Soccer game and Halloween!

I have been slacking off big time when it comes to my blog so I will attempt to fix this and cram in lots of info.

Classes have been going very well and I feel like a real teacher, haha. It takes time to feel out each class and figure out how to get them to participate because most of them are pretty shy. The students are great I love them and they are full of questions.

more students!

students!

I also finally feel like I live here – I think before now I still felt like I was on vacation or something. I am also getting Chinese lessons twice a week from my friend Phoenix, and she says my pronunciation is good, but my written Chinese is shit. The characters are like small art projects…I am pretty sure I won’t be able to retain any of them for future use.

m outside my teaching building

more from outside my teaching building

Last weekend some of us went an hour away into the city and watched a professional soccer game. It was a great time; we all started getting really into it after this man started a fire in the stadium seating area and got arrested. It was bring your own beer, and oddly enough we were the only ones drinking. We learned some Chinese chants and cheers and fit right in. Right outside of the stadium they were having a fair so we rode some of the sketchy looking rides and did some bumper boating.

Kathryn and I

go chongqing go!

view from the stadium

We went back to our hostel and had some drinks to pre-game before we went out again and we met a ton of people. We started out playing cards and more and more people joined in. We had some Chinese, Canadians, French, a Kenyan, and several Brits all playing a huge game of circle of death. It turned out to be a great night because all twenty of us went out. Maybe a little too much fun because I ended up losing my wallet in one of the many bars we went to that night. Luckily, I only lost like 250 yuan, and I ended up getting a call from one of the bars telling me they found my wallet. Wooohoo! And then we found this shopping center that had a subway, starbucks, and dairy queen so for the short amount of time I was there, I was in heaven haha.

the bar where i lost my wallet

The people from the hostel came out with us for a night on the town

Next order of business…Halloween. At first I thought that the Chinese didn’t celebrate it but maybe knew about the holiday through movies and such. NOPE, they knew literally nothing about Halloween so it was interesting to think about the holiday from a different point of view. When I did my lecture on Halloween and traditions that go along with it I could see why the Chinese people thought it was a very odd holiday.

basketball game in costume

For Halloween we made gravestones and bats made out of cardboard to decorate our apartments. It was hard to dress up since there are no costume stores…a party city would have been very helpful! But considering our resources we did well; I was a zombie, Alison was a panda, Lily was a witch, Peter was superman, Mat and our friend Phoenix were both pirates, two other American teachers were an aerobics teacher and a pregnant lady. During the day we went around campus in our costumes and took pictures with our students. We also played a pick up game of basketball in our outfits and tons of students took pictures with us.

after we played basketball in costmes

my fav panda and pirate

Phil loves his home country haha. and he wears short shorts

wait pregnant ladies cant do that!

Then at night we went to a local night club. The English society and the bar wanted us to perform so we made a deal…if we performed three songs we could have free beer all night. So we sang Backstreet boys “as long as you love me” and danced to thriller…which ended up starting a congo line that included like 50 people, and then we sang “country road” a john Denver techno remix.There were other people that performed including a drag queen.

long congo line that we did during thriller

the bar owner became Kathryn's baby daddy

The owner of the bar dressed up in three diff cotumes this was one

More of my students came to see me

Some guy said it was his girlfriend’s birthday so we serenaded her and she gave us delicious cake. A bunch of our students came to see us sing and dance and to take pictures with us. Some of them even dressed up in costume too!

Lovely students of mine

Matt and some students

Pre-gaming

Some of my favorite students and I

The bar owner and the group

At 2 o’clock in the morning we went with these people we met to get some barbeque. The Chinese idea of barbeque is just cooking random things outside on a skillet like lamb on a stick. The octopus was actually the best thing we ate..it was freakin delicious!

All in all it was a very fun Halloween and it was a lot of fun to introduce the holiday to the Chinese students =)

they had a bunch of masks to give away at the club

Soccer game and Halloween!

Chongqing, China