Heading to Beijing!

Dear Family,

I am alive, excited, and hopeful this week- I have 1st grade off! We also have our Beijing vacation lined up, meals and transportation provided by SVU for the SVU group! Guess those 800 dollars are starting to work for me now~ We leave the 6th, and will be gone until the 10th, which means I’ll be celebrating my second decade of life in the capitol of China! Yeah!

We are also lined up to participate in the district’s cultural festival on the 15th, which is awesome to the max- you know that we’re learning Tai Chi, right? Well, we and some of the children will be performing a skit with a mixture of Tai Chi and American dance thrown in on a floating stage in front of thousands of people! This is how it goes- the children (all eight year old girls) perform a short, stylized piece about ancient Chinese people, during which the English teachers come onstage and ‘scare’ them. They pretend to fight us off and ‘scare’ us with Kung Fu, and the leader of their group asks if we are demons, and Sam (who speaks Chinese), replies that we are foreigners. They perform some Tai Chi, and then ask what we can do. We then perform Thriller with the children looking on, and then we all perform a short piece of Tai Chi together, after which we each embrace a child and wave as we walk offstage. We’ve almost got it down perfectly, which is lucky because we only started practicing last week…and won’t be practicing very much this week.

It’s May Day vacation time, and we don’t teach until Tuesday, and leave Thursday…and now that I think about it, maybe this week isn’t the best for a week off of 1st grade. Darn. ^_^;

And now a bit about stuff going on- it seems this time of year is a bad one for stress, because our school is cracking down on security when we leave campus. A few weeks ago, eight children were murdered at a school nearby, and just recently, people have walked into preschools with knives and hammers and just started swinging. It’s freaking everyone out, and so we’ve been given careful strictures on when and how we leave. We must be in larger groups than three if we will be out after dark, we now have to sign in and out if we are going to leave campus, we cannot bring Chinese friends in, and we have been warned that 9pm is the ‘Danger Hour’, because that is when the crimes begin (especially to women in small groups) and when the gates are locked. We haven’t been accosted, we haven’t been threatened, nothing dangerous has happened, but we are being careful all the same. Generally, people are very nice, but no one is taking chances.

I’ve discovered that Chinese street food is awesome in so many ways, they can hardly be numerated. The place may smell of excrement, the people are a bit rough, and the booths are made of scrap wood and plastic, but the cooking is heavenly. We’ve even got a sort of friendship with a few vendors we like, like the old woman who sells four dumplings for a yuan, the young man who sells pineapples on a stick, and the surly dude who cooks a zillion different things over an open grill. And when the day closes and the sun goes down, the square is filled with music and everyone dances. I’m trying new things now, like Chinese fruit in jell-o, grilled squid, and Chinese ice cream (which does taste different, no joke).

Yeah, this is a short letter-I’m lazy this week, sorry! Maybe I’ll tell you more (like the time the headmaster crashed our Thriller rehearsal, about the cute guard who wants to practice English, when the whole school went to the Dinosaur Park, about the night Sam and I were outside alone after 9pm and walked miles to get to safety, about the people catching fish bare-handed in the nearby canal, about the songs I’m learning in Chinese, about my stalker roommate) if I get a few letters from my lovely siblings…nudge nudge, wink wink.

I love you all! Calissa