Sorry it's been a while

Dalian is an old city but it was occupied by the British in 1858, returned to the Chinese in the 1880s, and then occupied by Japan in 1895. In 1898, the Imperial Russia leased the peninsula.

Our National Holiday trip to Dalian and Qingdao was good. As we told you, five (this is including us) of us foreign teachers joined a Chinese tour (of about 20 Chinese people) for a 5-day trip. We had one tour guide per city and of course, they didn't speak any English but we got lucky. There was a second year college student on the trip with his parents and he ended up being our translator and now, friend.



His name is Tony and he lives and goes to school in the city of Hangzhou. His mother works for the insurance company (owned by the country) and his father works for a bank (again, owned by the country.) Their situation is that the father works in another city and comes home once or twice a month to see his family and so, this holiday for them was important.

Anyway, we got lucky that he was there because if he weren’t, we would have been up a creek with no paddle. He got lucky (of course we think this) because he got to have English Corner every day of his holiday. His parents were thrilled that he had this opportunity with us and showed it by sitting with us every meal and even took us out for dinner one night.

Dalian and Qingdao are coastal cities and beautiful. We flew to Dalian and stayed 2 days. We visited the seaside, saw some interesting buildings, stone carvings and went to an underwater adventure type place with all the bells and whistles -- just like in the states. There was a lot of riding around in a cramped bus and stopping at dried fish and health related buying opportunities. Really, they are both nice places to visit but basically, this trip was an overview chance and if we are interested we’ll go back on our own to see more.
crab on a stick -- we didn't eat any but took a great photo!

Biggest adventure of the holiday was that to get to Qingdao we had to take a ferryboat. We walked into the huge boat (picture attached) at around 9 and left the dock at 9:30PM. We docked at around 3:30AM but paid an extra fee to stay onboard until 5:45AM. Well, this was short time period made for one long night. Let's just say that the bathrooms were horrendous, unforgettable and the people loud and happy. Luckily, the five of us purchased a whole 8-bunk room so that we were by ourselves. This way we didn’t have card playing, seed spitting or endless smoking in the room.

We'll put some more pics from the trip and get back on-board the blog soon with more stuff.

Oh by the way, if anyone knows the answer to this question, please leave a comment or email us – PLEASE.

Question: If a person honks their horn all the time does the mechanism ever break?

And now a word from Cindy...

This was a very busy week for me as I’ve finally started teaching the rest of my eight classes. Wow! Luckily the students are a postgraduate, which just means the students are more mature as they’ve completed their undergraduate work and are now working toward various Masters and Ph.D. degrees.

Some of my students are working in the following fields: Textile Design, Engineering and Chemistry; Material Physics & Chemistry; Biochemistry, Proteomics or Medical Science; Regional Economics; Mechanical & Electronic Engineering; Computer Technology; Applied Chemistry, Psychology and Mathematics; and last but not least (idiom), Art Design which includes Fashion Design and Fine Arts. These are bright folks who not only know why they must improve their oral English but have also taken a minimum of 10 years of written English.

Someone asked me what the physical situation is when we are teaching. Well, the desks and chairs are not movable so there is no putting everyone in a circle. There are usually three or four rows and the desks have 3 to 4 fold-down chairs to a set. The teacher has a podium in front of the class and most of the time the podium is placed on a riser. There’s not that much room to walk around but we do it anyway because none of the FTs can stand at the podium all the time and plus, you’ve got to get down to the people and get warm and fuzzy.

To review, I’ve got two classes on Monday, two classes on Tuesday and then four classes on Thursday. Remember, each class goes for 2 – 50 minute periods so Thursday is a tough day. Only one class, on Monday, is not postgraduate students. I have met all of my students now and they are great.

Now, China’s National Holiday (like our 4th of July) starts this Monday, October 2nd and everyone is off until October 7th but really, the days of the holiday are Thursday and Friday. Now, this is not like in the U.S. where when you’re told you get a week off you get the week off. Here, everyone who either works or goes to school on the day of the actually holiday (in this case Thursday or Friday) must make-up that day, so, my classes held on Thursday had to do a make-up day and we held it yesterday, Saturday.

Remember, I met these students on Thursday of this week so this is our second class day together. In my 8:10AM class we held a discussion on recipes, Western and Chinese. Michael attended that one and I borrowed the toast and peanut butter idea from FT Pauline. We got some great new dishes to try from this group. My second class picked the topic of vacations to talk about and now we’ve got more places to see in China.

The third group of students wanted me to bring to class a problem that I have while here in China as one topic and then each student would bring there own topic. Well, the one problem all of us FTs have is that there is no Hangzhou bus route map in English. I brought this to the class and opened up the possibility of getting them to create something and then we could market and sell the map to all the universities, hotels and tour agencies in Hangzhou. They said they wanted to think about that. For their topic some of the students wrote out presentations and then read them. These included: 1)what it meant to be a student living on campus. 2)how students needed to get more opportunities to talk to foreigners. 3)creating a face-to-face translation service. and 4)Gone With the Wind. That was amazing!

My last class wanted to talk about Western and Chinese cultures. First we discussed whether or not the Chinese culture is slowly dying with all the western influences. They were mixed on this one as many of them thought that a 5,000 year old culture would be hard to kill. Then I reminded them that KFC and McDonalds were doing a great job of marketing and it was money that made the world go around. About America, they didn’t really see that we had a culture since we were only 230 years old and we’re a melting pot of immigrants. That was interesting.

News flash… We’re going away for the National holiday. We and three of the other FTs are going to Qingdao and Dalian and from Monday to Friday we’ll be tourists again but this time, we’ll be a party of 5 FTs within a group of Chinese tourists. Yes, a Chinese tour is what we’ve signed up for here and this should be an adventure. We’ll write upon our return and happy holidays to all.

If you want to know about these two cities go to: http://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/liaoning/dalian/index.htm
http://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/shandong/qingdao/index.htm