Week 3 sorry for the wait

Jinghong friends!

Jinghong #1 High School

my teacher taking over English class

Sorry about the wait for this post. I have been super busy at school. The teachers have been trying to cram every last vocabulary word into our already full brains before the end of the school year.

Anyway, my third week of the trip. We spent the rest of our time in Jinghong, my favorite place in the world. The weather was perfect, the food amazing, and the people friendly. We spent three days at a local high school, Jinghong #1 High school, going to classes with the Chinese students. Kind of like going to school, but no homework and we didn’t understand too much. Ok, that’s a lie. We didn’t understand ANYTHING! My Chinese vocabulary just does not cover chemistry and physics. Every once and a while, I would see a familiar formula, but that’s as far as my attention span stretched. Otherwise, I spent a lot of time reading, writing, and translating the signs posted around the room, most of which were things like, “Keep a harmonious school and don’t put graffiti on the blackboards.” Not too interesting, but it gave me something to do.

So, our day started pretty early. We had to be in our classrooms by 7:30. The students would spend the next 30 minutes reviewing for their classes. At 8 sharp, classes would begin. The students had class from 8-11:45, then lunch. The lunch wasn’t all that bad as far as cafeteria food goes, I have eaten worse. Then, classes would begin again at 2:30. The students had the afternoon off to rest because that is the hottest part of the day. If I was comfortably warm (i.e. shorts and a T-shirt) in February, I can’t imagine July. Then classes would last until 5:30, stop for a lunch break, and resume at 6:15 and finally end at 9 or so. Thankfully, we left after dinner. Really long day for us, not to mention the students.

The students. Hm. Very interesting people. We sat in on the senior classes because they were the only ones in school, those lucky kids. Everyone else was still on break, but the seniors had to come to class to review for the Gao Kao, the all-important test in China. If you do well on the Gao Kao, you can go to college, if you don’t, you can’t, regardless of you’re your grades etc. The kids are put in a lot of pressure to do well and start studying the first year of high school. No joke.

At first, I tried to pay attention during class, but that is really hard if you don’t really understand what is going on, so I spent a lot of time zoning out. Looking around me, I saw that the kids were just like any other high school kids. Texting under their desks, reading other books in their text books, eating in class, the usual. The kids in the back would just talk. The teachers were not all that strict, as long as the kids did their homework; although when they did their homework, I never did figure out. They let the kids get away with a lot, except for the Chemistry teacher; they did not mess around with him. If they didn’t do his homework, he made them stand at the back of the class for the duration of the class. Ouch.

The class I was looking forward to the most, English turned out to be a disappointment. Huge let down. The teacher didn’t really speak English all that well, and therefore neither did the students. They spent the class going over grammar structures and translating boring paragraphs from English to Chinese. Not as fun as I had hoped. Except for one day. They were learning about Facebook, yes Facebook, and one of our Chinese teachers was sitting in on the class. He speaks English really well, and he just kind of took over our class. After that, we had a great time. He had all of us go to the front of the class and tell them a little about Facebook, in Chinese of course. And, the students even began paying attention! They were actually interested in English class, for once.

On the last day, one of the teachers gave up teaching class and had the 6 or 7 of us SYA students tell the class where we were from in the States. So, one by one, my classmates stood up and tried to explain where Boston or Chicago was, and one by one they failed. Their explanations were met with blank stares and silence. However, I thought of a different tactic. Taking a gamble, I went up to the front of the classroom, held up a picture of LeBron James, and told the class I was from his city. This, the class understood. The class immediately started naming their favorite NBA players; turns out most of them are avid NBA followers. I think its pretty cool that LeBron is helping me to connect with kids halfway around the world in the middle of rural China. Pretty cool.

So, on our last day in Jinghong, we had the day to ourselves to do whatever we wanted. I spent the day hanging out with some of my friends from the school. They showed me all the cool places in Jinghong, which mainly involved climbing over fences to go down by the river. It weather was perfect, and hanging out with my new friends was a lot of fun. My Chinese isn’t great, and their English is not too good either, so we spent a lot of time trying to get our point across. I think the best was heart surgery, but I got my point across in the end. They took me to a really cool bookstore, and then to lunch. Then more wandering and talking. I had a great time with them.

The next day, we got back on a place to return to Beijing. I really didn’t want to leave Jinghong and Beijing was COLD when we got back. I only had a wimpy sweatshirt and was used to tropical weather. I think my sunburn was the only thing that kept me from freezing….

As you can see, I had a great time on my amazing 3 week vacation. I really love all the places I was lucky enough to see and I want to go back sometime, just not in the summer.

I hope to update again soon with all the stuff I have been up to for the last 4 or 5 weeks. See you all soon!