Settling in to Jiangmen

Wow! It's been over a month since my last post - and something like five weeks since I left the US. I have been trying to settle in to life here, so I haven't worried too much about this blog yet. I will have to slowly update with the things that have been happening.

First of all, I have been teaching! I've just finished my third week. This semester the school is trying something new: having all the students at the university take English classes. There are not enough foreign teachers to have full classes of oral English, so instead we all have twice as many students for half as much time. That is, I have one week of 8 two hour classes, and then the next week the same thing but a completely different group of students. Total I have over 600 students, and I see them each about 9 times... I'm not sure how I will get to know them all! It has been a little hard to know what to plan for lessons, since we are free to do pretty much anything, but I think I'm getting better at this. My students are great. They are all polite and eager to learn. Their English is not great (I have all the non-English majors), so I'm just getting used to repeating myself a lot.

Today I tried out a lesson where we talked about descriptions of people, so I taught them a lot of vocab by drawing pictures on the board. Things like "ponytail" and "lanky." I also taught them some personalities, which they really remembered well - things like "happy-go-lucky" or "stoic." I'm not sure they understood "drama queen." Then in groups they had to write a description of a famous person, and then I collected them and read them aloud and had the class guess who the person was. They liked this a lot. Then I made them sing "Yellow Submarine," because other than "submarine" there are a lot of really simple words, and it is easy to sing along to. I think they liked this, but they want Lady Gaga next time. Then we played a simpler version of Scategories... and ran out of time, which I felt bad about. I also gave them all mooncake, because someone gave me the most giant mooncake and I just want to get rid of it! All 40 students had some, and some had seconds, and they ate less than half of it I would say. This is the group of students I probably know the best at this point, since they're the only ones I've had three times.

Mooncake, in case you are unaware, is the traditional food of the mid-autumn festival, which is coming up on the 22nd. It's basically sweet bread filled with... whatever. You usually don't know until you bite into it. The one I have involves fruit and nuts and some kind of paste that tastes a bit bitter. It's pretty weird.

Next post I will talk more about Jiangmen or food or lifestyle or something, and maybe I will have some pictures by then. I haven't really been taking any, because I don't feel like as much of a tourist here. Anyway, sorry about the long delay, hopefully some of you are still reading!