Chengdu Week 7 - Start of the Week

Oct. 12, 2014

Kong... He prayed for the mosquitoes to leave in our dorm hallway

    Today was weird, for some reason Sundays always are. When I woke up this morning it was still miserable weather so Meiling and I rescheduled our outing for next week. Instead she came by my room at one, and we did Chinese for three hours. Which means I was sitting there struggling trying to figure out what I wanted to say, and she is there telling me “In Chinese please!”. It’s actually a really good arrangement because it forces me to really use my Chinese, in a conversational way. Class is good but the language tends to be much more formal that is naturally used out on the street. But no matter what three hours of Chinese melts my brain. So naturally like a god Chinese language student I then went and memorized all the characters from the last chapter. This mostly involves writing things over and over again until I remember it.
    While I was doing my characters I was also watching The Patriot, which I gotta tell you was’t all the spectacular. It was funny however, watching a movie based around American values in China; I always draw a great deal of amusement from it. Cassidy and I essentially were sarcastic about everything little thing while Brennan tried to defend the movie. He gave up. And by the end of the movie all the characters I needed memorized were, so a win-win situation. The rest of the night floated around rooms chatting with people. I also was able to go over the dialogue for tomorrow so I am hopefully fairly prepared for class. So begins week seven of my stay in Chengdu.

Oct. 13, 2014

    So extra previewing and lots of studying definitely paid off. I was able to do really well in class and even hold a fairly simple conversation with my Laoshi. This chapter is all about sports, which is not particularly interesting, but the grammar we are starting to get I am able to use in daily conversion which is really nice. Makes like a lot easier when searching for something to talk about with a language partner. After class I ended up working on my homework which went really fast. I am going to attempt an oral presentation on Thursday so good luck to me. I will be how I became able to run a marathon! Super exciting, I will tell you how it goes on Thursday.
    After class I ended up just chatting with Seth, Alex, and Jesse. Most of it was about Chinese history and the discrepancies we are finding between Western learning and Chinese learning. Man of our teachers for non-language class have a very different agenda than the one American University students are used to. Sometimes it really stands out, like in history class there were some discrepancy between what I have learned in the States versus what Xiao Laoshi has said. To be totally honest I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle. We ended up talking for a couple of hours just sitting on the floor shooting the breeze, all the while randomly switching between English and Chinese.
    Later in the afternoon I went for a run. I wasn’t really running here due to the humidity and air quality. But now it is much cooler (still really humid) and today the air quality was much better for I ran for about 45 minutes. It was nice to get out an exercise, but I have really gotten out of shape, even though I have probably lost about 15-20 pounds, on virtue of the good quality and amount of food I consume here (Chinese dishes are very balance (generally) and proportioned reasonably). Dinner was found in the student cafeteria, a whole 4 kuai (66 cents) for a bowl of rice and a bunch of veggies. The it was back to the dorms to work on my presentation. Tomorrow I should have my first day on the job, so I will let you know how that goes. I will also be meeting a new friend for lunch, Sam from Ito Yokado. It’s great to be meeting people from outside the USAC group! See you tomorrow!

Oct. 14, 2014

    Happy Birthday Mom, I love you!  Today was fairly fun and a little outside the usual routine. I went to class as per usual which was as fun as always. I don’t know why but Chinese is starting to really make sense and the grammars are coming together. I really pleased about that. After class I went out meet Sam so we could hang out. I am really happy to finally be meeting people outside of USAC. I love all my USAC people very much which makes it easy to stay in the dorms. But today I got to explore the nicest part of Chengdu. Apparently there is a large ex-pat community in Chengdu, it make sense I can easily see why living in Chengdu is appealing to many people. We ended up at a Tex Mex which is best known for fairly decent American food. It was pretty tasty, my chicken breast sandwich with no bones. I even got real tasting Ketchup. For all the fun I was having I did manage to drop my phone in a fountain, so now I need a new one because I can’t wait for it to dry out not having a phone means no communication for me. Then it was off to the movies, which was again a nice part of town. Sam wanted to see Guardians of the Galaxy, which would make this my fourth time seeing it. It was fun I was trying to figure out characters from the subtitles most of the movie. It was cool exploring the nicer parts of the city, but I still really like my poor area as well (secretly all I want in life is cheap food).

    After the movie let out I headed over to Carrefour to go to work. Today was my first time teaching the YMCC or Young Mind Crayon Club. Kids come to the school after their regular and do English for an hour and fifteen minutes. My TA’s name is Lily and she gave me the low down for the classes. essentially I am teaching a class of 4 boys and one girl, all of whom are 5 ears old. So it’s mostly play. I was however, able to get them to sit down and talk. We learned new words, played name games so I could learn everyone’s name. Lily was really surprised how energetic I was, she said I passed her expectations for tonight. I also had an observer, Terra, she only said that I was a good teacher, when her job was to tell me how to improve. It was awesome, I had so much fun playing with the kids. My only bummer was that my pants I wore were very old and ended up ripping in the thigh area. I didn’t notice until the bus ride back, I really hope the kids didn’t notice…Getting home was an experience, everyone was out with each other and normally I am too but  it was just me for a while which allowed for most of my homework to get done. Now I am going to go to bed and enjoy the cool night.