The weather around here is breathtakingly beautiful when it's not rainy. All the cherry blossom trees are blooming, turning our dorm into some sorta anime wonderland.
Some day I'll have a sword fight under those trees... and it will be awesome.
Food has still been pretty sweet. I'm tutoring a 9 year old girl and her parents have been trying to push food on me every time I see them (no complaints here!) The first day they gave me some steamed buns with pork or maybe beef inside... pretty awesome. Then the second day they gave me a bag of crawfish. No explanation, just crawfish. I spent a good hour or two staring at them, on the fence between being a champ and peeling them or screaming in terror and running away. Seriously, the segmented leg part looks just like a camel spider. And nothing that looks like a camel spider has ANY business being in my apartment.
Seriously.
I turned to the internet for advice, posting in Reddit's food section. Instead of moral support and a good recipe, I just got a bunch of people from the American south telling me to pinch the tail and suck the head. LOOK AT THAT HEAD. Lips do not go there.
I opted to use two pairs of scissors and chopsticks to get all the meat out of the tail. It was a pretty sizable bag, so it took me an hour and a half to get them all. Then I threw the meat into a gumbo and I feasted on some tasty American food. Mission accomplished.
Two days ago it was Easter and I didn't even know it. Except for an email from Grandma, I would have TOTALLY forgotten. I was tutoring the girl again and her parents called halfway through the lesson and were like, "We just found out that it's a holiday in America... want us to take you out to lunch?" So I spent Easter with their family at a Korean barbecue restaurant. It's a lot like the hot pot I described before except instead of a boiling pot in the middle, there's a little barbecue grill. You cook your own meat. It's kind of awesome.
The only thing that I didn't quite like was that it's custom in China for students to respect their teachers (that part's okay) but by respecting them they fill up their plates. Chinese food isn't served like Western food... people don't get their own plates. You get an empty plate and the food is in the middle of the table for you to serve yourself. Well, the girl (and I can't really fault her, she is only nine...) would suck on her chopsticks and then use the saliva-covered utensils to serve me food. Once she was playing with a tooth she had lost and her mother told her to give me some bread... which she did with her mouth-bloody fingers.
Like I said, she's a little kid and there are probably worse things that I could be eating than traces of spit.... but it was SO DIFFICULT to not just reach over and grab the stuff myself. Blech.
Speaking of kids... I'm not sure I'm really up for teaching them. I'm okay with the one-on-one tutoring time because it's easy to play games, teach songs and generally teach some English. But when I've got a class full of 10 year olds at one of the schools, it's utter chaos. The boys don't pay attention, spending the whole time talking in Korean or Chinese instead of listening to me and the one girl in the class is afraid to speak up because the boys tease her every time she speaks in English... which she's really good at. Then on Sunday evening I had to break up a fistfight between the boys because one of them stole the other's crossword puzzle. It's like... you guys didn't care enough about the puzzle to actually sit down and do it (even for the lucrative prize of American pennies) but you care enough to punch your friend over its loss???
I think I'm just not patient enough to handle multiple hyperactive kids at one time. Seriously... how did my parents do it? I need to give them a damn hug.
Teaching the older kids and the University kids can be just as difficult. I can't remember if I mentioned the Chinese education system (and I'm too lazy to go back and check) but the students aren't allowed to really talk or discuss things. The teacher says something or reads something and the students memorize it. It's a lot like No Child Left Behind where we don't teach critical thinking and creativity, instead we teach how to pass tests. Except it's WAY more extreme here because the culture sort of requires kids to stay quiet. (Someone should tell the 10 year olds this...)
So I'll ask a question. "Does anybody know what a fairy tale is?" complete silence. "Yes? No?" silence but now they're looking at their feet. "How about Cinderella, who has heard of Cinderella?" a few mumbles while everyone's shoes become increasingly interesting. "How about you there" specific girl "Who is Cinderella? Is she a normal girl or is she a princess?" Absolutely wide eyes and a look of terror. The way she looks at me, I'm slowly morphing into a camel spider while consuming a basket of live kittens. More silence, but this silence is tense. Terrified.
That's how every class at the university goes. Even the students who like to talk just aren't used to speaking in class. We played a game of Telephone and I told them, "It's okay if you get it wrong. It's funny! That's the point of the game" but instead they do absolutely anything they can to cheat, pass notes with the message, text the message further down the line because they are absolutely TERRIFIED of making a mistake. I had to stop the game after there were a lot of group discussions and someone brought out a laptop to look up the phrase I had given to make sure he heard it right. I said, "What's the point of taking an 'oral english' class if you're too afraid to talk?" and then I felt like a mean teacher so I shut up and let them go one. Ugh.
The high schoolers are a little cooler. I think it's because I'm closer to them in age, so I really relate. (They're 17 and 18, my University students are anywhere from 24-30) They'll have discussions and now they're starting to use incredibly difficult vocabulary in ordinary conversation. I put a bunch of hard words on the board, go over them and tell them that each time they use one correctly, they get a penny. American pennies might as well be gold here.
Last thing.... Shenyang is damn pretty at night. The buildings look very drab and grey during the day but at night, everything is lit up by neon and LED. I was driven home at about 11 on Sunday night and had Daft Punk playing in my headphones... I felt like I was going through the Tron grid. Seriously, it's SOOOOO cool. I don't have any pictures of any of the good lights, but here's a little something to leave you with. Zaijian!
