Monday Sept 10 (but really 16th. I had no time to write this before so I’m writing it now. Shhhh)
That was such a super fun and exciting plane ride we ZZzzzzzzz……
I apologize for my fragmented and confusing blog post. It was really late at night and I was half asleep when I wrote it. My plan was to write out what happened and after I got some sleep I would fix the problems. Where my plan fell apart was after we landed in Hong Kong and there was Wifi, Brodie quickly posted both blog entries when I was off in the bathroom, completely oblivious until it was to late.
After we landed and got off the plane the five of us (Allayna, Kelly, Tomi, Brodie and I) met with Paul and Mark (Mark is the manager/teacher at Dong Shan Kou (sounds like don shang ko) and I think Paul is the manager of all the training centers. He works for ACT (the place that trains teachers) and he works for CIEO (the place that employs teachers).
We all went on to a bus that the school owned and drove us to our garden (the gated community that we live, they call them gardens because there are plants EVERYWHERE!! There’re plants living outside here that I’ve seen in indoor gardens at home. That is very strange to me).
We had the choice between a four bedroom house and a three bedroom house. Two people would live in the three bedroom house and the other three would live in the four bedroom house. Brodie and I got the three bedroom house to ourselves (yay) and Kelly, Allayna and Tomi got the four bedroom house.
We basically walked through the doors, tore through our luggage (gently, we gently tore through our luggage), found our PJ's and went to bed, leaving behind a huge mess everywhere.
Recap of the rest of the week.
Tuesday Sept 11 (or is it?)
Got lost and wandered around down town Guangzhou for hours trying to find the kindergarten because we were 10 minutes late for meeting the group at the bus and they left without us- the day was surprisingly fun :) got to meet some new people from the training centres like Eve our Chinese language teacher. A little old lady who didn't speak a word of English tried to explain where the sub way was and ended up walking us four blocks to get to it, she was so awesome!
Wednesday Sept 12
Went to new training center Taojin.... not my favourite school to be at.
Thursday Sept 13
Started Chinese classes. re-met Eve and our 2-ish hour break time ended abruptly because Chinese classes took up the time.
Friday Sept 14
Went to another new training center Tianhe (sounds like Tea-and-huh). Definitely my favourite training centre to go to. They have real toilets! :D.
Saturday Sept 15
Had a full day at the training center with Chino and Adam (managers of the training centres). Ended the day at 6:20 instead of 8:30 which was so nice.
Sunday Sep 16 (finally writing this on the day it happened)
Wait what?! Sunday? I thought it was Saturday!
It is now 8pm and I am just now remembering its Sunday. It’s scary how on the ball I am :P.
Last night we planned to sleep in till noon because we’ve been waking up at 6am and getting to sleep at 10pm,. By itself is not really that big of a deal, but we had to run to catch the bus (our house is probably 4 times as far from the front gate as the rest of the groups house), depending on the day/time catch either another bus or a subway train, get to the school before 7:30 and watch a kindergarten or training center, then go to the subway and head for the next school which is the training center, either sit in on a class and participate in running a game or write notes about the class for home work or get the how-to-teach-English class, that ends at 8:30. After all that we make our way home and crash.
So I tried to watch The Avengers on my laptop (thank you Dad and Jory for getting it to work J) but we only managed to watch half of it before falling asleep. Brodie’s new cell phone kept getting scam phone calls really early in the morning and then the alarm that Allana had put on it so that it would wake us up (Friday we slept in because our alarm was confusing and Brodie and I at different points in the night managed to make it go off at midnight and then not go off at all, we weren’t late for classes though) it went off at around 6am and she kept hitting snooze because she couldn’t get it to stop all together, so she turned it off and went to bed.
Tomi, Kelly and I all had nightmares last night for some reason which was bizzare to me.
I forgot it was the day of rest so Brodie and I took the day off of school, home work and traveling by scrubbing and tidying our house. We found some cleaning supplies in our house like ‘Mr. Muscle” which I assume is the Mr. Clean knock-off and some Pledge for the hard wood floors. OH! We have hard wood floors :D and there’s a three step thing made of marble stuff leading from the living room up to the rest of the house, they are really pretty! Anyway we ran out of pledge after I cleaned two of the bedrooms and half the hallway, and Brodie wanted kitchen stuff and a phone card because she barely had money on her phone.
So we walked down five flights of stairs out the door and realized how hot and sunny it was, turned around, walked back up the five flights of stairs, got hats and an umbrella (thanks Gramma Shirley J), and went back down the stairs. If we leave the front gate to our garden and walk across the street then there are a row of stores, so that's what we did. There was a 7 eleven (which are EVERYWHERE, and a fast food restaurant called Kungfu. We have two directions to two different schools that tell us to find a kungfu place.). 7 eleven is where we were told to buy new phone cards.
Then we found a small convenient store that we bought cleaning supplies, another cloth, a mop and plastic bowl to put dirty laundry in (but we changed our minds and used it to wash dishes. I hope it doesn’t melt :S)
The check out lady spoke zero English (or she’s faking it ) and gestured to ask if we wanted a plastic bag (which we have to pay for. Go environmental people!) and I always either forget to bring those small fabric bags that fold up (sorry gramma) or have no room to be able to bring them, so I said sure for the plastic bag. Brodie chirped in then and tried to say we had one (because of course NOW she brings the fabric bag) but the lady didn’t hear or (or wasn’t listening :P) and used the plastic bag. Both Brodie and I sighed in defeat and left the store.
We got home and tried to get the phone card to work. Brodie made it so far with the directions that the phone person gave her but got stuck. So we decided that we wanted to call Mark (because he is the guy who helped us actually get the phone because he’s awesome :P) but the spare phone we got last Monday was with Alana at the other house. So we walked to the other house and called Mark. Actually we called a wrong number the first time thinking it was Mark and started throwing questions at this poor Chinese guy who had no idea what she was asking. After we figured that out and called Mark Brodie figured out the problem she had with the phone card and got the money to work (yay). The plan for Sunday was to watch Ollie’s football game (soccer not American football) but Brodie and I wanted to finish cleaning so we didn’t go, and it turns out there was a riot downtown where the football game was so the rest of the group stayed home as well (lucky decision making on our part, eh?).
When Brodie and I got home we were doing laundry and discovered that our newly clean and dry cloths felt stiff and weird so we went back to the store again to get laundry detergent. We ended up buying the laundry detergent and a scrub brush, a giant Pepsi (so we could just fill glasses with pop instead of buying small Pepsi bottles), noodles (yay), rice (yay) and chicken flavored seasoning (less yay). We brought the stuff to the counter and the checkout lady laughed when she saw us again. She asked if we wanted a plastic bag and Brodie almost screamed NO! whipped out the fabric bag and finished her presentation with a “Ta-da!” and the checkout lady laughed again. There was an old lady standing behind us when we were buying our stuff, she pointed at something on the counter and gave us a thumbs up. Brodie thought that was awesome, we had something in our pile of stuff that had been a good choice (whether that was the big bag of rice or the chopsticks, I don’t know). Then the old lady helped us by holding onto one of the handle of the fabric bag while Brodie had the other one (I didn’t see this happening because I was looking for my wallet. That old lady was so nice J, makes living here really nice too.
We went home and heard about the riot. Then invited everyone to our house for trying out these new noodles and seeing if they’re any good. We had pizza at their house last night so its fair, and Kelly was the only one that's actually seen our house while Brodie and I have seen their house twice.
We made the noodles by heating up water (In a kettle we bought and used for the first time today :D) and poured it into a bowl (or a cup), put the noodles in the bowl and poured in the seasoning. Very simple. Though we noticed the seasoning smelled kinda peppery. The noodles tasted very bland… like VERY bland. Almost like there wasn’t anything in the water at all. We read the package of seasoning again and Kelly pointed out that this wasn’t chicken flavored seasoning, but that it was actually seasoning for flavoring a roasted chicken >.<
Wow I feel dumb. So we ended up ordering pizza again and ate that instead.
Lesson learned. Don’t be dyslexic when buying food J.
Still have to finish my homework. I had a sheet of paper on the second day that explained how we’re supposed to make a journal entry, but when I get home I’m too tired to do homework, let alone read the sheet. So I thought I knew what it said but I was sorely mistaken, Darn. Every week we need to hand in a journal entry about each class we saw, what we liked, what we didn’t, and why. we needed three things about each one of those things PER TEACHER. I thought we needed to talk about three teacher >.< again, DARN!! So my workload has gotten bigger so I’m going to stop Blogging and get back to work.
Well I was told that tomorrow the Internet people are coming so we’ll finally be able to skype and post these blog updates! Fingers crossed that it actually works out.
Thanks for reading (even though most of it was talking about cleaning and shopping)
Makenzie (which is a name that most of the kids can not pronounce)
Oh PS! our curtisart and hotmail accounts are not working so we made a gmail account. if you're wanting to say hi just ask my parents for the new email address :) thanks.
OMG I love you guys XD that was the best post ever from the Fivelands!!! I miss you guys so much... and oddly enough I keep seeing Chinese version of people I know 0.o so far there's been Mom, Dad, Jory, Jayden (he was like a mirror image it was so freaky. I'd take a picture to show you but none of my cameras are currently working and it would seem a bit strange to randomly take a picture of one of the students lol), a little girl that reminded me of Kalei, and the funniest one has got to be the Paul look alike I saw today (to those who don't know, Paul is the manager for the ACT training program we're in. he also works for CIEO which is the school that this program was made for), but the Chinese guy had a big gut like Paul, same almost shaved head, glasses, messenger bag, black shirt and blue jeans, the way he talked on his cellphone and his goofy walk, was identical. I almost fell over laughing, it was awesome.
There're some random things that I had to get used to,living in china, that I didn't see coming. Like daily showers. Normally I would have a shower every second or third day (basically when my hair started to get greasy) but here its pretty much mandatory to wash your hair at least once a day. Yesterday I washed my hair in the morning and by the time I got home after walking around in the smog and sweating like a pig, it looked like it hadn't been washed in a week....gross. But it turns out that I am freaking lazy, and procrastinate every second I can before having ANOTHER shower XP.
I made a buddy here (not as good as my buddies back home of course) but he's pretty awesome. his name is Nick and he teaches at the kindergarten that we go to everyday in the morning. it's funny, I don't know if he was always like this or if it happened after being around kids who barely speak English, but he enunciates every sentence he says. it's very difficult to not understand what he says. I love his class, they know me because I watched a few of his classes my first week, and the kids call me teacher Brodie (I've noticed that its a tad difficult for older people to say my name, but not little kids. The older kids and some of the adults call me birdy, boring, brolly, bosley and a bunch of stuff like that, but the 5 year olds say it perfectly lol) I've been having fun texting Nick and I found out that he's a huge nerd with science fiction, monster movies and shows, anime, and dungeons and dragons XD. and he reminds me of a hippy sometimes, like the other day we were talking about the China/Japan fight going on right now, his opinion of it was "I believe hate is a disease and China and Japan fighting is making it spread."..... I have fun conversations with nick lol.
It's been nuts down here. We wake up at either 5:30am or 6:00am, meet 3 out of 4 of the rest of the group (Oliver's lived in china for years so he doesn't live in the supplied housing like the rest of us, and just meets us at the kindergarten) by the front gates of our garden (that's what the gated communities are called) by 7:30am. Take 2 buses to the kindergarten and watch and participate in a class (each of us gets a different teacher) until lunch time and go have lunch (lunch is from 11:30am to 12:30pm) then go to one of 3 training centers (after school program English schools). We have a Chinese lesson until 1:30pm. (small break till 2:30pm or 3:30pm if it's thu. or fri.) then either Paul, Jody, Mark or Adam (all managers for schools) teach us a CIEO teaching theory, basically how to properly teach English to Chinese children. We do that until 4:00pm (5:00pm on thu. and fri.) and have a dinner break till 6:00pm, and then we watch some night classes (in the training centers there are less teachers so 2 of us go with each teacher). Then we finish the class at 8:30 (weekends the kindergartens closed so we spend the whole day watching the training center classes and finish at 6:00pm). When we take the metro home and walk the two or three blocks between the metro and our house, it's about 9:30pm. so we try to do some homework (which we get with the theory class), have a shower (blehhh) and try to go to sleep before it gets late so we can wake up at 5:30am the next day and start all over again.....
I'd like to feel sorry for myself and have people feel bad for me, but the truth is being a kid in China is a hundred times worse than what I'm going through this month. a typical Chinese student will have normal school, then about 5 extra curricular activities like more English classes, and Chinese and math classes BEFORE even coming to the training center. then they have to do their homework in the tiny amount of time they have to be home, and they can't just do it on the weekend because they have more extra curricular stuff on weekends (this is by the parents by the way, its not self inflicted). and on top of that the pressure to get a good mark is ridiculous, kids have gotten a beating for bringing home 97% on a report card.... its hard to tell whether Chinese parents love or hate their kids. it's not like they just decided one day that they wanted to work their kids to death for no reason. basically, there are sooo many people in china, that there are very limited jobs and they're extremely competitive. Adam explained it like, if you don't get into a good kindergarten you wont get into a good primary school, you wont get into a good high school, you wont get into a good college, and you wont get a good job, and if you don't get a good job your F*&%$#!!! a 6 year old broke down in Adams class last week because he asked her if she did the homework (he doesn't hand out serious homework for kids because their stressed as it is. If there's homework to do it's like an extra bonus. He wont dock points but if they do it he'll give them funny-money that they can cash in once a month for erasers and notebooks and stuff. But it's in no way mandatory for them to complete any homework, and he was mostly joking around with her about it, but she took it seriously and cried).
So on that note lets change things to a funnier topic. Oliver. He's the only member of our group who's not from Canada, but instead from Australia. He was born in Taiwan I think and his family traveled around a lot and finally came to China. He's hilariously serious all the time- when we first met he was kind of a jerk to everyone and didn't seem to want anything to do with us, but now he's warmed up to the group and come out of his shell, he's actually pretty funny becaaaaaaauuuuuuse.... he's Germaphobic living in hina HA! XD it's like someone who's scared of water living in Hawaii lol. he constantly gets grossed out by things falling on the floor or people touching stuff like railings or handle things on the train. It's really funny when we bug him about that (we do it all the time, every time there's something disgusting or somewhat gross, we tell Oliver) he always makes this silly disgusted expression that makes everyone laugh. The other day Tomi (toe-me) dropped her water bottle on the bus and it rolled under Oliver's seat and he didn't want to give it back to her because of all the germs on the bus floor (even though 99.9% of what touches her mouth is underneath the lid). So we had a good laugh. I have a theory that Oliver gets back at us by convincing us to try gross food every once and a while (he might legitimately like this gross crap, but I think he's messing with us lol). The only problem is that Oli is starting to rub off on us. We all carry around hand sanitizer, and if one of us whips it out, there's a small line up of us wanting some to clean our hands- we're like gum vultures in high school lol.
And the last thing Ii want to talk about tonight; I will never understand why China sees fit to chew their drinks. Iif it doesn't have pulp, they add gummy chewy crap that serves no purpose except to piss me off when I'm drinking juice lol. So far pop and some juices are safe. I'm getting good at spotting the non-chewy drinks.
Goodnight All, I love and miss everybody, and can't wait to be able to keep in touch better once this month is over.
I'll talk to you guys later, Brodie
There're some random things that I had to get used to,living in china, that I didn't see coming. Like daily showers. Normally I would have a shower every second or third day (basically when my hair started to get greasy) but here its pretty much mandatory to wash your hair at least once a day. Yesterday I washed my hair in the morning and by the time I got home after walking around in the smog and sweating like a pig, it looked like it hadn't been washed in a week....gross. But it turns out that I am freaking lazy, and procrastinate every second I can before having ANOTHER shower XP.
I made a buddy here (not as good as my buddies back home of course) but he's pretty awesome. his name is Nick and he teaches at the kindergarten that we go to everyday in the morning. it's funny, I don't know if he was always like this or if it happened after being around kids who barely speak English, but he enunciates every sentence he says. it's very difficult to not understand what he says. I love his class, they know me because I watched a few of his classes my first week, and the kids call me teacher Brodie (I've noticed that its a tad difficult for older people to say my name, but not little kids. The older kids and some of the adults call me birdy, boring, brolly, bosley and a bunch of stuff like that, but the 5 year olds say it perfectly lol) I've been having fun texting Nick and I found out that he's a huge nerd with science fiction, monster movies and shows, anime, and dungeons and dragons XD. and he reminds me of a hippy sometimes, like the other day we were talking about the China/Japan fight going on right now, his opinion of it was "I believe hate is a disease and China and Japan fighting is making it spread."..... I have fun conversations with nick lol.
It's been nuts down here. We wake up at either 5:30am or 6:00am, meet 3 out of 4 of the rest of the group (Oliver's lived in china for years so he doesn't live in the supplied housing like the rest of us, and just meets us at the kindergarten) by the front gates of our garden (that's what the gated communities are called) by 7:30am. Take 2 buses to the kindergarten and watch and participate in a class (each of us gets a different teacher) until lunch time and go have lunch (lunch is from 11:30am to 12:30pm) then go to one of 3 training centers (after school program English schools). We have a Chinese lesson until 1:30pm. (small break till 2:30pm or 3:30pm if it's thu. or fri.) then either Paul, Jody, Mark or Adam (all managers for schools) teach us a CIEO teaching theory, basically how to properly teach English to Chinese children. We do that until 4:00pm (5:00pm on thu. and fri.) and have a dinner break till 6:00pm, and then we watch some night classes (in the training centers there are less teachers so 2 of us go with each teacher). Then we finish the class at 8:30 (weekends the kindergartens closed so we spend the whole day watching the training center classes and finish at 6:00pm). When we take the metro home and walk the two or three blocks between the metro and our house, it's about 9:30pm. so we try to do some homework (which we get with the theory class), have a shower (blehhh) and try to go to sleep before it gets late so we can wake up at 5:30am the next day and start all over again.....
I'd like to feel sorry for myself and have people feel bad for me, but the truth is being a kid in China is a hundred times worse than what I'm going through this month. a typical Chinese student will have normal school, then about 5 extra curricular activities like more English classes, and Chinese and math classes BEFORE even coming to the training center. then they have to do their homework in the tiny amount of time they have to be home, and they can't just do it on the weekend because they have more extra curricular stuff on weekends (this is by the parents by the way, its not self inflicted). and on top of that the pressure to get a good mark is ridiculous, kids have gotten a beating for bringing home 97% on a report card.... its hard to tell whether Chinese parents love or hate their kids. it's not like they just decided one day that they wanted to work their kids to death for no reason. basically, there are sooo many people in china, that there are very limited jobs and they're extremely competitive. Adam explained it like, if you don't get into a good kindergarten you wont get into a good primary school, you wont get into a good high school, you wont get into a good college, and you wont get a good job, and if you don't get a good job your F*&%$#!!! a 6 year old broke down in Adams class last week because he asked her if she did the homework (he doesn't hand out serious homework for kids because their stressed as it is. If there's homework to do it's like an extra bonus. He wont dock points but if they do it he'll give them funny-money that they can cash in once a month for erasers and notebooks and stuff. But it's in no way mandatory for them to complete any homework, and he was mostly joking around with her about it, but she took it seriously and cried).
So on that note lets change things to a funnier topic. Oliver. He's the only member of our group who's not from Canada, but instead from Australia. He was born in Taiwan I think and his family traveled around a lot and finally came to China. He's hilariously serious all the time- when we first met he was kind of a jerk to everyone and didn't seem to want anything to do with us, but now he's warmed up to the group and come out of his shell, he's actually pretty funny becaaaaaaauuuuuuse.... he's Germaphobic living in hina HA! XD it's like someone who's scared of water living in Hawaii lol. he constantly gets grossed out by things falling on the floor or people touching stuff like railings or handle things on the train. It's really funny when we bug him about that (we do it all the time, every time there's something disgusting or somewhat gross, we tell Oliver) he always makes this silly disgusted expression that makes everyone laugh. The other day Tomi (toe-me) dropped her water bottle on the bus and it rolled under Oliver's seat and he didn't want to give it back to her because of all the germs on the bus floor (even though 99.9% of what touches her mouth is underneath the lid). So we had a good laugh. I have a theory that Oliver gets back at us by convincing us to try gross food every once and a while (he might legitimately like this gross crap, but I think he's messing with us lol). The only problem is that Oli is starting to rub off on us. We all carry around hand sanitizer, and if one of us whips it out, there's a small line up of us wanting some to clean our hands- we're like gum vultures in high school lol.
And the last thing Ii want to talk about tonight; I will never understand why China sees fit to chew their drinks. Iif it doesn't have pulp, they add gummy chewy crap that serves no purpose except to piss me off when I'm drinking juice lol. So far pop and some juices are safe. I'm getting good at spotting the non-chewy drinks.
Goodnight All, I love and miss everybody, and can't wait to be able to keep in touch better once this month is over.
I'll talk to you guys later, Brodie
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