So this week was quite the eventful one with Jared, one of the ILP directors here, to see how we're doing a little after mid-semester. They go around to all of the schools in China, Russia, and Ukraine for mid-semester visits each semester, which is a ton if you ask me! It was fun to have him here though. We got some advise on ways we can improve our teaching for the kids benefit and got to go out to dinner with our entire group, Megan's group, Jared, Steve, and a few of the Chinese teachers and the headmasters of our two schools. We had our own private room in the restaurant which is actually pretty common in the restaurants I've been in here in China but we filled that room, that is for sure.
I have to say though...wasn't my most favorite meal here. Everything was extremely spicy. It was almost unbearable to eat any of it. I'm not sure if the headmaster ordered specific things or how that restaurant works but they didn't give us a menu they just started bringing out dishes and it's family style so everyone just takes whatever they want. Well dish after dish it was all spicy! Spicy noodles, spicy green beans, spicy this, spicy that haha. And it wasn't just that I didn't prefer the taste...it was the fact that my lips and entire mouth were on fire! We ended up going to a supermarket after and getting a couple snacks to tide us over because we weren't full. We felt bad that we left so much food but there were a few spicy food lovers on our table that were able to make it look a little more picked over.
But, the best part of the day was the ending when Jared brought out his bag of GOODIES. We had a questionare we filled out over email a few weeks ago and one of the questions was which American candy do you miss most right now. Well, I haven't eaten candy the past few months ever since me and Skyler decided we didn't want to eat any of it so I said what I would really love were some of those Grandma cookies that come in a two pack in vending machines. You'll never guess it...he brought me home made cookies from America! Everyone that didn't put a candy bar got reese's, then there were snickers, butterfingers, starbursts, swedish fish, but no...I got cookies! It seriously made my week that he or his wife or whoever went out of their way to get me cookies instead of candy. I loved it!
After that the weekend was finally underway, I slept in Friday morning until my kindergarten ELE class that I have for 20 minutes three times a week. It is usually an insane class because I am only with them for such a short amount of time that it isn't really possible to reward them and discipline them with tokens and strikes like the normal kindergarten classes. But, this Friday went pretty good! I was able to keep them entertained by a book for an entire 15 minutes and then I pulled out a "shaker" from my bag which was a toilet paper roll, beads, and taped shut but I tell ya they loved it. And I got almost every single one of them to say, "I want to shake it". Haha it was pretty cute.
We ventured across town to Subway for some American food for once and enjoyed that for dinner. Afterwards we headed back to our school for Tae Kwon Do. Our instructor has a performance coming up that he wanted all of us to perform in. Megan's whole group is doing it and he wanted ours to too, well Shantel made sure with everyone that they didn't want to and had Gloria tell him that. Ashley volunteered to do it but he wasn't too happy that the rest of us didn't want to. Well...Emily and I offered to do it because he really wanted us to. So, instead of having the normal class with everyone else, the three of us learned this Tae Kwon Do dance sequence. Oh...and he wants me to do a round off with five back handsprings at the performance! Yep...don't worry, I'll just bust them out after years of not doing any haha. I did 4 at the practice but was scared of running into the wall so I haven't done 5 yet but he was pretty excited about that. The performance is supposed to be Thanksgiving weekend and we're going to be in Beijing next weekend so I don't really know when we're going to get to practice but supposedly this performance is going to be on national TV but who knows!
Other than that we had a pretty relaxing day after practice Friday and Saturday. We played some games, What If and a drawing game like What If and then watched the Prestige. It was a fun weekend but we just can't wait until the next!
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