A weekend of FUN!

Well, here it is Monday morning. It was quite an interesting weekend. Friday night we were slated to have a "Western" meal courtesy of a restaurant in town. When the 12 of us got there, the owner informed us that he had been too busy to arrange all that other stuff, but he would provide some great Chinese food. It was great, I can't lie, but nothing will suffice when you're expecting pizza and BBQ. But we made up for it afterwards. Across the street from the restaurant is a place called The People's Square. It's a big town square type area, a huge open plaza. I guess at night people go there and do these traditional dances and form little community orchestras and stuff. It seemed to be mostly senior citizens so we added a little bit of youth to the party and joined in the dancing. I say we, what I mean is most of us. Some of us don't really have any moves. But it made for a fun night.

Saturday was a free day for the most part. Some of us played frisbee before lunch, which always draws a crowd here. Then the Lewis family and Angelyn went to Square Mountain, a.k.a. Four Table Mountain. It's a great place to walk around and there's a park with giant fake mushrooms that make you feel like you're at Disneyland or something. I couldn't go because I had a Taiqi lesson at 2. So I stayed, ate lunch, and rested up for my big lesson. At 2 I went down to Happy Guy's to meet my teacher. And we sat and waited. And waited. And waited. So at 3 my teacher showed up finally and we set out to find a place big enough to learn Taiqi. We ended up in the open space in front of my apartment. For about an hour he showed me move after move. He claims he only taught me six moves, but it feels more like sixty. I got a good video of him doing the routine he taught me, but I'm inept and can't figure out how to post a video on here. My teacher's only 14, but he studied at Wudang Mountain for 3 years (I think I said 13 and 4 last time) so he's got the poses down pretty good. I'm not quite as fluid and graceful as him but I can at least remember all the moves, which is good. After my lesson I relaxed and cleaned up, then at 6 some of us went to find a place to eat. We invited some Chinese students that we knew so that we could begin hanging out with more Chinese and less Americans. We walked down the street and found a new restaurant, so we all decided to be adventurous and try it out. It ended up being really good. One of the girls who works there was kind of scary at first, in a Goth kind of way. She was wearing all black and was super pale. But she ended up being really nice. I think I would go back there just for the service. Afterwards we sauntered around for a while and came back to our building for a rousing session of Uno. You've never played Uno until you play it with Chinese students. We had picked up one or two more people at this point, not English speaking, so it was fun to teach Uno to them. The evening ended with the students hurrying back to their dorms before 11:30 because at 11:30 sharp the gates are locked and they can't get in until morning. Kind of a bizarre curfew. You don't get in trouble for being out late, you just have to sleep outside.

Sunday started off busy and then kind of wound down. In the morning a bunch of us Met together and had a good time getting to know each other and Learning different things. Then a large group of us went to lunch together. After that, my day was pretty much over except for the 30 minutes when Happy Guy's nephew and daughter came over to see if I could give them an English lesson. That was fun. I got to give them names, so Happy Daughter is now Amber and Happy Nephew is now Luke. As in Luke Skywalker, because he's a Taiqi master. Yeah yeah.

Today has been booooooring, but tonight I have a class from 6:45 to 9:10. The students are doing introductions, which will take up 2 of the 3 periods since I have 40 students. Then we'll do something fun. Who knows? I'll figure it out before then. I'm sure we'll do some super exciting pronunciation exercise. Woo hoo! Rice, lice. Super, supper. Net, let. Fun times.

Well, that's all for now. I'm going to brush up on my skilz and see if I can get this video on here. Until then, don't do drugs!