You gotta give him credit...

Anyone who's travelled with me knows that I am extremely weak of the stomach when it comes to any jostling-activities such as car, plane, boat, or train rides. Unfortunately, yesterday's flights from Shanghai to Singapore were no exception. But whereas some husbands would turn away in disgust, mine was a star. He had my sicky-bags all lined up for me before take-off, and when the time came for my lunch to make its second appearance, he held back my hair and gently stroked my back until the ordeal was over. What a guy!

We're now staying at a little youth hostel in the part of Singapore called "Little India"... and it's just like India but way cleaner. If anyone wants to buy a sari, some Bangara cd's, or some authentic curry powder, just let me know... they're all available on my street! I drank WAY too much chai tea last night (delicious), but forgot how much caffeine was in there... I was up with the jitters most of the night and I still feel all nervous. Weird. Lesson learned though: no chai before bed!

Today will be day #1 of sight-seeing... I'm just about to do a little research online here to see what there is to do in these parts. Hope you're all well...

On Mystery Meat & Being Frozen

If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that Andrew and I, along with the entire staff of this massive school we work in, have received very random gifts about once a month. We have NO idea why the school keeps dumping on us... for some reason we always think it's the last time and are surprised when there is another announcement to go down to the nurse's room and pick up our loot. This time it was a giant box of fresh vegetables each, and a mystery bag. I pulled two smaller, shrink-wrapped-ish bags out of my big bag and couldn't identify exactly what the contents were... the Chinese writing was of no assistance! I asked one of my students who was standing nearby what it was- she took it in her hands, turned it over, examined it, and finally handed it back to me saying, "It is the leg of a lamb". Oh. MMmmmmm... can hardly wait for that one! Looks like our security guards will be getting another gift (a re-gift, but they're none-the-wiser!).

In other news, Andrew and I are nearly dead from being frozen. Despite sleeping with 3 blankets, 2 hot water bottles, and 2 magic (hot) socks, we wake up chattering every morning (no central heating). Only 6 days now till we head to Singapore and Bali for our much-warmer holiday. We are SO excited for this and I've been busy online checking out which surf schools will be best for us in Bali. Can't wait to improve and ride the waves again! Woot woot!

Page 420

Some things about China continue to amaze me (and not always in a good way). One of these things is censorship. Yes, China has dirt and baggage in their past, but what country doesn't? I seem to remember a rather large "incident" in Canada having to do with the Komagata Maru, for example, but rather than covering it up, it is taught about in Canadian schools and we're supposed to learn from it. Not so here in China.

I just started teaching Socials 10 here last week. The textbooks have been here since September, but were awaiting censorship before students would be allowed to use them. When I asked my colleagues for the books last week they told me there was a problem and I wouldn't be allowed to use them for the course. "What's wrong, and why has this taken 4 months to tell me?" I asked. Well, the problem was that on ONE page there was mention and pictures of the Chinese "Tianamen Square" situation in 1989 (if you're not familiar with it, just do a Google search... quicker than me explaining it all here). "Why can't we use the book if only ONE page is bad?" I asked. "Because we'd get in trouble if school officials found out" was the reply. In the end I negotiated to just have that one page removed (actually they glued it to the next page in all 48 textbooks) and the kids are now using the books. One of my students told me last week "Something's wrong with my book- this page won't open." I told her not to worry about it- that it was supposed to be like that (much to my chagrin).

If any of you are teaching or taking SS10 at the moment and are interested, it's page 420 in the Horizons- Canada Moves West textbook. Have a look.

The next blow came when I wanted to roll out the class set of shiny new atlases I'd ordered for the kids to learn about Canada thru maps (which had also been here since Sept). I asked the guys in charge for those, and was met with GRAVE concern. This time there was no gluing pages together before handing them out- they were simply denied altogether. Why? Because of all the pictures of Taiwan (of course!). For those of you who don't know, Taiwan is a seperate country in some peoples' minds, but is a part of China in the mind of the Chinese people. I guess in the atlas it's shown as a seperate country, and that wasn't cool with the book-censorship peeps. Although I only wanted the Atlas for all the various Canadian maps, the fact that many of the world maps depicted Taiwan as explained above, prevented the use of all the atlases. I got to keep ONE on my desk which I can make photocopies from, and the rest we are trying to ship back. Sad.

By the way, my blog might get shut down by the Chinese government for writing all this, but I'm willing to take my chances... if there's no more posts after this, you'll know why!

Congrats Linds & Baz!!

I would like to congratulate my friend Lindsey and her now-fiance Barrie ("Baz") on their recent engagement!  Linds and I have been friends since grade 8, and we all met Baz when our friends Tanessa and Denise met him randomly while traveling in England about 10 years ago.  After striking up a friendship, Baz came out to Canada at least once a year to visit them and to snowboard.  That's when we all met him and became friends with him.  A couple years ago, Lindsey and Tanessa were traveling in Europe, met up with Baz again, and that's when things started happening with the Lindsey-and-Baz saga.  Baz (who is an engineer), then decided to come to Canada for a year (this past year), mainly to snowboard and be with Linds.  

Dec. 24th was Lindsey's 27th birthday, and Baz completely surprised her with an early morning proposal on the snowy shores of Spanish Banks beach in Vancouver.  A treasure map and shovel were involved, I'm told.  

Linds and Baz are both super excited, and a June wedding is being planned.  Congrats guys!

It Arrived!

Hi Everybody,

You might remember (or look back to) a few posts ago when I said that my mom, sisters, and Oma had sent us a sweet Christmas parcel as a surprise.  Well, Andrew's mum did too!  It was on it's way over on a boat so it took a wee bit longer to arrive, but that it did today, just 3 days after Christmas, which was perfect timing as we were still on our 4-day "Christmas holidays"... we opened it right after church and found SO much stuff inside... again, I couldn't believe how one box could hold so much stuff.  All of it was individually wrapped in little pieces of Christmas wrapping paper, so we had lots of fun ripping it all open.

Here's me modeling the nice turquoise silk scarf and underwear... woot woot!

Andrew unwrapping a little Santa ornament.

Andrew holding his gift bag, which was full of wrapped pressies.

This is me, looking like I'm high on drugs (I wasn't!) cutting the box open.  Sorry these pics are a little backwards in order... it takes like a year to move them around on this program, so I'll just let you use your backwards imagination!  

Altogether, the package contained: socks & underwear, some chocolate bars, soap, hot chocolate powder, mittens, photos, a Christmas CD, little ornaments, Christmas napkins, etc.  Aunty Margaret and Uncle Charlie were also very kind to send Andrew a really nice collared shirt (which I'm sure will look ever so dashing on him) and a really nice set of PJs for me, which I can totally use here as it's SOOOOO freezing!  I've been sleeping in sweats for the past week b/c of the temp, but that just feels like I'm camping in our tent all over again, so real PJs will be a nice change tonight.

Thanks SOOOO much to the Nairns for this wonderful present of "Christmas in a Box"... we really appreciated it and felt the love.

This last pic is of ALL the cards peeps have sent us here.  If you sent us a card, look closely to see if you can spot yours... I promise they're all up there, but some might be hidden.  They are standing atop our oh-so-massive oven... that's what I baked the C-mas cookies in... I forgot to mention there's only room to bake 6 cookies at a time, so it's an enormous undertaking to do any baking b/c you have to sit there and wait and wait and wait... it's a 3-hour commitment!  

All right, thanks again Nairns, and Merry Christmas again everyone!

Round Yon Virgin

Well, needless to say, this has probably been our most "different" Christmas yet!  While we've both been away from our families several times over Christmas in past years, living in China definitely tops them all for being completely different to a Western Christmas.

Most Chinese don't celebrate Christmas; instead they're super big on Chinese New Years which will be starting in about 4 weeks from now.  However, they still decorate the malls with lights and pictures of Santa and play Christmas music, although I don't think they understand the background as to why Christmas is celebrated in the first place.  In any case, it's nice to be around a bit of "Christmasy stuff".  

At our school, our program being Canadian, us 4 teachers decided we'd totally celebrate Christmas, just like we went big with Halloween a couple months ago.  We encouraged our kids to decorate their classrooms, which they did with huge initiative... the classes looked GREAT!  Some of our kids even managed to get fake Christmas trees from somewhere... one for each classroom.  There were sparkly garlands, snowflakes, ornaments, lights, and artwork hanging from every wall, bulletin board, ceiling, and fan... so nice!  

On Dec 23rd we had a big C-mas party at school.  There were games like "Pin the nose on Rudolph" and the "Rudolph Dash", a big gift exchange, a visit from Santa Clause (our principal, Ron), skits and presentations, and lots of caroling that Andrew led on his guitar.  The kids were so enthusiastic... they're just fantastic to plan stuff for b/c they love whatever we do.  There are no bad-attitude-kids sulking in the back saying "this sucks"... which is so refreshing for us!

In the week leading up to the Christmas party, I took some time during my classes to teach the kids some C-mas carols so they'd be primed for the carols during the party.  I did this by looking up the carols online in the classroom, putting the lyrics on the overhead, and having them sing along with the computer.  Of course they'd heard of songs like Rudolph and Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and Frosty, but when we'd gone thru all those "kid-friendly" songs, one kid requested Silent Night.  So I looked it up online and put the words up for them.  Being the obedient little Chinese kids that they are, they sang along as best they could, but I noticed some very puzzled looks on their faces when we got to parts in the song like "Round yon virgin, mother and child".  I'm sure they were wondering "what the heck is a round yon virgin?".  Now remember that most of these kids have grown up with zero religion, China being a communist country.  In fact, we're not supposed to be saying anything about religion while teaching these kids, least of all Christianity I'm sure, but given the circumstances I couldn't really skip over it.

  Terry, the English teacher, had already told them the Christmas story during her ESL lesson earlier that week, so they knew about baby Jesus, but I guess she hadn't gone into detail about how Mary had gotten pregnant with Jesus.  Anyways, back to the song, the kids were very curious about this line, so we started talking about it.  I tried to explain it to them by saying "well, you all know what a virgin is right?  We talked about it during sex ed last month".  Yes, they all remembered.  "Well, Mary was a virgin when she was pregnant with Jesus".  "But Mrs. Nairn, you told us you have to have sex to get pregnant".  Shoot!  "Yes, but Mary got pregnant because God made her pregnant without having sex".  This was met with looks of disbelief from the kids, and was only exacerbated by me going on to tell about the angels in the sky singing to the shepherds below.  I'm sure they were thinking "ya right, teacher" in their heads, but again, being Chinese, they would never challenge a teacher out loud like that (they believe this shows disrespect).  So I said to them "Hmm, this might sound a little strange and far-fetched to you right now, eh?", to which one of our more mature kids responded, "Yes, but I'm sure you have a hard time believing all our old Chinese legends too."  Touche!   I really couldn't argue with him on this one.  

Jay the Santa Clause in "Twas' the Night Before Christmas" presentation

Siare & Monica in a Starbucks skit

Jay, Monica, and Siare in the Starbucks skit

More Decorations... this one took 2 boys about 2 hours to tape to the wall- dedication!

Special Feature: Shane & Bonnie Mowery

While living in Shanghai we've had the opportunity to meet loads of other expats, which has been great.  The couple in the picture above are Shane and Bonnie from Alabama.  Shane is a pilot and Bonnie's a flight attendant (that's how they met in the States).  After they got married, Shane's airline went under, and he was then hired by a Chinese airline and arrived in China around the same time as us (we met them at our cell group).  Here's the crazy thing: the Chinese airline hasn't had the time to train him on their planes yet, so they're paying him full-time wages and he's just hanging out here in Shanghai, waiting for their call!  This is super nice for him and Bonnie b/c they have LOADS of time to do whatever they want.  It's also really nice for us b/c they have become our "most available" friends.  There's always a 100% guarantee that if we call them to see if they want to hang out, they'll say yes and be there within 20 minutes!  We love it!  Shane and Bonnie are great for playing games with, and are quite similar to us in a lot of ways, so we get on great.  Bonnie and I are like two peas in a pod, and Shane is really intelligent and plays guitar, so Andrew loves being around him too... it's a good mix and is something we have been praying for (to meet a couple where both of us really like both of them, and live nearby enough to hang out with).  We're looking forward to their "after-Christmas Christmas-party" on Sat night... Italian theme!

Goodness from Home!

Let me begin this post by explaining that a couple months ago when our families asked what we wanted for Christmas this year we said "NOTHING!"  Reason being that a)we have everything we could ever want, b)shipping is super expensive, c)almost everything is made in China anyways, so why send it back to the motherland from Canada?, and d)it would be hard for us to reciprocate and send pressies back for everyone in our families as we'd be a bit embarrassed to do that b/c the quality of many things here is a bit on the junky side.  That being said, we all agreed that we'd just send each other cards this year and that would be it.  
But dear Carmen (my Mom) couldn't help herself!  She decided to surprise us and send us a box of Christmas goodies... mainly baking and the good old German treats I can't seem to live without at Christmas-time.  She actually told me about the parcel once it was in the mail and said it was "just small"... but it sure didn't look all that small when we received it.  
Moreover, it was PACKED full of amazing stuff... it must have been like putting a puzzle together b/c every square inch was stuffed full of stuff... nuts, chocolates, cookies, marzipan, German honeycake... even some Life cereal on the very top (for those of you who don't know, that's Andrew's favorite cereal in the world but it's super duper expensive here in China... for only a tiny box too, so we almost never buy it).  My mom told me that she was at the post office filling Life cereal into little Ziploc bags, trying to stay within a certain weight limit... I think she must have been getting some amused looks!  Also, there was a super nice card from my parents inside, plus cards from Emily, an Archie comic for Andrew from my sister Sylvia, and a box of baking and a card from my Oma Bohl... everyone was in on this!  Woo hoo!
This last picture is of me first attempting to break into the parcel.  My mom always wraps these Houdini-proof packages.  I'm pretty sure that the delivery plane could get shot out of the sky, sink to the bottom of the ocean, sit there for 30 years, and the contents of my mom's packages would be warm, dry, and in one piece upon discovery!  I'm not kidding... it took me about 10 minutes just to get into the box itself, using various cutting tools...
It's been so nice having all these wonderful Christmas treats in the house, and we are SO thankful to everyone who contributed... thanks guys!  It was really unexpected!

I wasn't planning on doing any C-mas baking myself this year, mainly b/c our kitchen counter space here in China is no bigger than 2ft x 2ft.  I'm not kidding... it's smaller than the top of an elementary school kid's desk, if that helps you visualize it.  It's so frustrating trying to make anything, including meals b/c there's no place to put anything... I end up standing things on the gas stove, inside the sink, and in the tiny little dish-drying basket.  Sometimes I even have to balance things on the top of the fridge.  I won't complain any further here b/c I know we still have a lot more than most people in the world do.  It's just a lot less space than I'm used to in a kitchen.  

Anyways, all that being said, our cell group is have an outreach-type Christmas party this Friday night, and I was asked to coordinate all the food.  It's just finger-food and desserts (not a big meal), so that's fine, but I figured I should bake something Christmasy instead of copping out and buying gross Chinese-y fried things in bags... that's like bringing chips and pop instead of nice stuff for C-mas.  So I got a recipe for sugar cookies online and have been working on them the past 2 nights.  They turned out okay, but taste a little funny b/c I had to use Chinese dumpling-flour to make them... that's the only kind of flour they have here... unless you want to pay around $10 for a little bag of the imported Rogers flour, which is crazy!  Anyways, the point is, our apartment is warm and cozy and smells like Christmas cookies.  While I was doing this, Andrew was practicing C-mas carols on the guitar as he's playing for the cell-group party's caroling part, and for our students' C-mas party next week.  The music sounds great!  

While I was writing this post, Andrew was just watching CNN and we caught the part about the Whistler gondola-post snapping in half... freaky!!  You gotta think that those kinds of things are always on peoples' minds as they ride up the lifts on ski mountains... at least I always think of that "what if" scenario whenever I'm riding up.  I always end up convincing myself that these things never happen in developed countries like Canada, and that they would only ever happen in new little ski-countries like Latvia or Slovenia or whatever... guess not!  The snow at Whistler looked nice on TV though... kind of wish I were there (just not on that gondola!).

K, gotta go... hope you're all having a great time getting ready for C-mas.  To those of you in our immediate family: watch for your C-mas cards in the mail... they should arrive soon!

The Latest...

Hi Guys,

Well, we're coming up to Christmas and are as busy as ever. Last week our school was inspected by some Ministry of Education inspectors from Victoria, BC... thankfully we passed the inspection, but it was a lot of work and stress.

Although Chinese people don't traditionally celebrate Christmas, they have definitely hopped on the bandwagon of decorating their main mall/shopping areas really nicely with lights, Santa Clauses, and Rudolphs. There's even some fake snow (white pebbles) for Santa to drive his sleigh over!

As we are teaching at a Chinese school (as opposed to an international school), we don't get the traditional 2-week Christmas holidays off (but we do get Dec 25-26 off). Instead of that 2-week C-mas holiday, we get 3 weeks off for Chinese New Year from Jan 17-Feb8. The great part about this is that we can go on a really nice holiday, which we booked flights for a few weeks ago and are now booking accomodations for. We were originally hoping to go to Thailand and Vietnam, but as it turns out, they are on the same "lunar calendar" as China, meaning that they also have holidays during Chinese New Year. This means that prices to fly and stay there are higher, and the areas will be crazier than usual... not our bag! Our travel agent here did manage to snag us some good prices to Bali (in Indonesia) though, so that's where we're headed! The cool thing is that on the way there we'll get to spend 4 days in Singapore, and on the way back we're gonna spend some time in Hong Kong. So really, we get to see 3 places.

Not only that, but once we're in Bali, we're gonna go island-hopping around the area. I've been doing a bunch of research and there are a few tiny tropical islands nearby (that you have to take a ferry to from Bali). These islands are so small that there are no cars, motorbikes, etc allowed on them... the only transportation is bikes or horses! Isn't that cool? We're gonna be staying in little huts right on the beach... cheap & cheerful! Because these little islands are very close together, we'll spend a few days on each, taking a little boat between them whenever we've had enough of one and need a change of scenery. These islands boast white sandy beaches, blue waters, and amazing diving and snorkling. When we're in Bali we hope to do some surfing, check out the monkey forest, and see some little villages which manufacture silver and wooden things. We are super excited for all of this!


The 3 tiny Tropical Islands (called the "Gili Islands")

Map of Bali (in Indonesia). We'll be staying in the south (town of Kuta).

Beach huts on one of the Gili Islands... I think this is the deluxe model though... we'll be roughing it!

On a sour note, our computer has gone belly-up... strange b/c it's a Mac and I thought they were supposed to be unbreakable... I guess not. What happened is that when I tried to turn it on this past weekend, the screen lit up with the Apple sign (like normal), but it didn't load beyond that to the normal user screen, even after many hours. Andrew got up early this morning to call the Mac store in Vancouver to see what the problem might be, and it seems that it's either a "corrupt operating system" or a failed hard drive. Anyways, they advised him to insert the "start-up disk" that came with the computer... guess where that is? It's in Gill & Tony's basement (Andrew's parents) somewhere in the depths of one of our many boxes that are all unmarked (b/c we didn't have time to organize all our junk while moving). There's no way I'm gonna ask Gill or Tony to go digging thru all our stuff, so we're just gonna have to figure this one out. If any of you computer experts have any bright ideas, please let us know! I'm pretty worried about it b/c ALL our stuff is on that computer, including all our photos from the past 3.5 years and a ton of coursework that I've prepared. We're gonna try to get it fixed this weekend here in Shanghai, but I'm concerned about losing all our files.

Anyways, that's all of our latest and greatest... hope you're all doing well!

PTIs and Adult Sports Day

Hi Everyone,

I feel like I haven't posted anything on the blog for a while as Andrew was up for "blog duty" last weekend... I think he did a great job by the way!

I wish I'd had my camera with me last week, but I didn't, so you'll have to settle for a little post without pics- sorry.

Last Thursday was had our first Parent-Teacher Interviews. Of our 48 students, 44 parents came out, which is a SUPER high percentage compared to what we're used to in Canada. Usually at home it's also the parents who don't really need to come, who are the ones that show up. Ie- it's the parents of the well-behaved A-students who show up, when the peeps you really need to see are the parents of the maniac ADHD F-students. So these Chinese parents came for the interviews last Thurs and all were super concerned about their kids... it was funny b/c since my course (Planning 10) isn't that hard, many kids are getting somewhere in the 90s. Many of the parents wanted to know how their child could improve on their mark. I was like "Ummmm, well, little Mei-Ling here is getting 96% already... I'd say that's pretty good for now!" Parents were also super interested in what kind of university their kid would be able to get into, (based on their Term 1 mark from grade 10). Again, we were like "well... it's great that you're concerned about that now, but you really don't need to worry about that quite yet." The other thing that they ALL asked was where their child ranked in the class. Middle of the pack (in the 80s) wasn't good enough, and many kids got dirty looks from their parents. I guess it's just really different here in China where each couple is only allowed to have one child... it's their one big investment and they don't want it to get messed up. Also, in China there aren't enough seats in the universities for everyone to get in, so it's extremely competitive... much moreso than at home. The kids are in school every day from 7:30am to 4:30pm, then have about an hour off for dinner, and then have a mandatory 3-hour study period in the evenings (those who live in the dorms). It's CRAZY!!

The other event that we had last Friday after school was Teacher's Sports Day. It was held out on the school field, and all the staff (0ver 100 of us) took part in a bunch of games... all these crazy things like sack-hopping, 3-legged jump-rope running, picking up ping pong balls with chopsticks, the tennis-ball shuffle relay, etc. My favorite one was where we had to tie a garbage can to our back (with big elastic bands, like a backpack), and catch badminton birdies that were served to us by our teammate from the other side of the net... it was really challenging. At the end of it all each teacher received a big cheesecake to take home. Yup, another random present from the Teacher's Union. I told the Chinese teachers that in Canada we have to pay dues to our union... here they give us cheesecake... works for me! For those of you who have been keeping up with our blog, you'll know that this isn't the first random present to be bestowed upon us this year... we've had boxes of pear-apples, big bottles of cooking oil, gift certificates to the hair salon, boxes of mandarin oranges, etc... they just keep the goods coming... each time more random than the next! We're very thankful though.

Alright, hope you're all well and enjoying getting ready for Christmas. Even here in Shanghai there are lights and trees going up all over the place, which is nice. The Chinese don't celebrate Christmas, but there are so many foreigners here, I guess it's caught on. The bigger reason is probably so they can rake in more cash... who knows.

Bye!

Weekend Trip

Hey, it's Andrew with more news.  Last weekend (Nov. 15/16) we went on a guided tour of a small city called Suzhou (Soo-jo) that is about 2 hours outside Shanghai.  We left on Saturday morning from our school at around 8 am.  There were about 10 of us who went, including the principle of our school, other school admin, and us four Canadians. We visited several great historic sites, such as a Buddhist temple that was built at the top of a mountain, and a tea house that was also on a mountain, both of which we had to hike up to.  They took us out for meals at nice restaurants, and the food was "interesting", but not by Canadian standards.  It is difficult to keep an appetite, when each meal has at least one plate with a bird or fish looking up you!  We stayed at a decent hotel on Sat. night (think Ramada Inn), and then did some shopping at a huge market on Sunday. Then it was back in our large passenger van, and we returned home by Sunday evening.  Good times!  Hope you like the pics.

Cheers, Andrew

Shanghai Master's Tennis Tournament

Hey everyone, it's Andrew.  On Nov. 13th, Corinna and I went to see the Master's Tennis tournament that was held in Shanghai.  It's a bit like Wimbledon, but on a smaller scale, and only men's tennis.  We went out the the stadium, which is about an hour and a half bus ride from where we are, and arrived at around 2 pm.  It is a very nice facility, which holds approx. 5,000 fans, and is probably less than 5 years old.  The roof even opens up for summer events.

As for the matches, we saw a two men's doubles matches, and two men's singles.  The most exciting one was between the number 3 ranked in the world Djokovic and the number 6 Tsonga.  It was a great tennis, with lot's of amazing net play, and in the end, the "underdog" Tsonga came out victorious.  However, at the end of the week, Djokovic was declared the overall winner of the tournament, after beating Roger Federrer a few days later.  Here are some pics of the event, and the winner Tsonga signing the camera lens after the game.

Fire Drill

This morning we had a fire drill at school. In Canada a fire drill is like a big free-for-all... an event that usually takes up most of a class, and therefore is pretty popular.

In China, of course you wouldn't want to take away any time away from the Math lesson, so the fire drill is held before school (instead of the daily morning exercise session). In Canada, everyone knows it's just a drill and therefore it can be a bit rowdy... here in China however, we had the firetruck come out for the event, smoke bombs detonated in hallways, and all students jogging in and out of the buildings in perfect single-file lines. Then the head fireman got up on stage and gave a speech to the students while they were standing out on the track... the whole event was videotaped, photographed, and had it's own special banner going across the outdoor stage. It took less than 15 minutes. Very impressive!

Teaching Sex Ed in China!

That's right, I was the lucky person who got to teach a bunch of Chinese grade 10's sex-ed!  

Here's the deal:  this semester I'm teaching a Canadian course called "Planning 10".  This is the same course as "Guidance" or "CAPP" or "Personal Planning"... it varies in name from place to place, country to country.  The course covers lots of useful life stuff, such as healthy living, education & careers, finances, etc.  In the healthy living unit, sex ed was one of the things I was supposed to teach, but I wasn't sure if I should actually do it as it's a bit of a taboo subject in China.  I decided to go ahead with it b/c I think kids need to know about it.  I totally thought the kids would be really shy and nervous to talk about it, but from the time I walked into the classroom and wrote "SEX" on the board in big letters, they were hooked!!  They got kind of giggly but settled down well.  We did a lot of brainstorming as a class, which is normally a risky thing to do as these kids are so shy and afraid of giving wrong answers that class discussions usually don't fly.  However, on this topic almost everyone had things to contribute!!  

The height of excitement was at the end of the week when I pulled out "Mr. Banana" and did the condom demo.  The guys sitting at the back of the classroom put up their hands and asked if they could move their chairs up closer for a better view!  Never have I seen students SO interested in learning anything before!  Of course I was a little nervous doing this too, and really hoped nobody would be walking by the classroom and looking thru the windows in the hallway! 

Of course I told the kids that it's best to wait until you're married to have sex, but I think it's very naive to assume that ALL the kids would actually adhere to this advice, and given all the nasty STD's out there (which the students studied in detail), I thought it would be best that they know how to better protect themselves.  

Overall, a very successful set of lessons... don't think they'll ever forget it, nor will I!

Halloween '08

Yesterday we had a big Halloween party for our kids here.  It was funny b/c Halloween isn't really that big here in China, so this was the kids' first time dressing up for it... they were as excited as 5-year-olds, which was great to see!  We'd been prepping them and teaching them a little about Halloween for the past week, so they were clued in.  We decided we would skip the afternoon classes on Friday and a have a bunch of games for them.  

The 48 students were divided into 8 teams of 6 and were competing against each other in all the games, of which we kept a grand tally so that one team won the grand prize (ice cream) at the end.  As always, our students were totally into it!  We had pumpkin bowling, apple bobbing, the mummy wrap (with a mummy dance!), a string weave, and a candy-guessing-jar.  
Andrew and I went to Toys R Us here in Shanghai to get our costumes.  Sadly, they didn't have a very good selection, and the only adult costume they had was Dracula, so that's what Andrew was.  I opted for the fairy costume, but had to settle for the 2-6 year-old version of it... tiny wings, hairband, wand, and a tutu that looked more like a little ruffle on me!  
The best reaction of the day was when Andrew walked into the classroom dressed as Dracula.  As you can see from the picture above, it was like the Chinese Paparazzi... they all rushed up to him and started taking his picture and saying "Ohhhhhh Mista Nay-rayn..."  Very funny!

Even the Principal and Vice Principal of the big Chinese school we work in came up to be part of the party... various kids donated parts of their costumes for a bit so they could feel included in the dressing up... at one point the principal was wearing a big black witch's hat with long neon-green hair attached... he was lovin' it!  

I am so happy with our students... they really took the initiative to make this party even better.  Without being asked, they somehow came up with tons of decorations for the rooms, painted artwork for the walls, etc.  What a great memory!