Yesterday the program went as a group to a city called Shaoxing, which is about 2 hours away. The weather wasn't good and overall it wasn't much fun. The main reason was that I didn't really see Shaoxing...maybe it isn't much of a city, but they basically just ushered us from tourist site to tourist site. No chilling at all. Mostly we just walked around famous authors' mansions. While their books may be great, their houses were pretty boring. Also went to a couple temple-like things, which were ok, but I think it would have been better to go later in the year when the flowers are blooming. Here is a picture of incense burning outside of one temple, I took it in black and white b/c it seemed appropriate, and I messed with the contrast a bit...I like it a lot. I think I'm going to start putting up a picture once a week, since I can easily upload one pic at a time.

My english class today was pretty bad again. I just didn't have the patience to deal with the kids mostly because the class started at 3pm and I hadn't eaten anything before it. They were better behaved overall, but only because they had some teachers from the school going from class to class and looking in the window or sitting there to scare them into submission. I had to teach them "always" "usually" "sometimes" and "never." I started by writing the words in english and chinese, but I realized after the first class that I had the words all mixed up. Not like they were really paying attention anyway. They can understand the concepts of the words, but they don't know enough english to really use them in a sentence. The have very little vocabulary, and the book focuses too much on grammar. In the future i'm just going to work on vocab, and stay away from the grammar (much harder to teach). The kids like me, but i think they realize i'm a horrible teacher. The two hours are incredibly tiring...I've gained a lot of respect for elementary school teachers for having to deal with this all day long. Couldn't imagine doing that. I took the job mainly because i thought it would be fun, but it's turned out to be somewhat annoying.