Nanbei Hu

Ms Waterman
(teacher)

Since Kelby and I returned to Hangzhou at 10:00 PM on Sunday night after spending the day at HuangShan (Yellow Mountain), I was a little tired on Monday morning for the day trip we took with the Senior 1 (grade 10) class. It's a good thing I had some longjing tea (caffeine!) to wake me up!

The trip was their spring outing and the destination was the Nanbei (North South) Lake. The lake is about one hour away from the city. The weather was sunny and warm again and it was great to spend the day outside. The kids spent the day with their host siblings' classes and I stayed with the teachers. I loved watching the kids travel in their class groups - each class carried a large red flag with yellow writing with the name of the high school and the class number (#1-12). There were also a few students who carried an even larger flag with the name of the school written in a creative design that students at the school designed a few years ago. The whole scene reminded me a little of how a military is organized in small groups. Each morning at school, the students in this same Senior 1 grade run laps of the school at break time in similar organized formation: one student leading at the front, the rest of the 48 students jogging in time in a crowd behind the lead student, and one student at the back of the group to mark the end of one class before the next class begins. While I like the idea of giving students 20 minutes for a break between classes (we do the same thing at DS!), I'm not sure I like the mandatory running. I like to run, yes, but the set up seems a little too militaristic for me.

Anyway, back to the lake. After the students had set off on their walk, the teachers walked around the lake and had dinner in a small restaurant at the water’s edge. We had at least 15 different dishes at lunch - mushrooms, potatoes, eggplant, pork, shrimp, noodles, and many more. It was fun to meet a lot of new teachers from different departments, and everyone was so nice to me even though I can’t speak Chinese and many of them (not English teachers, of course!) don’t speak English. LV, the former coordinator of this Exchange program, translated for me and told me that all of the teachers who were on the field trip that day taught only Senior 1 classes. Since teachers teach 2 sections of students in chemistry or Chinese or history (which seems like not many sections until you realize that they have between 95 and 100 students...), they are able to collaborate with other teachers of the same subject and they often spend time together to plan. As a teacher who teaches classes that no one else teaches, I am a little jealous of the collaboration. It also goes without saying that I am jealous of the fact that the teachers in HangGao teach only 2 classes a day (I teach an average of 4). It seems like a different life here!

Our last stop of the afternoon before we returned to the buses turned out to be my favorite part of Nanbei lake. There is a small island in the middle of the lake which is accessible by a long, narrow wooden bridge. It was unusual to walk on a bridge only 2 feet above the surface of the lake, but the water was calm, so I enjoyed the unique perspective of the lake. The willows and flowering trees on the island were incredible, and everything was very peaceful. There was also a small pavilion (at home, it would have been a gazebo, probably) where people were reading in the shade. The inscription above the pavilion said that it is a good place watch the sunset. Unfortunately, we weren't able to stay that long, so that will remain a mystery!

Nanbei Lake was beautiful and we were so lucky to be able to join the trip!