Monday, September 3

Monday, September 3

We started this morning off early with the kindergarten opening ceremony. After a few quick speeches were given, and a dance was performed by the other kindergarten teachers, Tom gave the speech that he prepared the night before. It was pretty simple, just stated that we are happy to be here from America and welcomed the parents and students. He did a great job. After the opening ceremony ended, we went off to teach our first kindergarten classes. This was pretty interesting because most of the kids were pretty shy, and I think most of them were quite scared of us because we look so different. Since then, they've gotten more used to us and gotten a little less shy, but a few of them still burst out in tears whenever they see us. After kindy classes, we ate some lunch and taught at the primary school. Tom taught grades 4 and 6, and I taught grade 2. This was also interesting because we really had no idea what level they were at and what we were supposed to teach, so we basically just threw together on-the-spot lessons. This was actually the case for pretty much the whole week.

After classes, we went over to Tong tian (the shopping area) and looked for cookie ingredients for Tom's birthday. Even after using the words in Chinese and talking to the people at the bakery and the regular grocery store, we couldn't find baking soda, cocoa, or vanilla extract, so that's going to make things hard. We'll hunt them down eventually. While we were at Tong tian, we went to the KFC there (they're all over the place here, there are two in the same parking lot of tong tian). The food was so so much more expensive than other food here, so we just got one chicken piece to share and some fries. The KFC here is not really like the KFC in America. It's like a conglomeration of all fast food in the States. They have the regular KFC chicken and mashed potatoes, but they also have fries, burrito-looking things, chicken burger things, even star-shaped nuggets like at Carl's Jr. It's pretty interesting. Anyway, the chicken and fries were pretty tasty, just so expensive that we didn't want to get more food. We're not so sure that we'll be going back to KFC here in China, because when we got home Tom had crazy hives all over. We're not sure what exactly caused the hives, but Tom suspects it could have been the fried chicken because he thinks he had a similar reaction to eating fried chicken while he was on his mission. Who knows. Luckily we had some benedryl-type stuff, which he took, and then slept for 12 hours straight. When we woke up the next day, he was all better. In the meantime, I cooked beans so we could have homemade soup the next day. I was pretty excited about the beans because I thought they were black beans and we could have like a Mexican soup, but when I cooked them they ended up being black soybeans. Still delicious, but not Mexican.