombie-pig-man":
"Teacher, do you like zombie pig man?"
"I don't know him. I just hear about him every time I come to your class."
"Oh."
But they giggled and talked about him anyway. It's good. This class has gotten so much better over the course of the year and it was great to catch up with them. I can't wait to see them on Monday.

I know I'd said I'd write about Hengshan and I will soon. But between the mountain and Fantawild I'm a little worn out. Thankfully, I walk everywhere anyway partly just to see what's out on the streets. I'm used to walking for hours, but the difference is I don't normally do more than say, 2 or 3 hours at a go. And usually within the same radius around my apartment: the exit/entry bureau, the Xiang River, the park,the school, roast duck stalls, the big shopping street near the train station...So I just told myself not to think about time or distance and to just keep moving and that seemed to work pretty well for me. The hard part was when one student kept telling me I looked terrible and asked if I was tired. I had to keep moving or go crazy while remembering she was just trying to be nice.

Haven't done much this week. I'm really trying to lay down the law and get the noise level to go down and respond more appropriately to the behavior of individuals. I have one student who actually stood up before I said class was over and slowly sat down so I need to find a fair way to address him and work with him on what we both need to do better in class. The weather was really nice so I walked around a nearby park thinking about what my new acquaintance from Morocco said about how the city planted over a million trees in 4 years and how that impacted the air quality here. It's so hard for me to grasp, but I'm also really happy that I have a little recent history now to layer into my daily experiences of this city. I've seen buildings go up over the course of my time here but in my own individual experience accessing that understanding of all the changes hasn't been too easy.

Aside from that, I guess it's been all about eating. They brought in the pidan, century eggs, to the fancy market across the street from us. I liked them when I had them in Changsha, so I decided to buy a few and play with them a bit. I'm not sure what the difference is between buying them when they've been all cleaned off and you just have to crack open that gray-blue shell and buying an egg still coated in straw and other things. "Clay" doesn't seem to suffice for describing the mix that is applied to the eggs but given the slightly pinkish color, that's usually the first word that comes to mind when I see it. So I had them straight the first time, they were OK. Then because I'd heard they were good with zhou/jook/congee, I took some leftover rice and made some chicken broth, tossed both into my rice cooker with some slices of ginger and garlic, stirred occasionally, and was able to make a nice thick flavorful jook. It was pretty good. I haven't tried much else, but I've come to the conclusion that century eggs are probably better paired with something because of its unique taste. It's interesting to me because of the different textures you get too. The egg yolk is kind of semi-solid and still a bit liquidy, the white has became dark and gelatinous, and the other inner part is a bit more solid than the rest. It looks scary, but it's not too bad, just a slight kind of...sulfurous(?) smell.

I finally tried some of the traditional Hunan snacks that I've seen in Vanguard, Walmart, Better Life Market, and other places I've shopped for food before. The green and gold bean cakes were sweeter than expected and I'm still not sure what the white cakes I ate were made of.

As far as teaching at my middle school, it's been a pretty short week. Although, playing 20 questions actually went pretty well despite the students not knowing the names of too many objects. I should have taught them more words for objects like rubik's cube, jump rope, candy, etc. But once they realized they had to guess what they're classmates were thinking of, not only did they become quieter as they listened to each other, I really felt like I'd done my job because it was my students communicating with each other instead of me talking (I always have independent activities and time for them to talk obviously but this one seemed to engage them more). Although the kid who chose the bow from "Green Arrow" stumped us all so I gave him 2 points.

My week was marked by foreigners in Zhuzhou events both on Monday and on Friday. I was looking forward to the ceramics expo in Liling, but we arrived on the morning of the last day. Still stuff out on the floor, but a lot of empty booths and shelves since a lot of people were packing up . And then we were a bit late to the museum so we had to rush through it and didn't see much. There were a few nice pieces, the biggest ceramic jars were all for alcohol, and we saw some ceramics done so finely that they were used for lightbulbs because they were so thin. I was looking for a gaiwan and saw some nice celadon sets that were cheaper than I expected, but nothing really caught my eye. I talked to one of the teachers I haven't seen much since getting separated into our sites and these events are always interesting for me because I get to meet people working in Zhuzhou who aren't necessarily teaching, though there are a number of teachers. I met a family with a Chinese wife and a German husband and their young daughter. The husband said he'd been here for 4 years and hadn't learned much Chinese. He said his daughter always calls him very lazy in Chinese. I met another man working with China Southern Railways too. I may have mentioned this before, but Zhuzhou is probably the biggest transportation point down south. Sometimes people have to come here from Changsha to get a train because we have so many connections that pass through here.

Speaking of trains and connections, during Friday's event for foreigners I had a great conversation recently with a man who's been here for 13 years. He mentioned that you only get a passing view of a city from the trains and don't always get to see everything going on in there. Maybe he meant that because of all the people that must pass by Zhuzhou when they ride the train but never get off on their way to Changsha, Guangzhou, Kunming, or other places more popular as destinations than as stopping points. I was really fascinated to hear everything he had to say because for the most part, I've noticed/encountered relatively young people who stay for 5-6 years and then seem to move on to other things (though there is a group of people who started a company in Changsha, a few of whom used to be in WorldTeach). To find someone clearly at a different stage in his life from many of the other younger people I run into both because of the opportunities available here in China for foreigners (teaching is the most common, it's usually a little harder to find work in other fields but not impossible and that while most seem to like it here and stay for longer than they planned, they seem to move on to other things) presented a unique opportunity. I asked him what brought him to China. He told me that many people from his home country (Morocco) generally go to the US or Europe for work or school, but he saw a growing China and came out of curiosity. He intended to stay for a year or two, then to go to grad school in Belgium. Now he's married and has an 8 year old daughter. I asked him about the biggest changes he's seen in his time here. And like with many things, the biggest changes are the smallest. The first thing he did was point out of the bus windows and talk about the cages for air-conditioning units and how the government had paid for metal bars and things on all the windows so that things wouldn't fall out on the street anymore. The next thing he talked about was jaywalking, "It's much more controlled now. We had guys standing on the street and they would ask jaywalkers for 20RMB. And then people would run away or stop jaywalking not because they didn't want to pay, but because..they felt very silly..." he put his hands against his face so I asked "Embarassed?" "Yes". He told me that the Xiang river used to be a total mess. Things stuck all over the banks, dead animals, junk, bikes and other things used to float through the river. He told me about the efforts to clean up the river around Zhuzhou to make the most impact. If they cleaned up further downstream then the dirty water from here would still come down to others. He told me about the factories that have since moved and how awful the northern part of the city was when it had a chemicals factory. He told me all the chimneys (except one) have since disappeared. Since we were riding on a bus back into the city and I saw the cars around us as we went on the bridge over the Xiang, I asked him if there were more cars. "Oh yes. Many more. And many more kinds of cars." He pointed out his school and the dorms, the opera house in construction, and I asked him about Yandi Square. He told me the statue went up the year he came to Zhuzhou, but there was no square. It was all fields and some graves. I find it hard to visualize. I actually found someone's site where they posted photos they took years ago and compared them to the photos they took on a recent trip, but I still struggle to think about what it must have been like. When I go to YanDi Square now, it's clearly been designed both as a place of leisure and a bit of a tourist spot but there are still things in construction such as the opera house and a concert/arts hall. Those fields have been turned into a lake. The whole set up is near a museum/development exhibition hall which I've only been to once. Listening to my new friend made for quite a story and a chance to get an understanding of this place that I really haven't had access to too much.


It was a long conversation that took course over dinner at Songxizi and the bus ride back into the city. And I guess I'll now have to work backwards to talk about that long but very satisfying Friday. So I and the other teacher here agreed to take part in a program with other foreign teachers to teach in a school that was still in Zhuzhou county but outside of Zhuzhou city. We were assigned to LuKou Town. I got nervous and started to overthink what I needed to do a little bit but then looking at my lesson plan and powerpoint realized that I'd done what I could to teach new words and play charades, but that at this point I was just going to have to deal with any problems when the problems came. I was a littler nervous because I was teaching 8th and 9th grade for a day. It was weird. I didn't have to write and show so many pictures. I just said "take out a piece of paper" and pulled a piece of paper from my notebook "write one verb" and wrote the word swim "now fold it", and showed them, "and put it in this bag". It went smoothly, but the same verbs (fly, play, make, do, swim, sing, dance, run, jump, fight, write, read, watch) came up over and over again so after 20 minutes, I let the last 25 minutes of class be about questions. The 8th graders seemed more willing and warmed up to me more than the 9th graders. I think the same 4 outgoing 9th graders asked me questions over and over again. The 8th graders were so ready to ask me anything some pulled out their textbooks and scoured for a topic. It was really fun. And lunch was awesome. I finally tried hongshao rou while another guy with my name started singing "If it's good enough for Mao, it's good enough for me." He was a character. I knew I'd like hongshao rou before I ate it because everytime I see a picture of Mao's favorite dish it's always cubes of braised pork that seem to be mostly fat. The texture, the flavor, and all of it was great but we all resisted eating the whole thing since our table was so crowded with other foods. Then we went back to organize a question and answer session with the students

I remembered how curious and active my students were when we first met, so I was looking forward to being the new face on campus again. What I didn't think about is how much bigger the school would be (it was a public school and I think it covered primary to middle, if not up to high school) and how we would be mobbed by students who wanted us to sign their notebooks, their jackets, their English books, and sometimes, themselves. It was crazy to leave lunch and get to where we needed to be. I'd already allowed my students to ask me questions in class but there were so many people still who had questions. Some of them surprised me actually, one very outgoing girl with very good English in my 9th grade class asked me what I thought of LGBT and not really knowing the views I would encounter (I've heard that because China doesn't have the same religious context, it's generally more open but I also know that there are people who don't know much or don't understand, and then there's the traditional idea of family too...) I just said "I know what it is, but I don't know very much about it". But I probably should have guessed from her question that she asked because she knew something. She told me after class that she was a "B" and I was pleasantly surprised to find someone so young and so open about who she was. But it may just be that I'm a foreigner and a number of students have told me they feel free when they speak English, so there's that to consider. The sense of freedom is part of why people say such strange things in English sometimes. We talked about South Park, if I like pandas, my favorite drink, where I'm from, what schools in America are famous, if I like Chinese food, if I like China, if I liked the school (they asked me this during my first class when I'd been there for a total of 20 minutes), if I liked la tiao ("What's la tiao?" "This! Try it!"), and if I could accept some gifts from the students. It's always a little weird to be such a huge celebrity for a day on account of nothing more than you being a native English speaker or from another country, but I'm now the proud owner of a handmade pair of earrings and two hair pins, a Chinese chess set from Zhuzhou's top chess player, and a drawing of a tired kitty. I let them have my QQ number too so now I have over 30 requests that I need to add to my contact list. It's always hard to juggle being available to students with your own need for time to yourself but these kids don't have a regular oral English teacher so I thought I'd let them at least write to me every now and again. And they were so welcoming and such characters, I'm not saying no to them.

So that's a very brief summary of my week. On Friday, I had to leave my apartment at 7:20AM and we got back to the city at around 7:30PM so that day alone was pretty packed with new sights and new faces. We had to get up early on Monday too but besides seeing the expo and the museum before they closed for the day, we didn't have a lot of commitments to meet. And we were done after lunch. But I do have some photos of those excursions so I guess I'll spare you all having to read more text when I could just show you people making soy milk.

So here I am at the end of the week and it's been a while since I did any sort of weekly review so I thought I'd start doing that again. First off, I had a pretty lousy lesson plan so while I did get them to list off verbs, I had no real independent activity planned so that went over badly. The head teachers are floating around my classes more often probably because of my issues in regard to discipline (I'm getting a stopwatch. In the future, if the kids are noisy I'm going to wait for them to be quiet and they'll have to wait for the end of class for a few more minutes.). So I was lazy and paid for it, I'm trying to make sure everything is still fun and engaging but maybe I need to take a day to really dig into consequences and the importance of listening to everyone. Urgh. I was hoping to be so much better than this but I haven't been as responsive as I've needed to and that's why they don't listen and do all kinds of things in my class, because I'm basically non responsive to misbehavior. I really need to change that and pushing myself to be that proactive person has been really tough though I still have a long ways to go. I have to pull all my lesson plans together as part of a resource for future teachers. The headmistress of the middle school I work at wants to start Hunan's first international school and is looking for ways to use all the resources she has. We actually had a visit from a school in San Diego so it looks like there may be some American middle schoolers studying abroad here in Zhuzhou in a year or two. The headmistress is planning to fly out to California with our liaison to check out the school. It's quite an ambition, but I'm sure it'll be great for the kids. I know from my side of things it's tough when I only see all these kids once a week so it'd be cool for them to have someone in their class who speaks English and gets to know the students from being with them all day.

Struggling to stay with things. Still not strict enough and now I have teachers coming in and out of my classes more often to check in on me and how I'm doing, what I'm teaching, and how the kids are behaving and how I'm responding. Pressure's on, when the kids see the other teachers and behave, the other teachers generally seem happy and move on or hang around and enjoy listening to the students respond. I still need to really get them all in line though...especially for my next site visit. I'm working to get myself moving because I really do want to be that better teacher. That's why I want to do this again.

And as usual, we were just told we are going to Liling on Monday so we have to reschedule our site visit/classroom observation with the assistant field director. We were also told nothing about the upcoming tests until: 1) I saw the signs. Literally saw the signs with the dates on them that told students which room to go to for exams in Chinese all over the school. 2) One of our students told us and 3) Our liaison finally confirmed it with another teacher. So I have tomorrow free because my students will be testing. This weekend is also Qing ming jie, the tomb sweeping festival, a time to go pay a visit to ancestors and to celebrate the beginning of spring. All the trees have bright new green leaves and the shopping center across the street from us has workers planting new trees and bushes. I'm thinking of visiting a park near our apartment to see what's in bloom there, though I'm already sweating after having turned the heater on a mere three nights ago I've switched everything to air conditioning at my apartment and in the office. Vanguard, the big fancy, pretty upscale market across the street from us has expanded its selection of ice creams so I picked up a small tub of vanilla ice cream and a large bottle of Sarsae (which is root beer, I think it's called sarsae because of sarsaparilla but I'm just guessing). I was a little surprised to find that I could get Sarsae/root beer here even though I'd heard that Watsons (a drug store) produced sodas, I expected lighter flavor or next to no sugar. More like plain soda water, but no it's sweet, it's sugary, and I'm going to enjoy a rootbeer float for the first time in a long while. The ice cream was about 12RMB but the large bottle of soda was about 4RMB so it feels pricey but I'm splurging. I withdrew enough money to eat until Tuesday so I think I'll still have saved quite a bit. I'm going to ask about the cost of a name seal tomorrow too to see if I have enough for one. It's been a dream of mine and it would be much more significant to get one from Zhuzhou than ordering online or going to another city, though Hong Kong's "Chop Street" did have a pretty wide selection of stones and script styles.

I was really off this week. I was going to play mad libs but I heard at the mid-service conference that mad libs didn't work out so well, but then I tried it for the last class of the day and it worked out just fine so I've stuck with a lesson I found online. I'm trying to figure out how I'll bridge from them writing a story to turning those stories into skits for their final exam. The kids are asking about the next teacher and how long I'll be here, and if I'll remember them. I'm trying to set aside a time before school is out to take a class picture. I'm counting the days, both towards their vacation and the end of my time here and in terms of how much I can fit into that time. It's not easy, and since Spring Festival came a little later this year the second term is even shorter so I'm really feeling the pinch after break.

I'm also feeling much better than before. Today I felt hungry for the first time in a while. About two nights ago I wasn't hungry at all, slept from 5pm to 10pm, woke up, made instant noodles, went back to bed, got up 7AM feeling really good and realized I just need to make sure I'm sleeping as much as I need to to make sure I'm not as vulnerable to all the things passed on from students to teachers and teachers to other teachers. The sky is a little more blue since the wind and the air is moving around more than it did in winter. My allergies haven't been unbearable though I still feel a little congested. It feels like I had 2 days of spring and now we're on our way to summer already.