I finally started teaching this week, I forgot I was here to work not just hang out in China for 10 months. Teaching went pretty well, the students are excited to be there b/c they are freshman and are eager to start learning Enlgish. All of my students are studying to be English teachers themselves. More good English names that they had : Fun, Breeze, Diaper, Donkey. They want to know about weird things here are some of the things students wanted to learn about when I asked them.

How to lose weight, why America says/ does mean things to China, are guns easy to get because this particular kid heard everyone and everyone has a gun.(this made me nervous bc he made it sound like he wants to do a school shooting and needs a gun fast), what I think about assisted suicide. (very serious issue to talk about and it is illegal to talk about it in China) and why did michael jackson die on earth? haha

All the students love Obama for some reason.

So things that happened this week: Three of us got talked into doing a radio spot for the campus radio. For 15 mintues we had to talk about random things. They shoved the microphone in our face and at one point forced us to sing the national anthem, which is actually really hard to sing especially when you get to the "land of the free and home of the brave" part. We didn't realize that the radio segment was live and it was broadcast on loud speaker to the entire campus as well. So everyone heard my terrible voice. I don't sing for a reason!

I dont know if i mentioned it but the clothing sizes here are ridiculous. They are like kids sizes and I can fit into ladies size XL or a men's size L. It makes us feel pretty sad but the Chinese are soooo tiny its ridiculous.

There is this guy..Mark of the sky... that loves us and may or may not be stalking all the teachers. The other day he literally popped out of a bush and was like oh hey where are you going? what are you doing? you can come back to my dorm and help me get my balls ( basketballs we were assuming.) and he insisted one of us give him our number. He is by far the creepiest.

Also, there are random electricity blackouts here. they could last 15 min or 10 hours or more. It's bc there isn't enough energy to support the country so it just messes up and stops working every like few days.

We met two more American teachers that are working about 15 min away from us so we made friends with them. We went out for karaoke and did the golf pub crawl game. I took some pictures of that and of a mountain bike ride we went on today. It was scary bc cars, scooters, and pedestrians are everywhere in the street - there are no traffic laws - sooo it was intersting and it was kind of like a frogger game.

anyways I'll post these pics and keep updating. I finally got facebook to kind of work so that was a break through.

peace on earth and goodwill to men

- CZ

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written by  cz74699 on September 26, 2009 from Chongqing, China
from the travel blog: Chongqing, China
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you can tell them that "Michael Jackson died because he did not take care of his skin and he ate too much sugar!" -- compliments of the 4 year old I babysit :)

written by  coot on September 30, 2009

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