Wednesday, June 25, 2008

reaax your vilace


I slept for seven hours!! Six in a row and then one more after that. It was a miracle. Thank goodness. I still feel kind of floaty most of the time, but mentally I'm a lot clearer and I haven't felt gloomy at all today really which is a nice change of pace.

This morning we had another workshop with Bill. In my class today they were taking a test, so he taught me what to do. I asked them 2 QA's, they asked me 2, they read some passages from their books and did some spelling (newspaper which everyone left the 's' out of, house, cupboard which no one got so I stopped asking it, and empty). Some of the kids were super quick and definitely got it, most of them understood the majority of it, and some were completely lost the whole time. It must be hard for them to go into a test like that with a new teacher though, I'm sure they were nervous. My Chinese co-teacher in that class, Angel, said the class is super wild. There are 21 of them and they must be like 7 or 8 years old.

Today I lucked out because Alan, who lives in my dorm, was also teaching classes at Dar Chu (pronounced Dah chew) so he took me on the bus on the way there and on the way back and showed me important landmarks and told me what to do which was nice. I have to do it by myself tomorrow so we'll see how it goes.

I also went to Carrefour by myself today for the first time and bought some groceries. Kiwi, nectarines from CA, pasta, juice, yogurt, ice cream and some cup-o-soup style noodles. There was a whole entire long aisle devoted to dried cup-o-soup noodles. I almost took a picture. Speaking of pictures, I took a few when I was walking around my part of the city today.

Tonight after class, Keith invited me to go bowling with him and Katie, Gill and Jen who I met the other night at that housewarming party. Keith took me on his scooter and it was kind of scary but he's a really safe driver. I've never worn a helmet before and it was kind of odd. My head got super sweaty of course. I won the first game in bowling and got 2nd to last in the second. It was a lot of fun. The games were like $1.50 each.

I just hopped out of the shower a minute ago to wash the smoky bowling alley smell off and now I'm going to talk to the maj for a minute and go to bed. It was a good day though. I feel better now that I know more or less how to get to both of my schools.

This is the front of my school. :)

This is the view from the street in front of the school. It isn't very fantastic.

This is showing you the Jinguo road sign. It's my main road right now.

Carrefour!

The scooters outside of Carrefour. Every street looks like this.

3 comments:

Majjy said...

Can't you just see Matt walking around the UT campus wearing 'reaax your vilace"?

he he he....

Anonymous said...

So glad you got some sleep. Finding your way around will get easier with time, sounds like there are plenty of helpful people. Doesn't anyone that you live with go to work at the same time or place?
Also thought it is funny that the kids have American names, or is that just for their class? Our high school French teacher had us all pick French names to use during class.
Stay healthy and happy and keep up the interesting posts. It really is fun to read and see your photos.
Love ya, A. Margy

megan said...

I've been pleasantly surprised that every time I've needed help, there's been someone to help me.
There are only like 8 of us who live in the dorm and Gloria has i think 13 different schools, so it's harder than it would seem to match your schedule up with someone else actually.
The names crack me up. My understanding is that their parents or the kid gets to pick their name when they enter the Gloria system. Some of them have names that we would never use anymore, like Hank.
Thanks for the comment aunt margy :)