St. Patrick's Day in China

(Cassie)

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!  Unsurprisingly, no one here celebrates it.  But I wore a bit of green anyway.  It was amusing explaining what the holiday is to Yin this morning...I think she got the impression that it is a day of worshipping weeds and small red-haired men.  We talked about St. Patrick's Day and other American holidays over a delicious breakfast of steamed buns with sweet red bean paste in the center.  After our discussion and breakfast, we made our way to school. 

I began my school day in English class.  William was teaching.  The class discussed holidays around the world...thus why Yin and I had gone into depth about holidays during breakfast.  The class was most amazed and disturbed by a movie about Dia de los Muertos, which contained people wearing skeleton costumes and dancing in a cemetery.  The class was wrapped up with a discussion of the similarities and differences between holidays in different countries.  After this came Chinese class, in which I finished the book "Freakanomics". 

After the second lesson with our host siblings, we all met Liam and our kungfu teacher in the gym for our second session.  After several laps and some stretching, we began the period by learning the rest of the moves in the kickboxing series we'd began to learn during the first class.  We finished the routine!  It took many tries, but we managed to learn the entire sequence.  After this, we had some free time in which I ran, Alex and Liam played ping pong and basketball, Alaina drew, and Lauren learned a few badminton tricks from the teacher.  After I ran, the teacher then attempted to teach me how to balance a soccer ball on my head.  While he managed to balance the ball for an impressive amount of time, it didn't exactly go well for me.  Let me put it this way...he laughed at me to the point where he cried a bit.  At the end of the period, we headed to lunch, which was delicious and included fresh fruit and (to Alaina's delight) no condiments! Both she and Alex hate mayo, and she isn't a fan of ketchup either. 

Then, we had English corner for the first time! At 12:30, we all went to sit out on the grass near the entrance of the school.  We were joined by a small but lively group of four seniors.  One, named Joe, had met us yesterday and informed us that he would've been part of the delegation last year.  Another girl named Michelle told us that she had applied to American universities and Williams is her favorite.  She ended up coming with us when we went to cooking class.  I'm so happy the weather has finally been consistently nice long enough for us to start English corner! It was a lot of fun to meet some new and interesting people, and I'm looking forward to doing it on a regular basis. 

At the end of English corner we went to cooking class.  Today, we were taught to cut up fruit in such a way that it looked beautiful and delicious.  It was just as fun to make as it was to eat.  After all the fruit had been eaten, Sandy made a work of art which looked rather like a dragon and included a mouth of watermelon rind and toothpicks, eyes made out of strawberry slices, and a tongue made of orange peel.  We had a little bit of down time after making our fruit masterpiece, so some of us sat out in the beautiful warm sunshine (it was in the 70s and clear today) while others sat inside and chatted. We were joined by Ning, her friend Bella, and Charlie, who later accompanied us when we went to buy silk.  I found it remarkable that they could just leave school without telling anyone...I'm not sure why but Hanggao is much more relaxed about having students come and go about campus.  It might be the location...none of the students use cars to go anywhere because anything one could possibly want is within walking distance. 

To begin our errand, Helen picked us all up.  We then proceeded to walk down the nearby silk shoppping road, then turned into a neighborhood, made many turns, and ended up on a busy street again.  I would've gotten so lost if I'd been on my own.  We then stopped in a shop to pick out the silk for our qipaos (for Lauren, Alaina, and I), jacket (for Sandy), and vest (for Alex).  Remarkably, we all ended up with blue and green hues.  We'll match well at the banquet.  After we'd looked over seemingly endless reams of silk, we headed back to the school in time for clubs. 

Alaina and I were headed for the English club today.  We spent most of the club teaching the kids, who were very enthusiastic, an American song.  We'd chosen "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz.  Coincidentally, I'd found out the night before that Derek loves Jason Mraz, so he'd volunteered to get some music videos with lyrics for us.  With these to aid us, we managed to teach the class the whole song and they were singing it by the end of the period!  It was alot of fun, and the happy song definitely matched the weather and our moods well.

With the end of the club came the end of the school day.  Yin and I rode bikes home as usual, then took a longer route to walk home so that she could show me her middle school and so we could enjoy the weather and the setting sun.  When we got back, I read and she drew until we sat down to dinner, which was three dishes - carmelized onions and egg, stirfried beef and potato, and cold (but not raw) cauliflower - all of which were delicious.  After dinner, Yin went to attack her huge mountain of homework, while I worked on some of my own schoolwork.  That's it for today!  We're all having a really great time.  I can't believe that we'll already be moving in with our second host families the day after tomorrow.  'Til next time.