Merry Christmas!

Christmas here is lacking a bit in the Christmas spirit. There are plenty of decorations, but none of the love. However, we did find little ways to celebrate. On Christmas eve, one of our students offered us tickets to a Georgian Folk Dance show, Samaia, and she had her chauffeur drive us there! It was a great show and definitely a classy way to spend Christmas eve.

In the theater where more than 2/3rds of the seats were empty

The theater from the outside. Pretty nifty huh?

Merry Christmas!

Christmas day was spent eating pancakes and drinking Starbucks downtown. We bought some dvds and had Japanese Hibachi for dinner. It was very Jewish of us but those are they types of Christmases that I love!

Overall Christmas was a good week! We got three packages in one week! Thank you so much to all who sent one!! We truly enjoyed each and every one. :)

Package from the motherland from my Dad.

Huge package from the glorious USA from my Mom!

Full of delicious goodies!

Package from the Goodpastures!

And we even had a tiny Christmas Tree!

Merry Christmas everyone and a Happy New Year!

Back to School

I realized that I talk about school here assuming like you all know how it’s like. But when one of my friends sent me an email not even knowing what days of the week kids go to school here, I decided to write a bit about school. So here goes.

School here is Monday through Saturday at noon. I can’t say for sure that that’s how it is at all schools, but you can assume it’s relatively similar. Our school holds about 2000+ students all in three different grades and maybe up to three programs. I teach in the AP program and all kids in this program plan on going to college in the US.  It’s a special program that they have to test into OR know/be somebody really important (this is key since some kids do not deserve to be in this program).

The Campus.

The kids live on campus which has dorms, a cafeteria, a soccer stadium and basketball courts, a snack shop, a pharmacy and obviously class rooms. The kids are not allowed to leave this campus EVER. They get dropped off by their parents Sunday night and get picked up Saturday at noon. Sounds pretty miserable to me. They are also required to be in the class room essentially 7am til 10pm. It pretty much sounds like military bootcamp! And the kicker is that during the summer before school all freshman actually do have bootcamp! Anyways, the kids also have scheduled times to shower and a mandatory mid morning exercise routine. O and sometimes the kids order food for delivery. The crappy restaurants across the street pack up the food and walk it across the street. The lazy delivery people use their e-bikes to ride across the street.

The AP program that I am in spends a lot of their time worrying about the kids TOEFL and SAT scores. In fact, as I’ve ranted about previously, they like to frequently cancel classes so the kids could spend the week or two prior to the said exam studying and not worrying about school. Well, I’ve seen these kids study and their “studying” look an awful lot like playing computer games. This is where my rant about the kids not caring about their classes would be, but instead I will just say the following. I think the kids have figured out that their grades get upwardly adjusted (if you know what I mean) by the office (who is essentially paid off by their parents) and therefore have no motivation to even pretend to be engaged in their classes. The smartest kid in my class frequently skips questions on a test simply because he doesn’t want to do it. This does not reflect positively on the Chinese education. Other kids are simply struggling because their English is not good enough so they get lost and behind in class and are also failing (see note about how to get into school above). Overall, my views of the Chinese education have totally done a 180. The work ethic everyone raves about does not exist as far as I know, and the natural smarts in math and sciences is also not particularly there.

The bare hallways that open directly to the courtyard. Aka no heating.

Further, regarding the more fun social aspects of highschool, there are none! There are no dances, no lockers, no signs and posters, the class room walls are pretty much bare, the teachers don’t teach in innovative ways, no musicals, no school spirit, nothing! When one student asked for help with her application to some school in California, I realized that she doesn’t meet the schools requirements because her school does not offer any type of art, music, drama class that she needed to take to apply to that college. The arts as we know and have taken for granted back in America, do not exist in China. Sad. Very Sad.

Bare walls.

Three years worth of stuff piled up. Notice the phrase above the the board...

That is the highschool life of a Chinese student as I have learned. I honestly can’t imagine replacing my memories of class color days, locker groups, football games, pep rallys, homecomings, teachers who did cartwheels, School Chest, art classes with Mr. Bleck, Mr. DHS and school musicals with white walls, cold unheated hallways, same room for three years, no weekends, and zero highschool spirit. I am thankful to have gone to highschool in America.

DHS Warriors celebrating after a victory against HPHS

Our modest accommodations - Hangzhou

Thank you so much, Jim for getting us this fabulous room! We really appreciate it! :)

It's also the last soft bed I've slept in since.

While traveling....

...always be aware of your surrounds. For example, let's say you are taking a long flight of let's say 13 hours, and you are on the plane crammed into the lowest of the low class seats. Obviously, you foresee the next 13 hours to be pure torture. However, being aware of your surrounding can be to your advantage. After boarding, I was obviously eagerly looking around scoping out empty seats, when, could it be?! Three people want to for some unknown reason not sit in their exit row seats. Totally indifferent to looking like an idiot, I half stand up and raise and wave my hand like a kid in junior high who knows the answer to the math problem and wants to be called on first. And score! My entire row gets to move up to exit row seats!!! Leg roooooom galore! I think I was on a pure happy high for the first hour of our flight. My torture chamber that would have been my old seats, magically turned itself into Goda's version of first class. To top it off, we made friends with our stewardess and go served wine from first class. Could things possibly go more our way!

I have officially arrived in China and am hanging out in Beijing waiting for our connecting flight. I cannot believer I'm here!!

Also, while I have this time to thank everyone who came out on Friday to celebrate our departure to the land of pandas. It was so great to see you all and to know I have your support. This next year is going to be filled with ups and downs (hopefully more ups than downs) and it's great to know I have so many friends to help me get through it all. Thanks again! O and sorry for the hot loud mess that was Duffys. I didn't expect that and it totally wasn't planned. But I hope you all had fun regardless!