Where In The World Is Kelita? : First week of teaching, typhoons, charades, night dancing, and I'm famous!!

Nihao!! What a week! It has been crazy and fun all at the sames time :) I love it here.

However I wish I knew Chinese! Getting around is so hard and whenever there is a tiny bit of English or someone speaks a little English it is all we cling too. Whether it is at the store or trying to get around town or buy tickets, we basically have to use charades. It's kind of fun at restaurants (or scary) because you basically just point to the picture of the food you want to eat. I mean do you *really* know what kind of meat you're getting just from the picture? It's China so I guess you can never be sure! I know a few things in chinese such as hello, thank you, how much, I don't understand, and I'm sorry. I am also learning numbers so that's good! We will be taking Chinese lessons twice a week- Mondays and Tuesdays and that starts this week so I am excited to start learning! (also we will be having chinese painting lessons on wednesday, cooking on thursday and kung fu on Friday!!!!!) It just seems intimidating because there is just SO MUCH to know that no matter what I will never really know the language. Especially when it comes to characters. I kind of am not even going to bother trying to learn characters right now, just focus on speaking. Because the characters seem way to complex- there are thousands! Also I am not very good at learning languages.

Now about my first week of teaching. It was a little hectic of course being the first week. We are still trying to get our schedules and teaching methods to mesh with the chinese teachers. Things aren't quite what they are supposed to be. We have 2 levels I guess you could say of kids. There are about 21 junior kids ages 3-4 and about 15 senior kids ages 5-6. Within each level there are 3 separate groups/classes. That means there are 6 of us teachers. Each teacher is supposed to have her own classroom to teach but they only have two available classes which means 3 classes in each room. Which is crazy! Because kids will get distracted at what the other groups are doing. Or it just gets REALLY loud and I have to yell to communicate with my kids that are sitting right in front of me. Another problem is the Chinese teachers. They aren't supposed to sit in on our lessons but they have one chinese teacher sitting in per group. Which makes it difficult for us English teachers to have authority and control over the kids because the chinese teacher is the one *really* in charge, not us so the kids don't always listen to us. Also the chinese teachers will start talking to the kids in chinese but they are supposed to only be speaking in English during English school. And rule number 1 is "English only, no chinese".

Besides that it is pretty fun but hard getting used to teaching and having the kids pay attention. How we teach is there are 6 different teaching areas. Kitchen, Games, Gym, Arts and Crafts, Shop, and Drama. And each teacher teaches that specific subject and we rotate. For example, I am teaching arts and crafts for the senior class. So I teach my home group, then I rotate and teach the other two senior classes. So I am teaching the same lesson 3 times. Our schedule goes like this (monday thru friday)

8am: arrive at school,head to the cafeteria and eat breakfast

8:30am: after breakfast go to the supply room and finish getting ready for our lessons if needed or just chill

9am: Opening. all classes and teachers get together in the gym room and we go over the date, weather, and sing a couple of songs with the kids and go over rules which are 1) English only 2)eyes on the teacher 3)hands to yourselves 4)stay in your seat and 5) Have fun!

9:20: first rotation of class

9:40: get kids ready for outside time

10:15 have kids change into different clothes and have snack

10:30 second rotation of teaching

10: 55 third rotation of teaching

11:30 english classes are over for the day, we go to the cafeteria and eat lunch

12:45: we will have a different chinese class each day (as mentioned above)

1:45 we go home!

So as you can see our day of teaching is pretty short, and we have the rest of the day to do whatever we want! Which is basically sleep, prepare lessons, hang out, explore the city, etc. In the fall we will also have dinner at the cafeteria but since right now it is summer camp we don't have dinner in the cafeteria so we are on our own for dinner each night. They do give us some money, about 15 yuan per day. Which is actually pretty good for one meal. Sometimes I don't even spend it all. I got a big bowl of soup one time for 10 yuan which is less than 2 dollars!

As for the kids they are so adorable! I think chinese kids are just the cutest. I have actually always thought it would be cool to adopt a little chinese girl. Unfortunately there is some rule against packing them in your suitcase and taking them home with you...I know crazy right??

This is Abby (pronounced A-B) She is the cutest!!

This is Joanne! She is a princess :)

Snack time!

So many cute little shoes

For one of my crafts we made clay monsters. This is Weston and his monster

Annie and her monster!

Aurora with her monster

This is Jack. He is one of my favs.

One of the crafts we made was a crown- this was by far the best! All the girls came up to me and said "teacha it so beautiful!"

The school is open to the outside- pretty cool!

(I Promise I will take a lot more pictures of the kids and better quality ones too! I didn't bring my camera so these are from my phone. Also kids move around a lot so sometimes its hard to get a good picture ;)

Some other things that have happened this week. There have been quite a few rainstorms here and I LOVE IT. I love the rain and I love rainstorms and it reminds me of being home :) Its funny to see how the others girl react to them since most are from Utah and have never seen a rainstorm so they're like freaking out and I'm like this is nothing new for me...Anyways one day it start pouring right when we got off the bus after school so we ran outside in our clothes and got drenched. It was so fun!

My head teacher Maegan and I after the rainstorm!

Friday night we wanted to go to a karaoke place. So we went to one near-ish to where we live only to find out it was a really fancy place- it looked like a fancy hotel. And you have to get a private room to sing in which takes the fun out of karaoke because it would be just our group which we can do at home anyways and not in front of chinese people. And it was all in chinese anyways. It also was really expensive because it included alcohol. So we left and right outside in the parking lot was a group of ladies dancing! I have seen the same thing around my neighborhood every night around 8pm. I asked one of our coordinators what it is and she said that mostly the older women do it to keep their bodies moving and stay healthy and etc etc. I have always wanted to join so we decided to join them! After the first song we were going to leave but they wanted us to dance some more! It was so fun and I love dancing and it reminded me of my zumba and folk dancing classes :) There was also a market close by we walked around.

Chandelier at the Karaoke place!!

The karaoke place on the outside and a market

It would have cost 11$ EACH for all 11 of us to use this private karaoke room!!

We accumulated quite the crowd of people. Like no joke...everyone STARES at us. And they start forming crowds and take out their phones to take pictures and sometimes even come up and ask to get a picture with us. Or they want a picture of us with their kids. And they always do the famous "peace" sign. It is also funny when they are always eager to say "HELLO" to us because that's really all the English they know.

Saturday we went to the zoo in Guangzhou. Guangzhou is the airport we flew into about a 2 hour bus ride from where I live. Boy was it an adventure trying to go to the zoo. Our coordinator was nice to show us the day before how to get to the train station to buy tickets. So Saturday we left around 7am. Took 2 buses to get to the train station in downtown Zhongshan that took about 1.5 hours. Then our train left at 9:30am. The train ride only took about 30 minutes to Guangzhou (it was a really fast train!). Then we had to find our way to the zoo from there. We tried to figure out a bus but so many people told us different buses and we were so confused so after a long time we decided to take the metro and we had to switch lines on the metro once. FINALLY we got to the zoo around 12:30! It started raining as soon as we got there but it didnt rain for long. The zoo was pretty cool- nothing much different from the zoo in Atlanta because we also have giant pandas and red pandas there. But for everyone in utah (basically my whole group) where there really isn't much there, they were very impressed by the zoo! It was fun though. Especially at the end- we were the most popular attraction with everyone gathering around us to take pictures. And us just sitting there posing for them, haha. There was a part of the park where they had a pool of goldfish and the kids were practically butt naked (some of them literally) standing in the pool trying to catch the fish. Also the kids just go to the bathroom on the sidewalks!

The main attraction at the zoo. Posing for pictures!

Red pandas- SO ADORABLE. this little guy came all the way to see us!

Red panda just chillin

This was at the zoo. It is butterfly art. Look closely and you will see it is made completely out of butterflies

It makes me a little sad that they may have killed a bunch of butterflies to make this but at the same time I think it is really cool because it is unique

You scratch my back I'll scratch yours

That is something I find really strange and don't understand about here in China. When we are at the school the kids each have their own individual towel to dry their hands, and we have to wear surgical masks when they eat so we don't breath on their food or something. But they can go to the bathroom on the sidewalk? And not to mention markets with raw chicken and who knows what else all over the floors (I swear its a breeding ground for salmonella and e.coli). And also squatters...WHY CAN'T THEY HAVE NORMAL TOILETS?? I mean its not like they are a third world country. They are pretty advanced as far as technology goes- they aren't exactly poor.But they can't have drinkable tap water and there are high chances of getting all sorts of diseases here?? I don't really understand, but hey it's China.

Germs are everywhere

Oh also one day our coordinators were really nice and helped us get to the downtown city by the bus. We went to a place called Walking Street where its a street just for walking. We went in lots of shops- this area is pretty westernized and lots of the stores look very American, just really cheap prices! Also there is a random mountain the middle of the city that we climbed up- just a short hike and found a pagoda. It was beautiful!

Creepy mannequin aisle. Can you guess who doesn't belong?

Walking Street!

Random mountain/forest in the middle of the city. Sweet!

Allie, Brittany, Me, May, Lisa, Kirsten, Stacy, Taylor, Regan, Clara, Maegan about to climb the mountain

While on our hike in this beautiful forest!

This was taken in the day and the one below was taken at night. It went from day to night in a matter of minutes we were there and the lights of the pagoda turned on!

Maegan, Allie, Regan, Me, Clara!

This is right by the pagoda. I have seen lots of older people in China who do exercises/stretches outside. In order to get this picture I pretend to take a selfie so I wouldn't look creepy taking a picture of her.. But I shouldn't feel that way considering they take pictures of us all the time with no shame......

Other Random Happenstances and Pictures!!!!