Babies in China :) 宝宝

   

      

Ai yao tan dang dang

(Love should be honest) 

This song is huge right now. My students love it :) 

In the classroom!

This is my class of Tourism Sophomores. In the spirit of the Presidential election, we had our own class elections. The students were split into groups and then had to come up with at least five things they would do to help the school, and then have a campaign for why they would be the best candidate for class president. Here are the things they came up with :) 

Hiking and Shao Kao

Hiking and Shao Kao

One Friday afternoon my students took me hiking up Tai Bai Yuan, a huge rock/mountain behind Wanzhou and at the top we made Shao Kao which is like Chinese BBQ but super spicy. It was a really fun day!

Happy Thanksgiving!!

感恩节快乐

In my classes we had a short presentation about Thanksgiving and its history and then we talked about what "we are thankful for." Here is their lovely list :) 

-Parents - teachers - classmates - friends - family -yoga - siblings - country/China - community  and of course the necessities ....food, water and air.

visiting ching long pu bu 瀑布

Visiting Ching Long Pu Bu with the host family!

It is the widest waterfall in all of Asia they said. And we got to see an awesome buddhist temple tucked away in the caves

   

Halloween in China

Happy Halloween from China!

Tomorrow is Halloween, so of course I decided it would be a great idea to teach my students about Halloween! We talked about trick-or-treating, haunted houses, ghosts, witches, black cats and vampires. We even watched a clip from Corpse Bride - ya know the part where Victor goes to the underworld and the skeletons are all singing. Well, anyways they loved it and thought it was hilarious and kind of crazy. When you look at it from an outside perspective (specifically 8,000 miles away outside) it does seem like a pretty crazy holiday - celebrating scary things and dead spirits. Well, at the end of the lesson we talked about what scares us. I asked if ghosts scare them and they all yelled out NO! I was shocked. Why not I said?? In the US the majority of us find the idea of ghosts pretty scary. They kept laughing and saying... No no no! Ghosts are cute! Ha, that's one I hadn't heard before. Cultural encounters come at the most unexpected moments. Then of course, I had to ask, "what scares you then if not ghosts?" The majority of them yelled out SNAKES in unison! And then dogs. A lot of girls yelled dogs. The first thing that came to my mind was, spiders, ghosts, witches, evil spirits, demons etc.... not snakes! And definitely not dogs! Who knew, my Chinese students find dogs and snakes so terrifying. I'll have to look into why that is at some point.