Things I was glad to come back to

1. Great friends.
2. A good bowl of rice noodles in broth. (The ideal bowl is served under a tent by the side of the road, and has a good splash of vinegar, some pickled peppers (seriously), 3 or so spoonfuls of crushed peanuts, and a little bit of crushed hot red pepper)
3. My students + teaching
4. My toilet (as long as you're not food poisoned / have giardia, squatting is better)
5. Being able to walk everywhere

Back to school! (and the blog)

I'm back in Songgui after an awesome trip back to the States to see my family. I'm still teaching the same students, and the weather no longer makes me cry in the morning.

It feels good to be back in a lot of ways. Being at home was restful and fun, but it's nice to have more purpose and structure to my days now, and it's great to see the people who I've gotten close to over here again. I brought back a ton of food from the states (an entire suitcase full) and I know it's going to make those times when I really miss home (and food) over here better. It's good to see my students again too! They've remembered a ton over break, and it's good to be back in the classroom.

Right now, school is busy. It's the beginning of the year, so there's a ton of different things that I need to be doing: revising my review plan, planning out the semester (we got a new textbook with different units and order than last year), and getting stuff to the people who manage me. I think this weekend is going to be crucial to getting on top of what I'm doing.

Grading

Grading can be a huge pain. No matter how fast you were, it just takes a lot of time to get through 110 things--whatever those things are. What amazes me though is how willing students are to help out with it. I have students do a lot of my grading for me, and it's awesome. What boggles my mind is I don't give them any sort of reward or anything, but they're so excited to do it. Students complaining because you ran out of things for them to grade for you can really turn a rough day around.

SNICKERMEAL

I'm back! This semester has been incredibly busy, but class is still going well.

One of the things that I've found hard about living out here is eating enough food, especially protein. You just don't tend to eat big hunks of meat as often as you might in the states. When I first came out here, I lost about thirty pounds within two months (I was a little chubby) just because of the change of diet. And, while being skinny is great, I still need more calories and protein if I want to be able to work out and actually have energy afterwards, and so I have invented SNICKERMEAL.

To create SNICKERMEAL, you will need:
A big bowl of oatmeal
A silly amount of peanut butter
One handful of almonds
Two bananas
One scoop of protein powder
A few tablespoons of sugar
A big chopped up snickers bar.*

Put all of those things together. Eat it. It's over 1000 calories of awesome.


*If you have access to both American and Chinese Snickers bar, you should use a Chinese one. They're not as tasty, so you should save the better flavored American snickers for eating on its own afterwards.

Vacation!

For Mid-Autumn Festival I got to go up to the north of Yunnan with a good group of other TFC teachers to go hiking near Meili Xue Shan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meili_Xue_Shan, a mountain in the north of Yunnan. It was really cool, but getting there was scary. The roads up north are very narrow, mostly dirt, and right next to huge cliffs that don't have any sort of guardrail. I think everybody was convinced that they were going to die--I certainly was. It was some really sketchy driving, and I'm glad to be back. Apart from being sketchy it was also really far away, so we had to spend a lot of time in buses, which meant that if you made the bad decision to look outside of the bus, the entire time you'd be stressing about your imminent demise.

The hiking was awesome. We did three days of hiking, and it was really fun. The mountains were picturesque, and the valleys and landscape was epic. It was stunning, and hiking was awesome. I don't have hiking boots in China, so I mostly hiked in my sandals, which amused a great number of Chinese hikers.

On the way up, we stopped in Shangrila, so we had a day to eat delicious food, and bike around. I just really like being able to say that I went to Shangrila....

Anyways, here are some pics!

From biking around in Shangrila

From an earlier trip to Shangrila. This big structures are everywhere, and they're used to dry out crops. This was on the way to Napa Lake

Ready to go hiking

A pic from the hike

Soccer, Sickness, Sadness, and Something Else

So far, this year has been a lot better than last year, despite the added workload. Having some experience, and knowing the curriculum really makes a huge difference, and not worrying about the kids' grades really takes a lot of the stress away. Sadly, this past week I've been a little sick, and with two classes that means that a huge amount of tests and homework has built up into a heavy and terrifying stack of sadness (see below). 

This past weekend we headed down to Dali for a professional development conference (about 5 hours closer than the conferences we had to go to last year) and got to meet all the rest of the new fellows, which was sweet! Good food and good people is an awesome combination. 

Being in Dali also meant that I had a chance to buy soccer balls for the girls' team that I want to start. Girls never seem to get a chance to play basketball or ping pong, so I really want them to have the chance to experience a sport, and all the awesome things that that can teach. Our field is really overgrown, and there's some construction going on right now, so I'm not entirely sure when I'll be able to start it, but I'm really looking forward to it.

In other unrelated news, there were a couple of relatively big earthquakes in my province, but they were pretty far away from where all the TFC fellows are, so everybody is safe and sound. 

Sadness.

Class 83

This year, I'm teaching two bans, one of which is a little more trouble than the other. Jarlene, my co-fellow, came to observe me the other day, and took some awesome pictures! In lieu of writing stuff, and out of an interest to go eat lunch, here they are:

A shot of most of the 56 students in the class. 

I have no idea what I'm doing here, but it looks pretty stupid:

an accurate depiction of how I look the entire class

Helping a weaker student with his notes.