Sumo Wrestling - homeschool style

We were learning about the warlords of Japan and what they did with all of the warriors who were no longer needed for fighting. They became wrestlers and fought safely with no swords or bloodshed. We turned the living room into a dohyo ring and learned to do the shiko ritual of stomping each leg to drive away bad spirits. This was adult sanctioned rowdiness and the kids loved it!

My First Week of Teaching

Hey guys!

The computer lab isn’t open today (‘tis Sunday), so I can’t reply to your questions or news until tomorrow, but I can give you the skinny on current events in the good old school.

Our rooms are chilly but not…cold, exactly, except for Laura and a chosen few who have properly functioning heaters in their rooms (which means that the temperature hovers just below ‘decent’), and overlook a scenic construction site. It rains, and yesterday snowed, almost constantly, and so the scenic construction site is also full of muddy water and backlit by moody gray skies. Fireworks herald the beginning and ending of construction, so distantly we hear what sound like gunshots at sporadic hours. We’ve each got a washer in our rooms, but we’ve been warned that they are pretty harsh on clothes, so most of us hand wash then hang our clothes up on poles above the bathroom area. The squatter and shower in a tiny room to the side share a tile floor, and the water heater above them provides exactly 15 minutes of hot water an hour (supposedly) for us and the conjoining room. I am now a master of the two-minute shower. We’ve also got a little fridge/freezer, a microwave, and a non-functioning TV. Our floors are tiled, and surprisingly nice, and I’ve already described the beds- which no longer earn my adulation. I have discovered that comfort is relative to your exhaustion, and after 10 hours of make-up sleep, the sleeper finds that the spine has assumed the flexibility of a steel girder. The muscles thereof are a tight as piano wires, as contorted as a pretzel, and as sore as Cailyn’s legs after a long lacrosse practice. Do NOT throw out the mattresses, guys! L

Hm…Changzhou. It is dirty, VERY dirty, and full of people who sound angry all the time. I’m serious, some people smile at each other and make such very angry sounds that you think a fistfight is just waiting to happen. On the other hand, the kids are nice. The kids…wow. They are about the rowdiest, loudest, most hyper kids I’ve ever seen outside of a nursery. Chinese reserve? Not with the kids! The teachers don’t try to control the behavior, so I guess that’s the norm. I can’t help but think, though, every time I hear them shouting in the classrooms or halls that this would never fly in an American school, especially a boarding one. But even with the crazy behavior, they’re really very sweet and cute, and they’re just so precocious! *squee!*

The guards at the school like us, which is great, because the kids like us, which is awesome. Andy, our chef, also likes us, and therefore he makes sure we don’t have to have chicken feet for every meal. Yay!

Since we are all kind of feeling our way around still, we aren’t going to try to find a church today, but we will have a lesson in Laura’s room.

Oh, I just had a thought- who is feeding Christopher?

Later-

We had awesome testimonies after the lesson on service, and then everyone kind of napped until dinner (which was delicious). Dinner was an egg soufflé, which tastes like a spongy egg, chicken nugget-bits, chicken in sauce, beef-and-peanut toppings, and the staple food, rice! No chicken feet, hallelujah. I’m pretty glad Andy likes us!

OH. Before I forget! You know those ‘English names’ that every Chinese person is getting these days? Well, you’ll never guess who names them- we do! We, the English teachers, in the first semester of teaching, get to assign our students an English name which they will have for the rest of however long they are in school, and then beyond! Some of the names of the students are sweet, like Cherry, Jim, and Heron, but some of the kids got some pretty…odd names as well, like Roxas (a video game character), Sully (her name is from the guy in Monsters Inc), Bruce (another girl), and Michal Jackson (must I expound on the weirdness? Well, the kid is a little weird himself…). Yeah…we weren’t here for the first semester, so we didn’t get t name any kids, but it’s still pretty awesome.

Anyway! Goodnight, love you all! Calissa

Monday! (9:30 am)

Hey guys, what’s up? I started my day at five in preparation for my first day as an ELE teacher, much to the dismay of my roommate who does not start teaching until 12pm, and waited for 7 (and my first Chinese breakfast) with glee. Unfortunately, it seems they do not serve breakfast on Monday, as today is the day students return to the school, and presumably they are fed at their weekend homes before being dropped off. Blegh. I really wanted to try that gross porridge everyone complains about…

In other news, I will probably be called into a class to be the object lesson soon, which is what ELE teachers are for. I’ll practice conversations with the older children, give spelling/vocabulary tests, read chapters from books, and generally help out! This is terribly exciting for me, since I haven’t been in contact with any kids older than 7-8 years since I’ve been here. I hope I make a good first impression on the teachers and kids, and that the teachers who are teaching the English classes can actually speak it well enough to tell me what to do (this is a bit of a problem here).

Umm…yeah. Not a lot going on presently, but hopefully that will change. <3

Did I mention that Laura is teaching us how to say fun stuff in Chinese? We’re learning such useful expressions such as, “What?!”, “I don’t like you”, “Delicious!”, “Not _ yuan, _ yuan!”, and “Thank you”. I’m still a little shaky on everything but the “What?!” and “Thank you”, presently, but maybe I’ll be able to embarrass everyone with nonsensical Chinese on the cruise, right? LOL

And jumping to another topic, everything is four stories up and requires stairs to get there. It’s just like climbing to the Lofts at SVU for every class. Oh, the unspeakable joy. I better look good in a bathing suit after this.

Love you all! Calissa

Calissa Finally Made it to China

We needed to document the height difference before Calissa left!

It was hard to have her leave, but knew she would be fine.



Sisters and best friends!


Dear family,

Hi! I got to Shanghai at 9 pm, local time (so of course, I was cracked out on no sleep…so many in-flight movies…no self control…no sleep for over a day…), and was almost immediately scooped up by a Chinese guy named ‘King’ who is a teacher at the school- he teaches English, which is kind of funny (he’s not that good [he thinks he is XD], I thought he was an older student at first). He loaded me into a sporty little car with no useable seatbelts and off we went! It took about 3 ½ hours to get here, during which I alternated between dozing to country music and blearily watching Chinese drivers cut each other off in traffic. Hah, that was about as scary as it gets in midnight traffic, I guess. Anyway, I got here around 1 am and was escorted up 3 flights of stairs, and to my room (406) where my roomie, Johanna, was waiting for me. She sleepily welcomed me, I sleepily thanked her, and we both fell into out beds. Our beds, by the way, are 6’x4’ low faux mahogany crates with an inch thick pad on top, under a sheet and a thick comforter. It was positively blissful to sleep on! No joke, it was wonderful to be horizontal. And it’s surprisingly comfortable, firm with just enough give. Not that I’d recommend replacing our beds with boxes…rambling, stopping now.

I think I was out in five minutes- and woke to the sound of loud laughter drifting on the air, courtesy of the 800 children going to breakfast at 7 am. I rolled over and went back to sleep, waking up at 9-ish when Johanna got up. Since we don’t teach ‘til later, she said this was okay this week (next week, it’s up at 6 like usual, though). It’s Friday, so we can wear jeans, but I’m glad I have my four pairs of nice pants to get me through the rest of the time! We kind of lolled about for a while, then I asked about the art journals we were supposed to receive. Kara had mine, so I walked over to her room and got it, running into Laura at the same time. She pretty much picked me up and schlepped me bodily to the building with the only computers we can use with Internet (they just found this out, and Laura had a terrible time hooking them up to the ‘net). I was told to send my emails declaring my living status to ILP and my parents. I did so, as you know. :D

Laura has a bit too much to do by herself, I think. She has stress hives and it makes her testy. I hope that either they go away, or that things start settling down, otherwise our Head Teacher is going to have a miserable time of it (and consequently, so will we, minus the hives).

So! That business done, I was taken back for a quick meeting before lunch at 11:15, where everyone welcomed me to the group and we discussed the messed-up state of affairs here. As it turns out, they’ve had a pretty stressful week. A ton of things changed, like the Internet (we were supposed to have wireless in our rooms), the TVs (we were supposed to have cable, ‘tis gone now), the food (we are not fed breakfast on weekends), the schedule (it changes by the half-hour), and other sundry items. I was given my marching orders to tail Shelly today, as it was a short day and I could do some absorption of teaching skills. This was a little silly, as they had only begun teaching yesterday, but it did help me a lot. I helped organize a bunch of stuff in the storeroom, where all of the Glitter of Evil, the dishes, the toys, the scrap papers, and the Ever-Useful Pom-Poms are kept. I got to display my prowess with a mop, which awed my new ILP pals- I’m not joking, they gaped when I managed to make the floor look clean with such a dirty, nasty mop. I explained that I had experience as a janitor at an office, and had a private giggle. Ha HA! That job is so useful for skill development for living at this place! It’s just as dirty as they said, although the squatters aren’t as utterly diseased and excrement-encrusted as I had expected them to be (actually, no worse than the boy’s bathroom at church). I’ll send you a picture. My first lunch was rice and a fried hunk of chicken, and I wonder with a bit of trepidation what dinner will be!

Just had dinner: delicious rice from lunch, egg drop soup, these delectable meat balls drenched in broth, and…chicken feet. These did not look like I had expected them to, fried. No, they were boiled in broth, and the flesh had the consistency of jell-o. They were white and pebbled, like fetal fingerprints, and had longish nails. They looked like the forearms of a boiled baby alien, not something I wanted to think about while a fellow ILP teacher is softly murmuring, “I dare you to take a bite of that.” Yeah, no. I replied, “Not all peer pressure is positive. I don’t take dares.” My ever-helpful roommate then said, “It’s the ILP initiation. We do need to try new things!” I looked at the chicken feet, thought about my private personal promise to try something new and Chinese while here, and internally remarked, ‘Even if it does look like an underdeveloped arm, these other people like it- maybe it isn’t so bad?’. I took a bite, on the condition that the darer do the same. She accepted, and we raised our chicken feet, simultaneously biting into the pale, tender, textured flesh.

Guess what. It tasted like chicken.

PS-

Dad- Thanks for the heads-up on how to act, and how to take care of my things at an airport. I was able to travel alone with aplomb and confidence (or at least, it looked like that to everyone else). I got through everything just fine, it was a smooth journey with a safe end! I miss you, and Robin says ‘Hi’!

Mom- oh my goodness, thank you so much for the long underwear. It’s raining, it’s been raining for weeks, the temp is low and about to drop, and I can see my breath everywhere but my room. I’m taking my vitamins and bundling up, and the boots keep my feet dry and warm.

I just found out what I need-

20 CD-Rs (because I can’t put all of my pictures on my computer, as it is almost full, and I don’t have time each day to put them online (30 min on a slooooooow computer is not much time)), pens, a notebook, and more calcium tablets (because we have no dairy).

Love you all! Calissa

PPS- I just got cheated out of 4 yuan by a dastardly rickshaw driver, and when we tried to make him go back to the original price, he laughed at us. What a jerk! *rage face* I’m not going to trust any rickshaw driver but the one who takes us to the market ever again! Also, the bus is fun, and the traffic is just as weird as you said it was, Dad. Write me, I love you!

Brandon Comes Home!

Elder Brandon Cristopher Wall became just Brandon Wall again on December 1, 2009. He returned home to balloons, cheers, hugs and tears as he completed his 2 year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. We are so happy to have him home and look forward to seeing him grow at school and see what comes next in his life!

Brandon was so excited to get in his little Bimmer and take it for a spin. Sadly, he discovered the next day that it had a leaking head gasket...darn it all! So he spent his 2 weeks at home taking his car apart and putting it back together. He did a great job though...it drove all the way to Utah with no problems!

Mothers Day Greeting

To our mothers: come sit in our living room for a few moments so we can share some music with you!

Make a Smilebox greeting

We honor our mothers who taught us what was most important in life: God and Family

Lacrosse !

Saturday the girls had their first Lacrosse game in Tulsa. They were so excited, had just been given their uniforms and were so ready to play. There are not very many girl teams in this region of the US, so we have to travel to play games.

 

The girls won their game in the morning and Justin's team won both of their games.

 

Lacrosse combines many skill sets from other sports: soccer, football, basketball, hockey.
For the boys, it is a contact sport and they have to wear gear similar to football players. The girls are not as physical, so they don't have to wear the gear. They all wear mouthguards and look quite funny when they are in!

 

All three of the kids love the game and have quite a lot of fun practicing together. Justin throws the ball against the back of the house on the brick wall, so I hear "thump, thumpity, thump over and over..." At times it sounds like he is trying to practice against the wall upstairs, but we had one ball go through the wall in our room when the boys put it on the treadmill - you know - newton's law - an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by another force. In this case, the heavy ball made a perfect round hole in the wall before anyone could catch it!