Just a quick follow up since as it turns out I was a little alarmist on friday night...
All my kids are staying afterall, and the cancelled-classes doesn't apply to them. In fact, it doesn't precisely apply to anyone, but most of the other students were told that they can go home for the next month if they want and therefore do not have to go to classes. This does affect most of the other trainee's classes. Only 7 of us will continue totally as planned and most of the others are anticipating that their classes will be decimated come class-time tomorrow. I guess we'll see what happens.

And naturally, as soon as the decision was made to hold this unofficial break, the heat spell broke with an enormous round of thunderstorms friday afternoon/evening and it's been practically cool for the last two days.

In other news, today I bought some peanut butter :)

And SO my first week of teaching is over. I think it went really well :) Days 1 and 5 were the best, with the middle days varying in my ability to get the kids to participate. Today was perfect... just this awesome vibe between me and the students, lots of interaction and tons of fun... I asked them to write some anonymous feedback both wednesday and this afternoon, and today I got several "can every day be like today?" comments! (at least more constructive than wednesday's comments which generally consisted of "you are so beautiful and so kind.")
I've been slacking a bit in chinese class this week... when we're lesson planning every night, its hard to study for chinese and I think all of our language progress has taken a beating.

My hostmom is a professor at the school and today she told me that although school just started up again on monday, from tomorrow on, the school is cancelling classes and having a(nother) one month summer break because of the heat (a university worker died the other day from the heat, and many of the students have been hospitalized). She said the administration just made the decision this afternoon, and I guess I don't know for sure, but I assume that means all students including mine! Soooo model school may be over just one week after it began. Which would really be too bad... I have two more weeks planned, and was going to meet my kids for a ping-pong tournament next week! I'll update when I know more.

As of now, two of the trainees have gone back home. None from my training hub though. I hope we don't lose anymore... everybody here is really great.

Item 1) Not to harp on the heat continually, but my host fam just told me that this summer has been the hottest in 30 years here... My poor little teacher bemoans daily at the beginning of chinese class that it is simply "too hot and humid, too hot and humid!" Chengdu has sold out of air-conditioners and a lot of the students here have been hospitalized for heat exhaustion. I hear there's a heatwave back home too? Well isn't it nice that 12 hours apart we can all still sweat together!

Item 2) On Sunday my host cousin and her sister took me to a town about 40min outside Chengdu by bus, called Luo Dai. They didn't have the english to tell me what we'd be doing, so it was a suprise when we ended up at the bottom of a mountain, staring up at a steep Great Wall-look alike stone staircase which led to a mountain top Buddhist temple. We hiked it for 4 hours, over 2 small mountains and back. I literally sweated through every stitch of clothing on me, including my bag. I have some good photos, and it was pretty beautiful. It was a little touristy, but everyone there was Chinese, no other white folk. The only other foreigner we met was a Korean student doing a semester here in Chengdu. Up at the top of the mountain, my lurking head cold exploded and by the time we got off the mountain, I had a big headache. Not the best way to then wander through Luo Dai itself, which is famous for it's fountains and water filled gutters where the whole town splashes and plays. They told me that to be splashed there is a happy thing and no one is allowed to get mad. okayyyyy. The town had several restored historical streets and lots of unique crafting going on. I don't know if I've ever been quite so exhausted, but it was great to get out and see some of the surrounding area... the countryside is beautiful around here!

Item 3) Monday, model school started! The first day went really well. I had so much fun, and my kids are great. The first day was all introduction type activities, while I was assessing their english level. There are 18 of them, and they are college freshman, so this is pretty much their first class here. They've all studied english for years, but are not english majors, so while I have a few students whose speaking and comprehension are both quite good, there are a broad number who are at a lower level and a few who have very few comprehension skills and cannot use their english spontaneously. All that makes it hard to teach a lesson which can challenge or even just reach everyone. Day two we talked about hometowns & history. Several had told me they wanted to learn a little about American history, so I modeled talking about hometowns with a brief lecture on Leesburg, D.C., and Charlottesville/Jefferson. Sort of got off on Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness and the concept of an academical village... ohhhh UVA, what you've done to me. My top students were totally with me for that material which was exciting, but then we definitely had to step back to pick up the rest of the class. That was a little frustrating, but I know that teaching such multi-level classes, particularly when my class sizes are much larger, will be a constant challege for the next 2 years.
Today the lesson was relationships: with parents, with friends, and then loooove/dating. I passed around lots of pictures, and had fun teaching them a Rascall Flatts song at the end of class, BUT I was struggling a little more because they are almost always unwilling to speak up in class, and no one will volunteer any info or ideas. When I assign them something to talk about, even spontaneously, they do much better, but I'm still concentrating on trying out different strategies to get them to speak up.
Tomorrow we'll be doing emotions/personality and I'm psyched about it. Then we're going to be using what we discuss related to those things, to work on some story-telling exercizes. They think it's hilarious when I tell them stories with voices, gestures, and big facial expressions, so I think it's time to turn the tables. After all, no language can be fun or interesting when it's spoken at the floor in a monotone!

Yesterday during class there was a torrential downpour (which temporarily flooded the back of my classroom in fact). Even with the doors and windows shut, it was a struggle to be heard over the rain for a few minutes, and the strain sent my scratchy throat into a coughing fit! I hd tears streaming down my face and couldn't stop coughing. One of my kids had to grab me some water while the class monitor ran a vocab drill for me while I got my breath back. So today when the class showed up, they brought me a bottle of water and a mango :) Awwww.

Hi all, sorry I've been MIA so long!! Because of various sensitivies I needed to get some clearance before posting anymore here. The keyboard of the computer that I'm on right now is awful so I'm just mostly going to cut and paste from a few emails I've sent the last few weeks in order to catch this blog up a bit. Sorry to those who've already read some of this:

7/4 : Chengdu is hot and humid!! And the food is super spicy. Having never included anything remotely spicy in my diet, and being totallly unaccustomed and sensitive to the taste, the sheer heat of Sichuan food had been my biggest challenge so far, though the eats are plentiful and delicious so it's not as though I'm going hungry. In two months though, when I go to my site and meet my colleagues and university department, I very much want to be able to at least try everything that shows up at the welcome banquet. That said, today I decided that instead of avoiding everything with the tell-tale specks of red peppers on it or in its sauce, I dove right in. Lunch and dinner were spent with sweat, tears, and snot pouring from me... a fellow trainee told me that after about 6 weeks of this I'll be used to spicy food in general, though I think the intense taste is inescapable for all of us. That said, ALL the food is delicous, and NOT all of it is spicy. Tonight for the 4th, a few of our VFs (6 PCV's from China 10 who are helping with our training as they finish out their time here) took us out to a BBQ place (don't think american bbq... it's more along the line of spicy shishkabobs). Sadly, there were no fireworks.

7/8: I'm at my homestay right now, in a neighborhood just north of Sichuan Normal University (Chuan Shi Da), which is on the outskirts of Chengdu. I'll be here for the next 8 weeks (minus one week in which I'll be visiting my evenutal site, which I don't know the location of yet). My host family is very considerate although it's sometimes stifling to be so worried about and fussed over. I practically have my own upstairs apartment within their "pent house" apartment. I call it that because it's on the 6th floor (no elevator of course! I'm going to have a killer ass before I leave here! ) -- it is beautiful and quite spacious actually, with two stories and a patio garden. The family is a mom and dad and 2 year old little boy. The mom is a professor here and I think the dad is also. Also in residence is the mom's older sister who helps take care of the baby and cook, and the mom's younger cousin who is a 1st year english major here. She is staying at the apartment while I'm here in order to practice english and to help with all of our mutual communication. They are all so kind, and very understanding about cooking with a little less peppers for the time being, though I think the father misses the spicyness a lot and will be very happy when I can eat it.

All of us in this group training at Chuan Shi Da will eventually be placed in sites either in Northern Sichuan or in Gansu province. Gansu does get pretty cold, with a little snow in the winter, but it also contains the only Peace Corps apartments with heat, so it's a winter-time tradeoff with the more southerly sites which don't have heat and still get down to freezing for much of the winter. Gansu can also be quite dry, with the more northern parts of it getting a lot of dust from the Gobi. However, Gansu has simply spectacular landscapes, and was the "mouth" of China during the days of the silk road, which went right down the center of Gansu province to enter the heartlands of China. This means that not only is it full of spectacular scenary and very interesting peoples (including Tibetans and Kazakhs), but it is also just littered! with Buddhist grottoes and other major historical locations that grew up around the silk road. Very cool. Southern Gansu is a little more pastoral (as opposed to steep gorges and rushing rivers), but it is considered a pearl of western China. Some of those sites are 1-2 day train rides from Chengdu, and some of the schools are much less advanced, like technical training schools instead of full universities.

7/15: This week my life has been 4 hours of language every morning, and 4 hours of technical sessions every afternoon (exceptions being the vaccinations-- 3 more of a total 16 -- and an enlightening "diarrhea dialogue" by med staff). In the evenings we sometimes go out for a beer or pingpong, or I watch TV with the host fam. It's sort of funny actually, I live in the farthest neighborhood from campus, with a 20-25 minute walk either to class OR to the South Gate where most of the bars, restaurants, and other volunteers' homestays are. It's like being on JPA all over again when it comes to going out or meeting up with people. Luckily a couple other cool kids are also way out the North Gate in my neighborhood, so we often make the trek together. Between them, my ipod, and the people-watching to be done along the way, it's actually a pretty great walk, buckets of sweat aside. Outside the walk, my days here are sortof defined by stairs. I live on the 6th floor of my building, I have class on the 3rd and 4th floors of two buildings, and teach on the 4th floor of another.

Starting on MONDAY I will be teaching model school! Well, it's model school for me, but for the students it's a real course and I'll be giving them final grades. I only have 15 students actually, which is unheard of for China. While I'm excited about all the things I can do with them that maybe I can't with a larger class, I'm afraid that getting to site and standing up in front of my regular classes of 30-100 kids will still be a bit of a shock! I can't WAIT to meet my students and start muddling through! All I know about them is that they are freshman and not english majors so their english level could be quite low.

We'll still be having language every morning, and I've started keeping a journal written in characters for my teacher to correct each day which I'm hoping will help my chinese improve since in-class language acquisition is focused on oral and listening comprehension.

Just wanted to mention that I can post on here, but I can't see it because China has blocked blogspot -- so I can't see comments and the only way that I can find out if something hasn't posted right is for you to email me. I love hearing from you all anyway :)

Much love,
Kristen

PS: until I'm on a computer where I can see webpage options in english, I can't post this disclaimer in my info, so I'll just do it here for now --> Anything posted in this blog is my opinion only and does not represent the official stance of either Peace Corps or the US government.

Safe and sound in China, and only a little the worse for wear. We left our hotel in San Francisco at noon on July 30th, East Coast time, and finally got to our hotel in Chengdu precisely 24 hours later, on July 2nd, Beijing time. After a pathetically weak 7 hours of sleep to recover, we had breakfast and then dove right into this first week of training, with a lot of introcductions, acronyms, and goings-over of schedules for the next 10 weeks. We were also each issued a formidable med kit (more of a small suitcase really). Each session was topped off with food... either an enormous lunch, a whole spread of snacks, or the welcome banquet tonight. We are all officially stuffed, though most of us were afraid we'd fall right to sleep in our food at dinner tonight. I had forgotten how incredible Chinese banquets are.

Tomorrow we begin language training and a more formal review of various Peace Corps policies in general, and PC China policies in specific. We also get the first of several rounds of shots (we'll have a final accumulation of some 16 vaccinations, as well as info sessions on diarrhea and bird flu etc., before we're deemed prepared on the health front). I think it'll just be me and one or two other people in the advanced language group since no one else has had much in the way of studying Mandarin before, but with 4 hours of language classes a day, that's going to be incredibly intense. I can't wait to get started though! The faster we dive in, the faster I'll be able to really communicate over here.

We'll train here (at a hotel just outside the West Gate of Sichuan University) for a few more days. On Thursday we'll separate into three groups to continue training scattered around the city with several different university bases and while living with our Chinese families. I'm pretty exhausted and on my friend's computer so I'd better cut this one short, but I'll be sure to find an internet cafe next weekend, after I've met my host family!