I have a hard time believing that we are half way through our time in WeiHai. I can’t believe that in less than 3 weeks I’ll be home again! It’s amazing how fast time flies when you’re having fun. Anyhoo, this past week has been busy, just like the week before.
Monday was another day of teaching—as was every other day of the week. As I am the only one teaching my class, and we only meet in the mornings, I was still teaching mornings. However, seeing how Sarah and Bettina are both teaching the upper level classes and have teaching partners, they switched their teaching to the afternoons for the week. The biggest change this caused was they weren’t around in the afternoons to hang out (which was probably for the best, so I could prep for my next class). Monday morning, Wayne came to visit us—to check up on how we are doing. It was really good to see him! He stayed until Tuesday evening. Monday evening was the first E-zone that we (the teachers) were in charge of leading. And it was our group that was in charge of leading—Sarah was the designated leader for the day. After E-zone Wayne took us out to a restaurant that has tables on the sidewalk. We went and got some meat skewers and scallops. It was good to get out of the school for a while.
Tuesday was Sarah’s birthday! Even though we had to teach, we all had a good day, celebrating by enjoying brownies at lunch and going out for Korean Barbeque and ice cream with Wayne. Also, we had the night off from E-zone, which was a nice break. We had to say goodbye to Wayne, which was sad, but we know we’ll see him again in a few weeks.
Wednesday and Thursday were rather uneventful days. I taught in the mornings, and planned in the afternoons. We had E-zone in the evenings, Thursday which I led. I decided on choosing the topic of celebrations, and comparing how we “westerners” celebrate Birthdays, New Years, and Valentine’s Day with how the Chinese celebrate these holidays (or at least similar holidays). I had some rather interesting conversations with the students in my group as did, from what I heard, many of the other groups. I think, after much worry about what to do and how it would go, it went rather well.
Friday was again spent teaching in the morning. In the afternoon, Jasmine, one of the teachers, and I were talking about going to the beach. While talking about this over lunch, we decided to go, as did some of the other teachers, deciding to take their classes as well. So, we took 3 classes of students on the bus to the international beach. Seeing as the students didn’t have warning ahead of time we didn’t go swimming. We did, however, enjoy wading in the water. We brought along a volleyball and Frisbee. It was fun to play with the students. They taught us a form of dodge ball with one ball and four people standing in the corners trying to hit the people in the middle. Shortly before we had to leave, we started tossing the Frisbee around. I believe that most of the students had never seen a Frisbee before. They had fun tossing it around for a few minutes before we told them it was time to go.
Coming back from the beach was quite an adventure as well. Not all of us fit on the same bus, so we crammed as many as we could on one bus and a few of us decided to catch the next bus. The next bus that we ended up catching was not a city bus, but a private bus. Not long into our bus ride I noticed that the driver was having trouble getting the bus into gear. Even though this was a little troublesome, I just ignored it—stuff like this always happens in China. However, half way back to the school, the bus stopped running, and wouldn’t start up again. After sitting there for a few minutes, we decided to get off and catch a taxi. It was quite the adventure! (in a good way of course)
Saturday we went to Liu Gong Island. We went with a large group of students. Even though the day started out a little rough, sorting out tickets and who would go with whom, we had a really good day. We split into different groups. In my group, we had 5 teachers and 6 students. We had a good day, walking around, taking the cable car up to the top of the mountain, seeing the museums, checking out the different sights on the island, and shopping. After being there for 7 hours, we decided to head back to the mainland and get some dinner. We decided to get personal hot pot, which was a wonderful way to end the day!
Today, Sunday, we were able to have a relaxing day. We went to church this morning, went to KFC for lunch, came back to the apartment and relaxed. It was a wonderful day and a wonderful ending to a good week.
