So my english class last saturday didn't go too well. It wasn't horrible, just that the kids barely paid attention the whole time. It's hard getting them to care at all, the class is on sunday afternoon, and I think they already go to school from monday to saturday. I don't blame them for not caring...it's probably important that they learn english but probably more important that they enjoy being 11 years old and enjoy their 1 day free a week. I tried bring a tennis ball and play a game with it where they throw the ball to each other and have to ask and answer a question in english, but of course this just detioriated into the kids pelting each other with the ball. For some reason I had an image of asian/chinese kids being much better behaved in the classroom than american kids, but they're still kids, you still have to yell at them to get them to pay attention (which i'm not willing to do). Also my chinese TA who is there to help me translate instructions stopped trying to keep the kids in line about 45minutes into the first class, and talked on her cell phone for most of the time after that. Then in the second class they had already done all the lessons i had planned, so I had to wing it for an hour...which basically meant, after having them do the last excercises in the lesson, I asked them the same kinds of questions over and over, I was bored and they were definitely bored. It'll probably get better after I get more used to teaching though.

The other thing I wanted to write about is chinese food. I love it. I've gotten a few dishes that turned out bad, but overall everything is really good. Usually when I order I have no idea what is going to come...I just know what kind of meat is in it and sometimes whether it's soup or a regular dish. The hardest part about living here has been ordering food because I don't recognize most of the characters on the menu. A lot of restaurants have pictures of the dishes or a display with all the dishes under plastic because I think a lot of chinese people also don't know exactly what they're getting when they order. Or maybe it's just how they do things...but whatever, the food is really good. So far my favorite thing is xiaolongbao (pretty sure it means "little dragon bun"), which are sort of like dumplings with soup/juice cooked inside of it. You're supposed to bite a hole, suck out the juice, then eat the dumpling...i've had them at least 4 times so far at this one restaurant.

...as I am writing this, the cleaning ladies for the dorm/hotel I live in just came in to change our sheets and clean our bathroom. I think they come about every 3 days to do this, but it's really weird to just sit on my computer while these ladies change our sheets and take our the garbage...I'm not going to say I don't like it but it's a little unneccesary.

Also, I've labelled all the pictures on my computer, and I'm going to try to upload pictures from the last month sometime this week.