Training

Hey, everyone.  Now I never said I was going to be good at this whole blogging thing so you can't hold anything against me for my lapse in posting.  But in reality, there hasn't been too much going on other than training.  Granted, this post will sure make it seem like a lot has happened, but compared to the first few weeks things have settled down quite a bit.  So I'll try to give you as much of a rundown as I can.

On Monday (the 14th) I started my official TEFL teacher training.  It was 2 hours in the morning (10-noon) and 2 in the afternoon (2-4), sometimes with a chinese lesson during lunch.  It has been nice getting into a daily routine.  The training sessions were classroom lessons taught by Isabella.  It really opened my eyes to how much we take for granted with our native language.  I have never learned all the subtypes of verbs, adverbs, pronouns etc. But these are things that foreign language speakers have to learn.  So yeah, training really not that exciting, not too much more to talk about.

So now I'm going to skip to Thursday, because Thursday was pretty significant.  On thursday was the Lantern Festival, Aka. the end of Chinese New Year.  So we only had half a day of training and spent the rest of the day walking around the city watching the preparations for the festival.  We wen't to the big park in Yangshuo and they had all of these chinese lanterns hanging from the trees and light posts.  I got a bunch of pictures so you'll see what I mean when I post them (i'm low on HD space so I need to figure out what to do).  It was interesting because most of the shops were closed and the streets were relatively quiet.  So after walking around for a few hours Isabella took the 4 of us out to dinner with the family.  It was a very nice dinner and we ate most of the typical local fare, beer fish, pineapple chicken, egg plant, etc (yes you read that correctly fish, Mom you will have to at least try some).  Anyways after dinner is when things got really interesting.  So just like chinese new year the local government set up a station where people could make the sweet dumplings (i forgot the chinese name).  Of course they take all of the westerners and put them front and center so the chinese media, can take pictures of westerners doing chinese things.  For a few hours I felt like I was some sort of celebrity because I couldn't walk 5 feet without some chinese person wanting to take a picture of me.  Anyways, I got to make about 20 dumplings which was fun.  After we finished making dumplings we slowly walked back to the park.  This was pretty difficult because for lantern festival it is considered good luck to walk about the streets.  Once we finally got to the park, Isabella told us that we needed to do a one of the several thousand chinese riddles hanging about the park.  Of course these riddles were all in chinese and I had no idea what the answers were.  So, Isabella figured out two of them for us and then informed the local TV station that we had "solved" the riddle.  So they filmed Amelia and me walking up, acting like we knew the answer and then taking our solved riddle to the prize distribution point (don't worry the reporters were all in on our scheme).  So once we got to the prize booth we waited our turn to collect our winnings.  I told the lady my answer, which was Cheng Du,  and then handed me my prize... six tubes of toothpaste.  Of course, the typical chinese person would have only received one.  So if anyone needs some Crest.  I got you covered.  Shortly afterwards Isabella's friend comes up to us with even more prizes which were laundry powder and bars of soap.  AWESOME prizes!  So we were walking back through the park and every chinese person had to tell us how impressed they were...  So finally to end the night we walked back down west street to watch the fireworks show.

Okay, so thats all for now. I have to go back to school and pack for Liuzhou because I'm moving TOMORROW!!!! AGHHH I promise I'll get caught up on this ASAP.