Hello again!
Sorry I've been a bit lagging in my posting. Turns out I've actually gotten a bit busy, and now I have real things to do, like figuring out lesson plans and what not. Silly. I guess since the last time I posted, I have actually started teaching. I am teaching Junior 1, the equivalent of 7th grade. My students are 11, 12, and 13, and mostly adorable. The first week was a lot of fun. I mostly just talked about where I was from and showed them a lot of pictures from home. They were all totally enthralled, though I feel like they may have only understood about half of what I said. The level of English of my students is varied, but all around a bit lower than I originally had thought it might be. It's hard trying to figure out what they know and what they don't. I'll think something will be difficult, and then it turns out they get it in seconds. But then other things go straight over their head. I think it'll just take more time to really fine-tune my lessons. My first week of class we had teacher's day, which is a day in China where all the students honor their teachers. So either before or after class all the students in the class would stand and say "happy teacher's day" in unison. It was rather sweet. They also gave me gifts, like a flower and a pencil holder and a couple of cards. Which was nice considering some of the students hadn't even had me as a teacher yet at that point. It does get a bit exhausting though. At least I only teach one lesson plan a week- 22 different times. And I have over 600 students. So that part is a bit rough. At least the students are all different and help keep things interesting.

Okay, enough about that, time to talk about something else...A couple of weekends ago all us foreign teachers attended a huge mass wedding at one of the other campuses. Fourteen couples (all teachers in the Zhengzhou Foreign Language School complex) tied the knot in the most confetti filled wedding I have ever seen. I don't have too much to say about the ceremony. The dresses were white and huge, the hair was huge, glitter was quite liberally applied, and I believe an entire backstreet boys album was played at least twice during the course of the ceremony. It reminded me a lot of an 80's prom, but perhaps a little tackier and with more bowing. My opinion of the whole affair might also have been influenced by the fact that I understood about 0% of what was going on. Still, it was fun. The reception,though, is where things really got interesting. I had my first shots of "bijo" (this is how you pronounce it, I don't know how to spell it.) This is a rice alcohol of a similar potency as everclear, and tastes worse, and unfortunately there are many traditions that make you drink it against your will. Such as, if someone of authority toasts you, you must toast back, and you cannot stop drinking until he stops (if these rules are wrong, I apologize. There were a lot of them, and they were explained to me while drinking large quantities of the aforementioned liquor. Consequently, some of the details are a bit fuzzy.) We also were served fish, which we spun on the table, and whoever the head pointed to had to take four shots, and the two people the tail pointed to had to take six. Guess who was one of the lucky ones on the tail end. You guessed it. Consequently, this was also the first night I learned what bijo tastes like when it comes back up.

The dinner at the reception was similarly interesting. We were served (and I'm not making this up): chicken feet and heads, tripe (pig intestine stuffed with vegetables), congealed duck blood and duck intestine soup, and donkey meat. Also cucumbers, and some thing I was told was fruit. I didn't eat anything but the cucumbers and fruit, and also one piece of the duck blood (which was a similar texture as tofu, but a rather different flavor.)

Well, this is getting long, and I don't have many more interesting things to say. Mostly I've just been working and being lame. We haven't had the chance to do any other travelling yet, because we haven't really had time, and also our passports were taken so that they could obtain us our residence permits. We are finally supposed to be getting them back later this week. Then I'll finally be able to leave the city without fear of deportation. Which will be nice. Hope all is well at home, and that you all are enjoying the fall weather. It's been pretty cool and really rainy here. Though I haven't seen any evidence of any trees changing color. I'm not sure if that's something that happens here or not. It's likely with all the pollution the leaves just turn brown...I guess I'll find out!