Grania (one of the students I'm closer with) invited me to her class's talent show. It was a ton of fun. All the students got up and did different songs and dances, including "We're all in this together" from High School Musical. There was tons of food that the head teacher had fun chucking at us. Luckily they didn't ask the teachers to perform, we just had to get up at the end and say a couple sentences about the class. They are one of my favorite's so I was happy that I could be there.
See post from 28th/29th. It finally was Wednesday! The performance was here! I got seven of my American friends to agree and come out to my school to help with the dance. Our program included a made up dance to a Chinese song, the Cupid Shuffle, the Electric Slide, and the Cotton Eyed Joe. This was our practice for the music teacher who was freaking out since he was overseeing the entire event. We actually did pretty dang good! After practicing for a bit the show started. There were twelve performances in all. Some dancing, singing, acting, Tai Chi, etc. The art class that I teach even each designed their own outfit and had a fashion show. Our dance came and went. The kids loved it, especially seeing all the new foreigners. And it actually went really well I think. Everyone afterward said they really liked it and enjoyed seeing our dancing. So in the end I think it was worth all the drama and frustration. And I want to send a shout out to Cliff, Andrew, Christy, Tremayne, Roz, Cara, and Jenna, and my ten students. Thank you so much for all your help and you all made the program great!
See post for Dec 27th. Ok, so now it's Tuesday. We still haven't been technically approved because a principal hasn't seen our dance yet. So we were told to get to the gym at 4:30 to dance on stage to show the heads of the school (and we had about 20 minutes of practice with the other girls so far). When we arrived in the gym the choir was on stage. They were still on stage at 5:30. We finally decided to go get dinner and come back later to see if we could get time on stage. We came back, the choir was gone, but another act had taken it's place. Finally after that one we got to get up on stage and get approval of our program. Thank goodness it worked well enough and the principal said he liked it. This picture is of one of the other performances. These two boys were my life savers. They are the two students who agreed early on to participate in my American line dance program. They are great dancers and were very excited to help out.
Ok, so look at my previous blog post on December 16th. As a refresher: I was asked to perform for our school's New Years Celebration, it was a mess figuring out our performance, and two days before the performance we still had not been approved by the principal to dance. So now it's Monday, the performance is on Wednesday. There was a big rehearsal with all the acts up on stage to figure out arrangements, microphones, etc. We were told to be there but then didn't actually get up and perform (thank god because we were not ready). So then the music teacher asked if he could meet with us at 730 that night to see and approve our performance. 730 rolled around and me, my two student dancers and Daniel, the singer, went to the music room to show off our stuff. After seeing our routine the music teacher informed us we needed to find 6-10 girls to add to our show. Great. So the students and I went on a mad search for girls that would be willing to come help out. They got some of their dance club members and I grabbed a couple of my students, got 10 and quickly taught them the dances. Then the music teacher said he wanted to make our dances more dynamic and therefore half of us should dance the American line dances in one direction while the others dance in the opposite direction. After about a half hour I finally got it through to him that we would all end up running into each other on stage because we did not have enough time to figure it all out. He finally dropped it and at 9pm we were done with rehearsal.
For Christmas I made each of my China family members a XiYangYang (a VERY popular cartoon in China) baggie. I found them at Book City and couldn't help but get them. Three weeks full of cross stitching got all six bags finished in time for me to hand them out at our family dinner.
Christmas :) For being away from home and family I had a really nice Christmas. My China family headed to Longgang for the day, watched some Christmas movies and had a wonderful meal. We had spaghetti with full fledged meat sauce, eggplant Parmesan, real salad (we rarely get that here), fruit salad, garlic bread and no-bake cookies for dessert! I even got to skype with my biological family back home as they opened presents. We even got to celebrate Greg's birthday and got him a cake which made his day. It was perfect as perfect can be.
Christmas Eve! All of CTLC went to a hotel in Dongmen for the evening. We had a big Chinese/American banquet. The food consisted of french fries and mystery meat. It was decent. After dinner was entertainment. This included some singing, instrument playing and a great rap from Conner and Ben about bingqilin (ice cream). Afterward it was off to the rooms for some wine and games. We had a nice evening chilling out in the hotel. At one point we went into Dongmen to look for food and alcohol and came upon the remnants of a silly string war. Dongmen looked like a natural disaster had just occurred. Overall it was a great Christmas Eve.
Outside my tutee's house is a bunch of street market stalls. This stall had a black chicken! I found out later that it is just a different breed of chicken.
Jessie asked a couple of us to come to her school today to help her out with a Christmas party her school wanted to her to run. Five of us spent the afternoon trying our best to control the large hoard of middle school students. Justin and I were put in charge of Christmas carol musical chairs. We got one group of students to sing Jingle Bells while the other twenty kids quickly walked around 19 plastic stools. Every time the music stop a large pushing match would break out over who got to sit down. Luckily, during the entire event, only one kid started bleeding from the activity. Afterward Jessie's contact teacher took us all out for a nice Chinese dinner. He had a lot of fun teaching us the Chinese words for different things and it was a great meal.
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