Friday, November 15, 2013

Nov 4 2013: Monday Meetings

A Monday! I was too tired to do much except shower and lay around bed for a good while. I started journaling and freed up some space on my computer, and put together a Christmas playlist for future. Finally ready for school, headed to lunch, not too shabby or eventful or anything…

Back to office to plan lesson, not too exciting. Trying to plan trip to Beihai, kind of tricky but exciting all the same. Doing stuff like that… planned out lesson and finally off to teach

Crazy class, tried trick or treat almost, impossible to control, playing with computer presentation and trying to take my pen- it was just crazier than usual somehow. Not just loud, but super scattered and such. Mondays are always like this, it’s nuts.

Finally pulled them together a little and ran through slide for have/has, and teaching them ‘pretty’ and ‘awesome.’ Mostly went well, but I didn’t give them a DVD.

Silly because other class was worse but they quiet down during a few claps which got them a good grade in the end. Usually the bad class so they need to know what it’s like to be good. I had one kid ask for Katie. Crazier than the class before, it took forever to get them even remotely quiet. They even got crazy when I tried to start the video- so I stopped it and gave them a look- I was giving them a lot of looks. Not fun
Finally finished and Katie went. I borrowed her headphones but didn’t use them much, trying to look for modern family season 2, more Beihai stuff and such. Tricky tricky stuff.  But hey, it kept me busy for about two hours until Katie was ready for dinner.

Oh and one kid, Tim, came in during last class and drew robots on Paint and super cute but not happening again because I know he lied and totally had class and yeah I did treat him to candy after but almost stole greg’s and he was precious but not again, not happening. I’m a responsible adult on most occasions, after all. It needs to stay that way.

Dinner happened, but no activity time. Still, even after that time finished we were hanging around for another hour because after a hundred or so invites to hang out with Emma, we finally had an good occasion to hang out, that Monday night. Emma is the mother of Zack, one of Katie’s grade 1 kids. She’s got a high voice but is super cute and friendly. Zack is seriously the cutest chubby kid I have ever met in my life, I kid you not. He is the best, just freaking adorable I have no idea how that happened, he’s just so freaking precious.

The car ride lasted almost an hour and he was crawling all around so there was a ton of time to get to know him. His English is pretty decent, too, for being so young. Probably helps that Emma, his mom, can speak it decently, of course. Anyways, he’s cute. We played a few games like Hanky Pank and thumb war with him a few times, and he shared some candied nuts from India, I think it was. He squirmed and played around like crazy, it was so cute.

Finally we got to our spot, and she parked in a nice place right next door to Jiaxiu tower, we realized. We crossed the street from it to a drink shop, and she bought us drinks, some milk tea with boba, and then we went a few buildings over to Coffee Time.

It’s this backway entrance, and super nice. But we kept climbing the levels, up and up to about the fourth floor, it was crazy. Kind of weird taking my drink to a different coffee shop but it was all good. And at the top, we ran into Canadians! We couldn’t believe it. That was crazy.  More English speakers! We cracked a few jokes about the different countries before Zack showed us the roof, then we came back and ended up sneaking into the room next door.

It was super crowded but apparently that’s what they wanted. These Monday nights are basically a gang kinda party for English speakers. Happens all the time! There was even a British dude there. So many English speakers, it was pretty insane!

We barely talked to Emma, which I thought was a bit odd but she seemed cool with that. Zack played around for a bit- and then he got a bit crazy and tried going around everywhere to everyone in the room to kiss them! On the lips! It was super funny watching him run around persistently, basically tackling some of them. It was pretty funny and a good bit crazy for a bit. However later on, it got a little extreme and Alex, the buff British blondie pulled him off a girl and then Zack got all moody and we didn’t really see him after that.
Between that drama though, he did perform a little dance of tae kwon do for us, which was super cute and fun to watch! It’s so much like a dance, it was awesome. One of the guys, a local with perfect English and even sarcasm tried humming a tune to match Zack but the tyke didn’t like that… Oh his name was David. He’s very sick of Guiyang, but otherwise seemed like some fun.

There was Sally/Liberty who’s working on becoming a lawyer and is very, very paranoid about the government. She thought David was a spy and was getting a bit freaked out. She loves talking about human rights and things like that, though, and wants to chat about that sometime. But she’s super paranoid- apparently she spent a while telling Katie about how the government listens to phone calls and such.

Yeah, Katie and I weren’t sitting together- we were on opposite sides of the circle which got split up so we had our own parties surrounding us for a chat. And I’ve found out what it’s basically like to be a trophy wife and I always knew I’d never like that position, no way. It’s a bit annoying, as friendly as they are, but yeah…

Alex ended up in Katie’s circle with two or so other guys who talked to her about Native Americans and Confucious, which she enjoyed. David left soon enough, leaving me with a new guy, Collin. Collin seems nice enough, he graduated recently in media marketing. We talked about some clubs, about America’s marketing strategies, about America and China, and about hanging out sometime.

He was there, the one sitting with me the whole time and sorting out English words and the like. And he stayed there the whole time even through the awkward silences because I had nothing else to say, but whatever, it was an interesting experience overall…

After a bit Ryan came over, he left the international market to actually teach people English [payday drop], which was cool- he was super chill, friendly and nice with his friend whose name escapes me…

Quite the experience, we haven’t been so social in our time here, I feel! It was super crazy, very unexpected, quite odd and still a fun experience! Although I’ll admit it was a ton of work to keep up conversations with these new people. It was a lot, but Katie liked it too, and everyone basically got our numbers which is fun to have more friends although since then we’ve having a bit of a tricky team texting because they still really like talking to us…


It took three hours! A lot of fun, super tiring. And we couldn’t get over how crazy it was! And apparently this happens every Monday, so we might have to do it again! Often! 

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