Teacher’s Day

Teacher’s Day is a national holiday here in China and the school celebrated it by giving us flowers, 2 boxes of apples, and having us visit all our classrooms. Most of the classes just yelled “Happy Teacher’s Day” at us, while others danced for us (and we got up and did the only synchronized dance we all knew—the Macarena) or gave us some of their treats.

After visiting all the classes, I got to tuck my kids into bed for the first time! Something cool about my school is that because the students all live at the school—we can say goodnight to them. Most of my students are in kindergarten and this is their first time away from their families. So during this time we go to give them hugs and as much love as we can. Sometimes the kids are troublemakers and really hard to deal with in class, so we like tucking them in because it helps us like the kids. I visited the kindergarteners’ room first and then the first grade girls’. Once I pulled out my camera with the girls—they all wanted to take and be in pictures. We took so many, but most of them were blurry. These girls are adorable.

Bengbu

I thought Bengbu would be a really small town since it’s not big enough to be on most maps—but it’s actually huge. It’s easily bigger than Salt Lake City with a population over 3 million (some stats say 6 million); of that 3 million, I think it’s pretty safe to say that my fellow teachers and I are the only non-Asians. Our first Saturday here (September 8^th) we decided to spend th3e whole day in the big Bengbu city. We’ve been to the city a few times to go grocery shopping and such, but today we went to explore and have fun!

Waiting for the bus—it was a very rainy day.

We visited some Chinese antique stores, the mall (where we all bought much needed rain jackets), and a restaurant for lunch. Some of the workers wanted pictures with us.

After lunch we found the cutest restaurant—with swings as chairs—so we stopped in for dessert. I got a mango crème bulee.

Next we got massages since they’re so cheap in China! I was just hoping for a nice, relaxing massage; however, all these Chinese girls came in and started taking pictures of us in the middle of it! Then after the massage, the girls and all the workers wanted a million pictures of us; we were seriously taking pictures with them nonstop for over a half hour. The girls were actually really nice and we became friends with them; we gave them English names and they gave us Chinese ones (I lost mine though!).

For dinner we found McDonalds (American food!); however, the food was a bit different than the McDonalds in the US (there’s no hamburger meat whatsoever), but it was still good. A lot of people came up to us and tried to talk to us while we were eating. Here’s a cute, little boy we met and some guy who wanted to take a picture with us.

Basically we are famous here!