ivman's blague

We arrived safe and sound back in the good ol’ USA last Tuesday evening late, August 1st. Here’s a little bit about our last day of classes and our flight to Beijing.

We were sad to see our time at Hainan University come to an end. We all enjoyed our classes so much this summer. I am putting pictures of each of us below so that you can see us in action. The students were placed in our classes not only on the basis of age, but also on the student’s individual language ability. I will put pictures of our classes from the oldest students to the youngest.

Yvonne taught the university aged students, but several younger students were in her class because their English was so strong.

Jean taught the class of mainly high school aged students.

I taught the middle school aged students. Since I had always enjoyed this age group in my early years as a teacher, I was happy to teach kids of that age again. We probably enjoyed ourselves far too much.

Becka taught the youngest children - ages 7 to 9. In case you wonder what she’s doing in the picture below - her kids loved to sing the action songs she taught them.

Becka had as one of her main themes “animals” and had many fun craft projects for the kids to do. Below is a picture of some of her students’ paper penguins.

We left on Saturday, July 29 to spend several days in Beijing. Even though we left our apartments at 6:30 a.m., we were surprised and pleased that some of our students from this year and last year came to see us off. Below is a picture of those who assembled to bid us farewell.

On our flight from Haikou to Beijing I was very surprised to see one of my students from last summer on the plane with her parents. Though my class last year was mainly university-aged students, this middle school girl named Nancy had by far the best English in the class. I was sad not to have seen her on campus this summer since she was not able to take classes from any of us; therefore, this was a very pleasant reunion for us both. Below is a picture of Nancy and her parents. The three of them were going to Beijing for several days since her dad had to go there on a business trip.

One of Ruth’s Chinese friends had asked us to carry some frozen Wenchang chickens to a friend of hers who lives in Beijing. This friend agreed to meet us at the airport. Since we did not know her, she held up a sign with our name on it. This was actually the fulfillment of one of Becka’s dreams - to have someone at a foreign airport holding up a sign with her name on it.

I will do another blog entry in several days to show what we saw while we were in Beijing.

Tags: China, school, travel

We thoroughly enjoyed our time in China, but it is certainly nice to be back at home in the good ol’ USA too, believe me! Every country has its cultural peculiarities. My students this summer decided that Chinese people and American people are more alike than we’re different, yet we truly are very different. Today’s iv points out some cultural pecularities of Americans and life in the USA.

Only in America

You can get a pizza to your house faster than an ambulance.

There are handicap parking places in front of a skating rink.

People order double cheese burgers, a large fry, and a diet coke.

Hot dogs are sold in packages of ten and buns in packages of eight. Go figure!

We use answering machines to screen calls and then have call waiting so we won’t miss a call from someone we didn’t want to talk to in the first place.

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.

We yell for the government to balance the budget, then take the last dime we have to make the down payment on a car that will take 5 years to pay off.

We demand speed laws that will stop fast driving, then won’t buy a car if it can’t go over 100 miles an hour.

We get upset that we’re spending over a billion dollars for education, but spend billions of dollars a year for cigarettes.

We whip any enemy in battle, then give them the shirt off our backs.

We know the line-up of every baseball team in the American and National Leagues but mumble through half the words in the “Star Spangled Banner”.

In the office we talk about baseball, shopping or fishing, but when we’re out at the game, the mall or on the lake, we talk about business.

We applaud our free press even when they convict innocent people in print.

We’re supposed to be the most civilized nation on earth, but we still deliver payrolls in armored cars.

We have more experts on marriage than any other country in the world ….and still have more divorces.

We tie up our dog while letting our sixteen year old run wild.

We will work hard on a farm so we can move into town where we can make more money so that we can move back out into the country.

We’re the country that has more food to eat than any other country in the world, and with more diets to keep us from eating it.

We leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and leave useless things and junk in boxes locked in the garage.

We’ll spend half a day looking for vitamin pills to make us live longer, then drive 80 miles an hour on slick pavement to make up for lost time.

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updates…

It feels kind of odd - after getting “re-oriented” four weeks ago, we’re now suddenly “disoriented” again! This morning I’m *truly* disoriented as my internal clock is still trying to be hungry and sleepy at all the wrong times. I’m glad I got the bulk of this ready back in our apartment in Haikou! My thinking is rather unclear this morning. Hope the rest of this personal update makes sense.

As seems to be typical of international air travel, we experienced delays and missed connections. Our pilot of our flight out of Beijing told the passengers he was actually going to leave about 10 minutes early to beat an approaching storm but was delayed by the tower because of those same weather conditions. The resulting half-hour delay plus the airline’s extremely slow handling of the baggage everyone had to reclaim in order to clear customs caused us to miss our connection to GSP. Since United did not have another flight to GSP until this morning, they tried and were able to get us on an American Airlines flight that would still get us home last night. Phew! It was already a very long day and we did not want to have to find and pay for a hotel in Chicago in our state of brain-deadness! We know that many interceded for us yesterday as we traveled. We have much to do to get settled back in here, but I will try to get a blog entry up in the next few days so that people can see what we enjoyed in the Beijing area. Our couple of days there was a nice mix of relaxation and new adventures.

quotation…

“In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people.” - Groucho Marx

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Rob Loach in Greenville SC

Americans are getting stronger. Twenty years ago, it took two people to carry ten dollars’ worth of groceries. Today, a five-year-old can do it.

Tags: China, geography, points of view