Thursday, September 28, 2006

New holiday plans.

Everyone's leaving for the holiday today! And by everyone I mean Angelyn and Derek. Cindy leaves Sunday, the Lewis family is leaving Monday, and I have no idea when the others are leaving. Maybe today. Anyhoo, I'm planning on having a nice week of sitting around instead of the planned week of travel since I have no one to travel with now. But on the upside, I've been invited to play on the English Department's badminton team in a tournament this week. That should be fun. Two days of badminton, maybe some ping pong sprinkled in there. Frisbee. Who knows, this week could turn out okay.

So last night was pretty awesome. We had to go to English corner, which I dread. If you don't know, English corner is a time set aside each week for people to get together and just practice chatting in English. As a foreign English teacher, I have the honor of "getting" to attend each week. So on Thursday nights from 6:30 until 8:30 we go into a classroom where students crowd entirely too close to us, ask inappropriate questions in bad English, and as soon as one student is done asking you a question the person next to them will ask the same question as if you hadn't just answered it three times. It's usually okay for the first 10 minutes and then the last 110 are torture. Well, this time around we foreign teachers got to give a "self introduction" to the whole group instead of having a mingling session. The students were all seated and we got to stand at the front and tell them about ourselves and why we are in China and then they asked us questions. Because we did this, only the last 30 minutes was unstructured mingling. I almost made it through without wanting to scream. After making our way out of English corner, Angelyn, Derek, and I decided to go to Happy Guy's to eat because we hadn't eaten. At 9pm most restaurants are fairly empty, so we had the place to ourselves. Happy Guy and his wife both came out and were chatting with us while the other employees took care of the cooking and serving. Then, Happy Wife got up and went in the kitchen. When she came back she had a big can of Nescafe instant coffee. Mind you, I wouldn't normally drink that stuff, but desperate times call for desperate measures. That stuff was sooooooo good, let me tell ya. They got a big kick out of the fact that we didn't use the creamer powder stuff that came with it. They would stop everyone who walked past and tell them that we didn't use it. I guess people here don't usually drink black coffee? I dunno. Then we sat around and gave everyone English names, made up songs about coffee, and met some of Happy Guy's siblings. Good times were definitely had.

Yesterday's weather: rain. Tomorrow's forecast: rain. And it's chilly, too! I've been wearing my trusty Arkansas hoody for three days now. Thanks Jennifer and Matthew! Well, I've decided that I'm all blogged out right now. I know, a little disappointing. Sorry! I'm going to watch an episode of Monk (yay for cheap DVDs) and pass the time until LUNCH! I like lunch.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good luck on the upcoming badminton tournament! The important thing is to enjoy while playing. :-D

Anonymous said...

Tony here - I wouldnt' want to play you in badmitton...you're tall, and you've been playing for awhile now...but it's so fun!! Hope you enjoy your break friend. Call me on skype sometime.

Vail said...

Be mean and agressive -- show them the real you :)