May Day And More

This past week has been pretty good! Because of exams I didn't teach Monday and I don't ever have classes on Tuesday. Luckily I still had training for the company last week so that kept me kind of busy. Last week of training went really well. The three girls that were 'regulars' told me facts about certain lights and then I wrote out something for them to say about the lights. It sounds boring but it was actually quite fun. We all got along very well and were able to laugh about things. After training Remy would take me to her house for lunch which was a nice change from eating in the cafeteria every day. One of the days after lunch Remy took me to an unused bedroom and had me take a rest. I didn't think I'd be able to sleep at all because it seemed a little uncomfortable but I actually did sleep and had a very nice rest.
I also started tutoring Remy's mom last week. She takes me out to dinner every night and we eat and I try to tell her what foods are. She doesn't speak any English and I don't speak any conversational Chinese so sometimes it gets a little awkward. Remy tries to come with us but she can't always make it, she has a family and such. One night we went to the coffee shop here for tutoring (I got a smoothie for those of you who might have been wondering). I taught her numbers 1-10. She did really well on all the numbers except six which is really close to the word sex in case any of you haven't noticed that one before. So, we were sitting in this cute little coffee shop that has nice French music playing in the background and is just a lovely atmosphere and Remy's mom is yelling (And she is a loud woman so it really was yelling) "One, two, three, four, five, SEX!" And I'm trying to say "I i i i!" and she's just not getting it. This goes on for probably five minutes before Remy stepped in and helped out. She said six once and her mom got it. Then on Friday we went out to dinner the two of us and then back to her house for some tutoring. There wasn't much tutoring that went on there. I'm sure most of you know that in China the son and his wife live with the son's parents and this is the case here. So the only one's home were Remy's mom and Remy's dad's mom. I'd met her before she's quite nice (At least I think so, it's hard to be sure when you've got a language barrier). Well the two of them were talking and then the next thing I knew a huge fight had broken out. They were yelling at one another going on and on and I was sitting there awkwardly wondering what they were fighting about and what exactly was protocol here. It ended with grandma picking up some beads and waving her hands and then walking into the other room. Remy's mom went into another room too and I was wondering if maybe I should just slip away quietly. Eventually Remy's mom came back and we did a little tutoring (She could not say light all she could say was night).
For classes I played two truths and a lie. It was a lot of fun actually. I was trying to teach them about being creative, not exactly something that can really be taught, especially in high school. For my two truths and a lie I did I have never broken any bones,  I really am married but my husband works for the government so China wouldn't let him in, and when I was little I cut open my forehead on a slide and had to go to the hospital to be sewn up. Every one of my classes was able to figure out that I was not married. For one of my classes I changed it to me and the Scottish man were secretly dating but no on bought that one either. Not sure why... The answers they gave were pretty good too. Some of my classes took a while to get the hang of it but eventually they all got it. I told them from the beginning that if anyone said "I like to play basketball, I like to sleep, I like computer games, or I don't like to study" they would buy me ice cream because every single student gives those answers. Sad to say no one had to buy me ice cream.  One class tried really hard to get me my ice cream though. Whenever they felt the person hadn't given creative enough answers they would yell "That wasn't creative! They must buy us all ice cream!" My favorite was class 5 though. For some reason they decided to write their answers on the board and things got crazy from there. It was really like watching a soap opera there was so much drama going on in that class that was revealed during those measly 45 minutes. The students would come up and write some names on the board and say that they were in love or dating. My favorite was one student wrote that two other students talked on the phone from 10pm to 11pm and that was a huge scandel. I'd realized I'd been in China too long because I really did feel like that was scandelous behavior! There was one moment that was slightly awkward, one of those moments where I really am just not sure what happened. I think one of my students might have come out of the closet if you know what I mean. He volunteered to go first and I was all excited because he's one of my favorite students and I knew he'd have funny answers. Well he wrote them on the board and one of them that he wrote was "I am a gaye". I was assuming that was going to be the lie but he picked something different. Then I asked him "By this do you mean happy or... the other thing?" He got this funny grin and answered "The other thing." He started muttering something and I'm pretending like I didn't hear what he said. I really really REALLY wasn't sure what to do after that so eventually I patted his shoulder, thanked him for volunteering, had him sit down and quickly called up someone else. I've talked about this boy before back at the very beginning. The first week of school he was the boy that said he didn't think any of the girls in his class were cute if you remember that story from way back in February. The rest of that class went well though. I didn't even have to ask for volunteers they were running to the front to take their turn.
This past Tuesday was May Day which is China's Labor Day. So the students in grade 1 and 2 got Sunday, Monday and Tuesday off of school. Grade 3 only got Monday and Tuesday off. Since I teach grade 1 I got the longer holiday. This does mean that we had make up classes on Saturday. Yes, I don't really understand it either but that's how China works. So Saturday I taught Monday classes. So I taught Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday last week and got Friday off which was lovely. I'm having the hardest time keeping track of the days with all these breaks! Since I didn't teach my Monday class on Monday I did my two truths and a lie lesson which was lovely. It was kind of a rough class because I didn't really want to be teaching on Saturday and they didn't want to be in class so neither me or the students had any sort of motivation to do much. We played for a little bit and then we all lost interest and some of my students sang songs for us instead. Not sure why but the Chinese love to sing songs, especially in class and such. Probably why KTV is so popular here. One boy came up to the front and had me scoot over so he could use my desk/podium thingy as a drum it appeared. He starts banging on it and singing "We Will Rock You". I was super impressed with it actually. He knew all the words and sounded pretty good. One boy stood up and sang a song with words that sounded like absolute nonsense. For any Arthur fans out there it reminded me of the Crazy Bus song with all the fake sounding words. After he finished I said "Can I ask a question? Was that Chinese?" All the students started laughing and said no and I was thinking that for sure it was made up then. But then they told me it was Japanese as if that explained why I thought it was fake. That class finally ended and the holiday was upon us!
I wasn't traveling anywhere far this holiday. I had planned on going to Suzhou but there was no place to stay and even if there was all the prices were jacked up because it was a holiday. Instead I was going to hang out with my good friend Alicyn from Zhenjinag. She hadn't been able to get very many days off to travel anywhere either. Sunday our plan was to meet at the train station in Zhenjiang and head to Nanjing for church. I made it there just on time but Alicyn had problems with the bus system. She waited for a bus 19 for a half hour before one finally showed up. She saw plenty of bus 19 going the opposite direction so she knew they were running but none came her way. By the time she got there it was 9 and the line to by train tickets was out the door and we knew it'd be at least an hour before we'd be able to get tickets. So we decided to just hang out in Zhenjiang for the day. There was a really cool park by the Yangtze River that we went to for the afternoon. For lunch we went to the best dumpling restaurant I've ever been to. I got boiled dumplings and fried dumplings for 9  yuan. To put that in perspective it's about $1.50 US dollars for lunch. For dinner we went to the best fried rice restaurant I've ever been to and I think it was only 6 yuan which is 1 US dollar. Yeah, don't think I broke the bank with food that day and it all tasted delicious! I went home that night because Alicyn couldn't have people stay at her apartment. Since I wasn't spending the money I'd planned on spending May Holiday with big stuff I didn't feel too bad about it. Monday we had planned on going to a hot spring/spa in Nanjing. Sunday night Alicyn was doing some research on it and realized it was a place where you get a hotel room and spend the night there because it's more of an all day thing. So on Monday we ended up shopping all day. Sadly, we have little to show for our shopping. All the cheap markets don't open until night so it was only the expensive stores open. But we had a good time wandering around and looking at the clothes. The thing I really like about Alicyn is there's never an awkward moment where you worry about what to say. The conversation just flows and it was nice to walk around just chatting. Tuesday I was super lazy. I did go to the Suguo and buy some groceries but that was about it. The exciting part about that was to celebrate May Day I bought peanut butter and as a treat I dipped some really good cookies in the peanut butter. Oh it tasted like Nutter Butters. Then I got really crazy and finished up a Symphony Bar with peanut butter and these delicous cookies. That night I went over to Rick and Sarah's, who also didn't travel anywhere for the holiday, and we went out to dinner. I just want to pause in this story to say I have the best mom in the world. Here's why: (Any of you who know me well will either A. Agree that my mom is the best mom in the world because of this or B. At least acknowledge that I would think that because they don't want to get in trouble with their own mothers) she sent me popcorn. Popcorn is a staple of life for me and not something you get in China. Oh sure they sell stuff that says "American Style Popcorn" at the grocery stores but then you eat it and wonder who told them this is American style popcorn. So after dinner the three of us went back to their place where we watched "Hitch" and ate popcorn. It was the best night of my life! So, I didn't do anything spectacular for holiday but I had a really good time relaxing a bit more and I don't regret not traveling farther than Zhenjiang.