Getting into the swing of things

Week two of school is in the bag! We both feel like we're getting more comfortable with our coworkers, our students, and just the day to day proceedings of the school itself. I'm really liking all of my classes and my students are all fantastic. They are so respectful and nice and are all very interested in school and learning. They are also really smart! Their English levels vary though from pretty low all the way up to nearly perfect. One of my sophomore students is from Germany and his English is so good I would have never realized he wasn't a native speaker if he hadn't told me. Most students are somewhere in the middle though so I have to be very conscious about my rate of speech and vocabulary when I'm teaching. Anyone who has seen me teach in the United States knows that I talk very very fast when giving instruction. It is easy for me to get carried away with how fast I was talking when I was in front of a class of 90-95% native speakers. I know my few language learners had a hard time keeping up and it was something I had to continually work on and remind myself of. But here, it's much easier to be conscious of my rate of speech when I look out into the class and see 100% ESL students. I also do a better job of explaining vocabulary words they may not know. I really feel like my teaching skills are already improving after only two weeks of class here in China.

Outside of class, we have been spending a lot of time researching where we want to travel on our upcoming breaks. We have Thursday and Friday off next week and the whole first week of October. For the long weekend, we decided to go to Hangzhou (pronounced Hang-Jo: the 'zh' makes a 'j' sound in Chinese). It's only about 90 minutes away by train and is supposed to be beautiful. It's famous for a large lake and lots of great parks. We were advised to stay in hostels anytime we travel because they are significantly cheaper than hotels. The website we were given makes it really easy to compare hostels and book online. We're not quite adventurous enough to try the dorm style rooms, so we will be staying in a private room. And if it turns out hostels aren't our thing, we'll make the switch back to hotels. For the long break in October, we wanted to visit the ancient mountain town of Fenghuang in the Wuyi Mountains. We had even reserved a hostel there also, but then found out we'll need to go to Hong Kong instead to get our permanent work visas. Luckily we hadn't put any money down yet for the hostel and it was easy to cancel. So Hong Kong it is for the big break, where we will spend about a day or so at the consulate and the rest of the week exploring. The nice part is the school is paying for our flights and two nights of the hotel since we're being sent there for official business. We were really looking forward to Fenghuang, but we've also been wanting to see Hong Kong; and since the school is paying, we're okay with saving the mountains for a different break. But the break we're REALLY excited about is Chinese New Year at the end of January/first of February. We have three weeks off and have decided to go El Nido, Philippines. It is supposed to be absolutely gorgeous there and crazy cheap. The flight will be the most expensive part but we're going to check prices every day and should be able to get reasonable tickets. We've already booked our resort though, which was only about $40 a night. The pictures of El Nido remind us a lot of our honeymoon in Jamaica - we're super excited!

On Friday night we unwound a bit by going out for drinks for the first time with coworkers. We started at the apartment of an Australian teachers aid for 2nd grade. The five people present represented the countries of the US, the UK, and Australia. It was a lot of fun talking about our different accents and how things are pronounced differently in certain places or just go by a different name all together. It was a really interesting conversation and cool to hear how the same things are different in other parts of the world. After that, we all left and met up with a few other teachers at a small bar downtown. We ate, played pool, listened to music, and just enjoyed having conversations that didn't include lesson plans, daily schedules, or students. We really needed the break and enjoyed unwinding. It was also good to get to know some of our coworkers outside of school. Saturday has mostly been about relaxing. I went to the bank this morning and figured out the process of sending money back to the United States. Everything here is so complicated I really didn't expect it to work out. It was pretty easy though and they said the money should arrive in about a week. The rest of the day we have just relaxed and watched Netflix/napped. Sunday, as usual, will be about lesson planning and preparing for the upcoming week. We've done a good job of establishing a weekly schedule, which has really helped with adjusting to the stress of moving to a new country. Figuring out things like the grocery store, bus schedules, banks, and cell phones has helped a lot also. We're getting more and more comfortable as time goes one.

Thanks again for reading,

Hunter

PS - I'm really looking forward to the A&M game tonight! I was told about a British website where you can stream most sporting events live. It's kind of a drag that it will be playing at 3:00 AM here, but I feel like I just can't miss the Alabama game! BTHO BAMA!!


No pictures this time, but here are just a few Google images of Hangzhou and El Nido! We can't wait!

                                            

                                            

                                            

The lake and the skyline of Hangzhou. Everyone knows Beijing and Shanghai, but the crazy thing about China is there are like a dozen other cities with 10+ million people that westerners have never even heard of. Hangzhou is one of those cities.

                                            

                                            

El Nido!

                                            

Our bed and breakfast!