Chinese Brush Painting

Hey everyone,

I am back here to make another post of the happenings in China. Last Saturday we went over to Mr. Song's house for dinner with Destiny. After dinner Destiny and I learned how to write some Chinese characters, while Josh and Mr. Song played Go.

The fifth character was the one that I drew (Mrs. Song did the rest) and as you can see I do not have the ability to make a straight line :). I got better with practice though, I promise :D.

Here is my handy work after a few more tries. The last one here is mine. I must say I wasn't all that bad.

This is Mrs. Song and me while I was making my first attempt.

Well Josh and I finally got our Chinese names. The first one is me and it is pronounced Jong Lee. It means bright and beautiful. I didn't pick it myself, to let everyone know, because I know that is what my friends are probably thinking :P. The second one is Destiny's name and it is pronounced Dee Hoong. The third one is Josh's name and it is pronounced Jwah Bong Hwah.The surname Zhuo means outstanding and Bang Hua means to help China. So from what I am understanding it means outstanding help to China. Unlike me Josh did pick out his name...joking!

Well that is everything so far. I miss everyone a lot and wish the plane ticket was cheap so everyone could come visit. Hope all is well with everyone back home and I will be in touch.

Love,

Jen

Phoenix Park

So it has been a while since our last post. We've just been very busy. Weekend classes just began so we now work Saturday mornings. We have also started teaching Kindergarten. This week I started to help coach the soccer team, and Jen will be starting to coach a volleyball team soon. Last Thursday a new foreign teacher arrived to teach grades 1 and 2. Her name is Destiny and she is from BC. She is really nice, and it has been good to have another foreign teacher to hang out with.

Last Saturday we went to Phoenix Park, which is here in Liyang. The park was very small, but nice. This city has a lot of history. Here are some of the pictures we took.

This is Destiny, Ray and Jen. Ray is a Chinese English teacher who works at our school who we have made friends with.

The statue in the water is the Gauze-Washing Virgin. We've included the story about her below.

"Over 2500 years ago, Wu Zixu fled from his country, unclear of a false charge. When he arrived in Liyang, he was starving. The Gauze-Washing Virgin gave him some starch to save his life. She then carried a stone and jumped into a river to keep his secret. After ten years, he defeated his enemy in revenge and returned in triumph. When he passed through Liyang, he threw gold seeds into the Lai River in memory of her. She was late named Shi Virgin in recognition of her willingness to sacrifice her life to save others for her chastity."

Here we are just outside Phoenix hall. We got the following information off a plaque in the courtyard.

"In 992, the emperor of the Song Dynasty decreed that the calligraphy works of past dynasties within the palace should be carved on the date-wood plate so that he could grant them to his subjects. The completed works were historically called Chunhua Calligraphy Copybook, and recognized as the first edition of the model calligraphy in China. Currently only one and a half of the calligraphy copybooks exist, with a complete one in Xi'an and a half in Liyang. After the Phoenix Hall was built in this park in 1991, they were modeled and inlaid here."

You can see portions of the copybook in the frames on the wall behind us.

Me, Ray and Destiny.

Another shot of the Gauze-Washing Virgin.

Dinner at Tianmu Lake

This is the fish head soup that is a Tianmu Lake specialty. There are large-headed carp in Tianmu Lake with heads as big as 10 kg. The soup was delicious.

The people we had dinner with were teachers and parents of students from our school. The window in the back of the room looks over the lake. It must be a beautiful view during the day!

The boy slurping his soup is one of Jen's grade 3 students. The other boy is the one that can easily beat me at GO.

Everything was very fancy and the food was delicious. This restaurant was amazing!

It was dark when we arrived, so we didn't get any pictures outside. We will definitely be back to Tianmu Lake to take some pictures during the day time.

My First Time Fishing

On the weekend we went with Donald Song to a small fishing village out in the country side.

This is a picture of Josh's biggest catch. This fish was one of the bigger fish in the pond we were fishing in.

Josh with Donald Song.

This is me fishing...it is was my first time ever and I loved it once I started catching fish!!!

Yay me!!! It took me a while but I finally got one. The first one I caught broke my line and the boy who lives there had to swim into the pond to retrieve it with the fish still attached. The second one I freaked out and it dropped back into the water :S. The third one I caught I was actually able to grab but Josh dropped it back into the water by accident. Finally I got this one and I was so ecstatic! Josh and I had a really good time fishing and we will probably be doing it again if we can find the time.

Entering a comment and contact information

Hey everyone,

Well there have been some questions about publishing comments on our website. You do not have to be a user to be able to post a comment, just identify yourself as other. Input your name, write up your comment and enter the word verification. So now that this is cleared up we hope to be hearing from all of you :P.

In addition, here is our mailing address

Jennifer Rose and Joshua Grimes
Li Yang Bilingual Primary School
18th North Street
Li Yang City, Jiang Su Province, China
213300

Our telephone number here is... 011.86.519.728.0406

Miss you all,

Jen

Teachers' Day

Today was Teachers' Day in China. I had no idea until a little girl from one of my grade 3 classes came up to me with a pink rose and said "happy teachers' day" in her cute little voice. Oh I just melted right there, it was so touching. I had to compose myself to put myself into teacher mode. My next two classes also gave me flowers, awwwww. These kids are the best!!! These kids are honestly the cutest little kids that I have ever seen. Oh, they can be devils at times because some grade 3 classes behave badly as soon as their home room teacher leaves the room and then turn back into attentive students when they return. But for the most part, they are really good.

Josh also got a hard candy from a little girl for teachers' day. He was also really touched (I think he even cried... joke). She came up to him and asked "how do you say this in English?", holding the hard candy in her hand. Josh told her and she said "it's for you, happy teachers' day!". Awww, how sweet!!! Being foreign teachers here is a trade off because they like us a lot better than their regular teachers but their behaviour is not as good with us.

It was so funny because this morning Josh and I had to drag ourselves out of bed. We were up until 3:00am making lesson plans and we had to wake up for 7:00am. We were exhausted and just wanted the day to be over so we could start our weekend. I would not have missed a day like this for the world though! These kids completely brought our spirits up.

Today I taught four grade 3 classes the alphabet. They know the alphabet by song but Grade 3 is when they start learning how to write English. I showed flash cards and then drew pictures on the board (yes I drew pictures) for each letter (ie. an apple for A). I must say I am pretty handy with the chalk. They understood and laughed at my silly drawings. Overall this was an amazing day that couldn't pass by without sharing it with all of you.

Who knew I could be so sentimental!!! Talk to you all later!

A night out with the basketball team

Today Jen and I watched a basketball game between the teachers at our school and another school in Liyang. It was a really good game.

After the game we were invited to join the players from both teams for dinner at the school's restaurant (located in the same building as our apartment, which is nice for us!). The food as always was plentiful and delicious. There was chicken stomach, beef tripe, shrimp, egg, noodles, duck, pork, several things that I don't know the name for, and lots and lots of BEER! Wow, make sure you are ready to handle some alcohol before dining with the Chinese. They say cheers constantly throughout the meal. Before you take a drink you should stand up and say ganbei (bottoms up!) to someone else at the table. Then you down your drink and fill it back up for the next ganbei. We were dining with two basketball teams, including coaches, principles, and vice principles from both schools. So there were a lot of people! That is a lot of "ganbei"! It was a lot of fun.

Not too much else to report. Monday morning Jen and I made our speech. That went really well. I think everybody understood most of what I said in Chinese. They took pictures so hopefully we can get a copy.

Yesterday I played a game of go against a six year old who beat me hands down. These kids are trained from a very young age and they are amazing. Arrangements are being made for me to get some lessons from the go teacher here at the school.

That's it for now. Later!

Dinner with Donald Song and family

After dinner, Mr. Song and I played a game of GO (weiqi). I found out I have a lot to learn about this game.

Mr. Song's wife and mother looked on as we played. It didn't take long before Jen and Mrs. Song went to watch Friends in the bedroom.

Mrs. Song made this paper-cut and gave it to us as a gift. We brought a bottle of maple syrup to give to the Song's.

Our evening with the Song's was very nice. Dinner was delicious. After dinner we all played a game of scrabble and listened to Supertramp. Then, as you have already seen, Mr. Song and I played a game of weiqi. That pretty much wrapped up our evening.

Hope everyone is doing well back at home!

First Day of Class

Hey everyone,

Well Josh and I had our first day of class yesterday. All of my classes were grade 3. The grade 3 kids were so cute!!! My first class started at 10.00am and Josh's first class didn't start until 10:45am, so Josh sat in on my first class. All I have to say is kudos to teachers, this job is not in the least bit easy. I brought my laptop to class to show all the children pictures of Canada and complete chaos errupted. All the kids were soo interested they came running up to the front and crowded around the computer. They were pushing and shoving each other and it was a complete mess. The Chinese teachers got control of them and all was good afterward. There were oohs and awwws for all the pictures, so I was happy. They actually were all familiar with the song that I wanted to teach them, head and shoulders, so that was a complete bust. Mr. Song prepared us by telling us that the first week was going to be very difficult so I wasn't too down with the fact that my first class didn't go so well.

The next period I had off and Josh was teaching, so I got to sit in on his class. He was teaching grade 6. It started off ok with his brief introduction of Canada. He then tried to play a game with the class called traffic jam. That was a complete bust because he was unable to get the rules across to them. He wanted them to get into pairs, and they were not comprehending it at all. It was a good thing I was there because I was able to help Josh demonstrate what to do and they finally understood. The next thing is that they were supposed to be playing in English but they ended up saying everything in Chinese. Then to pass the time Josh wanted to use my computer to show some of my pictures but there weren't any plugs. So we ended up basically with nothing to do for the last ten minutes of class.

After our first classes it was lunch so we went up to our apartment to regroup. We were wondering what the hell did we get ourselves into! LOL. Josh had two classes after lunch and I had four so there was no way we could have what happened during our first class happen for the rest of the day! We revamped our lesson plans and critiqued our teaching strategies. Well let me tell you the rest of our classes that day were amazing!!! For my first class after lunch (Josh had a class at the same time, so we were on our own) the kids sat on the floor and looked at the pictures and I had them repeat everything that was in them. They were also very interested in the pictures but this time everything was more orderly. I gave the lesson about Canada and the kids loved it. They were smiling from ear to ear and even told me thank you when I was done :). That class gave me the momentum to complete the rest of the day and I must say that the rest of the classes were the same, completely awesome. We played games, and they got to practice their English. When I saw Josh for my last class he was just as happy as I was with his afternoon classes. Overall the day started with a slight hiccup but the rest of the day was awesome!!! I now know that Josh and I are going to be able to do this.

One thing that I should mention is that Josh and I are very fortunate to be teaching and living here at Liyang Experimental Primary School. When Josh and I went to get our physical examinations I was talking to some foreign teachers. They were not getting even half the treatment we were getting. They were basically picked up from the airport and dropped off to their apartment without a word being spoken to them for 5 hours. They also do not even have running water...now that is roughing it.

Don't worry a picture of Josh is coming soon! Talk to you all later.