I've been promising for a while...

... my mailing address! Sorry I've been such a slacker about posting this.

Kristen Rush
Lanzhou University of Technology
Langongping 287
Lanzhou, Gansu 730050
China

With that label, mail and packages seem to get to me just fine, taking as little as 10 days, and maybe at most a few weeks. I especially wish I'd posted this earlier as I'm really craving some candy corn right now. Happy Halloween, loves! Miss you.

fixings for a great weekend in China

Breakfast of champions!! Homemade banana pancakes, chinese strawberry jam, banana & home-grated cinnamon compote, honey! oh and wine, cuz we were out of potable water that morning. Be flexible is, after all, peace corps' moto.

Afterwards, we hiked a mountain and explored two buddhist temples there before finding a beautiful windswept cemetary of sorts at the top.

At the first temple we heard chanting but it was largely deserted, with a brisk fall wind whipping the curtains back and forth before the altars.

Here the older men and women who were sitting around the doorways told us they were students, of Buddhism I suppose, & they flocked around us to the altar and pressed fruits into our hands. One man followed us into another building and carefully showed us how to perform the prostrations correctly after we lit incense.



At the top we found brambles and a thin trodden-dirt path edging the rim.
Gravestones and markers were scattered haphazardly,

terraced steppes cut into the landscape around us,

and just below the edge of the far slope,
we found fall.

teaching high

Today we were talking about the environment in my sophomore speaking class.
The second activity was a role-play with a rainforest/oil reserve scenario. The students, in four groups, prepared arguments in the roles of people who live in the forest, people who live around the forest, an environmentalist group, and the oil company wishing to tap oil beneath the forest. Representatives of each group presented to the class, which was now the government panel convened to make a decision on what would be done.

In full character, early sallies from the environmentalists were such:
"You are so stupid, do you want to die?!"
And early insults from the oil company:
"Do you want to eat bananas and play with monkeys all your life?"

After each had presented, several students remained up front, asking to make rebuttals... as the impromptu debate escalated, the entire class was totally engaged, with gasps, oohs and aahhs and spontaneous applause after particularly well delivered points. Students started jumping up from their seats to join those arguing up front until there were 10 students up there, and more in their seats offering advice. Now the arguments included exchanges like this:
"You say your company will be green. But oil is black! How will you make the oil green?!"
"We are not trying to paint walls!"
The impromptu debate lasted a good 45 minutes and would have gone on much longer had I not called a stop just before the bell rang. I am SO PROUD of them! They hit on many different arguments and were using their English to the full conotations of many words.

A photographer from the School of Foreign Languages stopped by to take some pictures for the department and I probably have this ridiculous grin on my face in most of them because the entire class was a total teaching high.

all students, all the time

Tuesday afternoon I have office hours after class, and finally students have started taking advantage of them! This week a few of my seniors came in wanting to work on their pronunciation. I'm no expert in how to do this, but with a little trial and error I think we hit upon some strategies and tips that they will find useful.

That evening I headed over to the west campus to judge the finals of a speaking contest that the English Association was holding for freshman engineering students. The topic was Freshmen and Dreams, and the 14 final contestants not only delivered speeches on their aims in life, but also answered questions posed by the judges (a little advance warning/prep time for this category would have been nice), gave performances in which the Backstreet Boys and Weslife made big appearances, and played a taboo-like word-guessing game. The students did a great job and I had a lot of fun! Afterwards the audience had a few questions for Pierce and me. My favorites were: What do girls in America look for in a boy? ["good question! american boys want to know the same thing!"], and Should we call you Ms. Kristen or Mrs. Pierce? aka how you know you spend too much time with your sitemate.

Wednesday evening one of my sophomores came by from 7:20 to about 10 o'clock, with a whole list of prepared questions for conversation, ranging from culture to politics to college experience. I was exhausted by the time she headed out, but really proud of the initiative she's taking on practicing English as well as the awesome questions she came up with.

Tomorrow night is English Corner as usual... I don't know if I've mentioned much about how English Corner works. Just envision walking into a room and having 250 hungry pairs of eyes turn on you and cheering break out. Every friday. First you talk for a while to everyone, then they vigorously plead for you to sing to them, and finally you find yourself seated in a chair with about 100 chinese students standing full-circle around you hanging on your every word and edging closer and closer as you speak. When it's over, they all want your number and to take pictures with you and as exhausting as it all is, they're thirsting for the contact and the practice and it's really sort of incredible that they are there each week whether the foreign teachers make it or not. I'll take pictures on friday.

Last bit of babble about my students: the seniors have been debating all week and I wanted to share a few of the funnier outbursts which were sprinkled into their generally quite well-constructed arguments ---->
"If you have no idea then just shut up!"
"I think your question is out of the debate! I think YOURS is!"
"I think your question is... absurd? Yes, absurd!"
"Are you even a human being in this society?!"
"You say homosexuality is not natural. But what about the flowers? And the earthworms?!"

I love my job.

frankly speaking

guess I have a bit of catching up to do, hang on...

Over the National Holiday (oct. 1), my school only gave the students a few days off instead of the customary week vacation. We're in the middle of a major evaluation from the Dept. of Education and will be until November something, effectively throwing the whole University into a state of havoc. The teachers haven't had weekends off for a while, and won't for a while longer as they wrestle with massive amounts of paperwork. It was really too bad for the students, as most of them didn't have time to go home that week and the Mid-Autumn festival, sort of a Chinese Thanksgiving, was on friday. Even though I didn't have time to get out of the city, it was still a real vacation for me because I had lots of visitors! The first weekend, nearly all the China 12s scattered around Gansu came into Lanzhou, and we drank a lot of wine, bought some cheese (!), and generally spent a lot of quality time with eachother -- definitely the closest family we've all got right now. Ben and Emily both stayed with me, and people were mostly over at Pierce's and my places since we're the most central, so it was a full house! After people left, I had a quick day of errands (bought a cellphone! ohhhh the convenience) and then more visitors arrived: Stephanie and Blake just graduated and are spending a year traveling around the world! Steph and I grew up together though I hadn't seen her in about 8 years. She and her bf had been on the road for about 2 months straight and were very ready for a break by the time they hit China. They came with me to class on Friday, and then to English Corner that night. The kids were thrilled to see so many foreigners show up together. English Corners can be exhausting, but it blows my mind to see hundreds of non-English major students spending their friday evenings (and in this case, their holiday evening!) working on their oral English. It makes me really proud of these kids, and I think it's worth the time on my part to try to be a resource to them. I'll judge a speaking competition that these same students are putting on tomorrow night -- should be really interesting!

The next weekend I saw Ben's place out in Dingxi. We hiked a mountain and I met some of his students. It was beautiful out there and so nice to get out of the city for a breather.

My students have also started emailing me with their concerns: hi:i am ellen,i am very glad to be your student,and i also want to be your friend.if you need any help, you can call me. shopping, eating,or anything else,just say,everything will be ok.i herd that you almost eat beeefnoodle everyday,i felt very sorry,in fact there are lots of choice for you to eat,just call us. I have the best students ever. Just don't tell them that I really do eat beefnoodles almost every day or they'll be trying to buy me dinner.

Classes went well last week. I'm finally starting to get the hang of the language lab, and I'm in an really great place with my seniors -- I think we're on the same page about what I'm trying to give them and what they want out of the class, which makes for a solid feel in the classroom. I'm a little worried that they'll disappear for the month of November (an extremely common and job-hunt precipitated phenomenon here for seniors), but I'll just have to wait and see. In groups they came up with and prepared debates... topics range from homosexual marriage, to the job hunt, to giving money to beggars, to internet usage among young people. I'm psyched to see the actual debates this week. On Friday, Peace Corps brought the whole Gansu crew back together again for flu shots here in Lanzhou, and that afternoon Ben came to visit my sophomore class. The whoops and clapping when they realized my bf was there were priceless, as were their questions while they put him on the spot for the next hour of class. "How about your love story?" "What is your favorite aspect of our teacher?" "What about the girls you dated before Kristen?" "Can you sing a chinese love song to Kristen?" "How many children do you want?" and my proudest moment of the afternoon: "You seem to be a very optimistic person, like our teacher. What do you do when your optimistic ideas and reality are not the same?" --- awesome question, yeah?
Afterwards we played volleyball with some of the other teachers in my department, had a quick dinner of mutton neck, and attended a marathon English Corner before collapsing.

Finally, on saturday, everyone was ready for some relief from the first big push of classes for the semester -- so one of the 11s threw a Pink Party! People brought it and the outfits were pretty spectacular... and pink of course. I suzi-homemakered a pink mini-skirt out of some dishtowels and that was by far one of the tamest outfits.

This morning Pierce and I spent several hours recording phrases and dialogues from "Campus English 100" -- a pamphlet being distributed to all the students as preparation for the inspectors. Our tape will be played several times a day over the campus PA system, and in classrooms as well. Common phrases, in the book and among our students as well, include: "Frankly speaking..." "In my personal opinion..." "How about your life?" and "See you! bye-bye" We'll be campus celebrities! Or something like that.

Very happy, fairly healthy, and thinking of you all often...

see you! byebye (love, Kristen)