A new city

I have had quite an incredible last few days. First of all, I am in the middle of teaching middle school students for two weeks. The first few days were terrible! They barely speak any English (some not even 1,2,3 and A,B,C) so it makes it so difficult to teach them speaking only English. I am so thankful to have an interpreter in the room to translate pretty much each sentence I say! As you can imagine, it’s hard to think of things for these 9-16 year old children to do when some of them have had only 1 year of elementary English! But, by the end of the first 4 days, I loved it! Somehow we bonded through all of it, and it was really fun. They think it is so cool that their teacher lives in the dorm with them, and that I invite them to play Uno (which is a huge hit) in my room after class time. They really are having fun.
These past four days I had off, so I made a spontaneous decision to fly to Shenzhen to visit some of my students from last session! I just had the best four days! The first day, they took me to this tourist attraction called Splendid China, which are many models of the famous places in all of China. At night, there were many shows. These were so cool! They were shows where they did all of the tribal dances, and wore outfits that the Chinese people used to wear. In one of the smaller shows, they asked audience members to participate. Because I was the only white person there (I stuck out like a soar thumb) and they made me get up on stage and learn a Chinese dance in front of everyone. Mom, you feel my pain!  Oh well, at least I provided them a lot of entertainment! There was also this water festival thing going on, where all of the companies in the area come together and dump water on each other after this big presentation. I’m not sure why they do this, but it was cool to watch anyway.
That night, I stayed in one of my student’s apartments. There was no air conditioning, and it is SO hot here. I thought Beijing’s 104 degrees what hot, but I now have a new definition of hot! You walk outside and you are dripping with sweat. She asked me if I wanted to take a shower. Perfect! Yes! Well, I went into her bathroom, and the shower was a bucket full of cold water! Hmmm. Ok, so I managed to somehow wash my hair in this bucket, but as I stuck my head down in the bucket, I saw a cockroach scurry across the floor! Oh man. Thank goodness there was a mosquito net around the bed (really just a board on the floor), so the cockroach couldn’t get me. What an experience. Well, I will have to write more later because my battery is about to run out. The next few days were even more exciting!