First week coming to a close

It has been a very busy and exciting first week in China. We have been busy getting shown around town and learning Chinese from the Chinese English teachers. Tomorrow is the first day of classes so we are pretty nervous about that! Jen will be teaching grades 3 and 5, and I will be teaching grades 4 and 6.

Earlier in the week we got a phone call from one of the Chinese English teachers (Pike) asking us to come to a teachers meeting. It was 8am and we weren't quite ready yet. After we rushed to get ready and met Pike at 8:15 he told us that they would like us to make a speech in front of all the teachers at the school. All 200 of them! So in a few minutes we quickly prepared a few words. During each of our speeches we had Pike translate for us. We even got them to laugh when Jen joked about how hot it is here and I joked about how much green tea everybody drinks in China.

This coming Monday the school has asked us to make a speech in front of the whole school (3000 students and 200 teachers). This time Jen will be making the speech in English and I will be the one (trying) to make the speech in Chinese. That will be very interesting!

Today Jen and I joined some of the teachers for some basketball. I have never played basketball in so much heat. It was a lot of fun though.

Tonight we eat our last free meal in the restaurant across the street from the school. After this we can either start cooking for ourselves or eating in the canteen with the other teachers. Eating in the canteen will only cost us about $1 a day for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

Guess it is time to get going. Time to go eat and then plan for our first lessons tomorrow!

Zai Jian!