Saturday, 28 May 2011

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

Today, I got up around 7am. There is a street vendor selling fresh fruit right outside my building, and for breakfast, I tasted some of his yummy products. I also now have coffee (and toilet paper) from the little market located on the campus, so already a better start to the day.

After breakfast, I sat in on a couple of Miranda's classes (I will describe the classroom environment in more detail in some other day's Blog posting)....but, in general, I have to say that the students appear very keen and eager to learn (especially in comparison to our typical Canadian students) and that Miranda will be a tough act to follow - the student's love her!

We (I guess I now mean "I") teach Organizational Behavior, Human Resources and Business Communications. As you can see, given that I am such a touchy-feely fellow these courses are right up my alley.....but as I said, I'll talk about the students/school/teaching some other time - back to the important stuff.......namely eating, shopping and sightseeing!

For lunch today one of our "classes" (and by class, I mean every student - incredible!) met us and took us for a dumpling lunch in the marketplace. This was to say goodbye/thank you to Miranda as well as to welcome me to China.

We then spent a few hours in the ancient market in Qinhuongdao....there is tons of stuff to see, do and just plain look at!!!!)

Miranda had to teach an afternoon class (her last one in China), and I laid down for a nap....the time difference had caught up with me a bit)

After her class/my nap, we had an intensive discussion about the student's and our teaching philosophy (OK.....the meeting might have been more accurately described as a "happy hour"). As far as I can tell, China only sells beer in giant bottles (580ml...I think ours are 355ml????). The bottles cost 2.5 RMB (which is approx. 35 cents Cdn). NICE!!!!! PS: I have now officially given up water, milk, juice and all other unnecessary methods of hydration.

David (the E&A teacher I mentioned the other day) and his wife Tracy took Miranda, Gis and I for another fabulous traditional Chinese dinner at a hotel/restaurant with a Chinese name (in fact the one they were married in!) I had some very nice pictures of this dinner - but deleted them in error as I thought I had already transferred them to my computer....grrrrrr! (Because the blog website is blocked by the gov't and I can not enter stuff in directly, Chad and I are having quite a time figuring out a system to get the info/pictures on to the website).

Anyway, back to the dinner, and suffice is to say that dinner was awesome! As for more information/details about what we ate, I know we had a lot of Chinese dishes, that also had Chinese names (maybe as I am here longer I will get better about those types of details), but Miranda is a foody, and she probably gives restaurant names, what the food is called, how it looks and tastes etc. in her blog. 

After dinner, David drove us back to the collage and Icollapsed into bed at about 10pm.








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