Happy Belated International Women’s Day!

To all my women and girls back home, I hope you had a wonderful day and appreciated all the boss females who make our lives so great!

In China, Women’s Day is a real and widely celebrated holiday. Most women are given the afternoon or even the whole day off for work, and many stores offer sales and deals to women only!

I was very lucky to spend International Women’s Day with Sunny and her mother, Jessica. Since Jessica had the afternoon off, the three of us went to the other side of West Lake to a tea museum and to have dinner. Although the tea museum was closing, we did get to sneak into the “International History of Tea” hall, which described the history of tea spreading out from China and into the cultures of other countries.

Chinese Movie Theaters and Chinese Driving

Hey everybody! So far through my time in Hangzhou, I’ve had many experiences I want to write about. I didn’t think these experiences could be stretched out to fill a whole blog post, so I decided to make this post a collection of short stories. Hope you all enjoy.

Chinese Movie Theater: On one of my free days with my host family, Jason, the student who is hosting me, took some of his friends and I to see a movie. We saw the new Resident Evil movie. I’m a big movie fan, but I had never seen any of the other movies in this series and I never really wanted to. But I never thought I’d have such a strange experience watching a movie.

600 Students Later ... English Class Presentations (plus Spanish Classes Next Week!)

When we first arrived, I was given a desk and told that I could “rest” for the first two weeks and then present to a couple of English classes if I’d like…. Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been looking forward to getting into Chinese classrooms equally as much as I was looking forward to touring China. Consequently, my response to that idea was “Oh, no! I’d be bored stiff! I’d like to teach any class that teachers will allow.”

The next day, I was handed my schedule for the following two weeks….over 1200 students!!! Last week, I presented to all of the 10th grade English classes. (There are a total of 12 sections so that meant 2 classes each day and four classes on Tuesday. ) With 45-50 students per class that meant I saw almost 600 students over the week. (They, of course, half-way hope/expect that I’ll recognize them afterwards so I’ve ended up saying “Hello” a ton of students walking through the halls or around campus.) The high school uniform is a blue and white jacket so I’ve also recognized and been greeted by students outside of school around town.

Ni Hao Folks!

 

After hearing about Ms. Li’s haircut story from her China trip (as I understand it, she showed them how much she wanted taken off, and they cut her hair to that length instead) I was weary about letting anybody come near my head with scissors. But, I’d been talking a lot about how much I wanted my hair to be short again, and so when the four of us passed a hair salon during an off-campus supermarket run, Ms. Babson and Jenny managed to convince me to give it a whirl.

The woman who washed my hair was very nice, but continued to ask me the same question in Chinese, to which I kept replying “My Chinese isn’t very good!”. She even brought her friend over to watch me look confused as she kept asking the question, and the wash ended with the two of them laughing exasperatedly at my total ignorance. She took me to sit in the chair of a nice young man holding scissors.

Translations Are Hard!

As we’ve made our way across the country, one of the things that has been a huge source of amusement for us is mistakes in transactions from Chinese to English. Executing these translations, to any extent, is incredibly difficult, and props to everyone who does. I know if I tried mine would be far worse than these. Sometimes, however, they don’t quite turn out as planned and the new sentence or phrase makes no sense at all. From menu options to information plaques at museums to caution signs in our showers, here are some of the best bad translations we came across.

The first one we saw was in our hotel in Hong Kong, and started off our search for funny translations. It was a plaque stuck IN our shower reading: 

'Floor have water,Be Careful of Slip'