days 62-67: beijing

This was the last week of teaching and the end of Summer Camp. Wednesday was the final competition and my group won 3rd place (out of 3500!!!) for singing "Go West". I'm so glad I will never have to hear that song again. The Final Competition and Closing Ceremonies were fun. When the students were walking in, the teachers were on the stage dancing the Macarena and electric slide. It wasn't until dancing in front of everyone that I found out how long the Macarena actually is. It feels like 10 minutes when you're doing the same dance over and over ..go west Then after the opening public humiliation, we sat through 24 acts of a solo, small group, and chorus of all 8 provinces. Then at the end, we got on stage and sang a song to the tune of "Let It Be" but instead sang "In Beijing":

I tried to learn to speak some Chinese
And the only thing that I can speak
Tsinghua Daxsue
And that took three weeks
In Beijing, in Beijing, in Beijing, in Beijing
Wo-ai Tsinghua Daxsue - In Beijing
All 10.000 people eating in the canteen they do agree
Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine people use those green plastic chopsticks
Better than me
In Beijing, in Beijing, in Beijing, in Beijing
Eating pizza with my bare hands at Qing Qing
Wu Lun Ge Chang Bi Sai
Hshi Yan Jiang Bi Sai are so amazing
Qing Hua Xue Sheng De Chuang Ye
Zhen Niu B~

The last part made the crowd go crazy because "Zhen Niu B" means fucking amazing and something about the students at summer camp.

Then yesterday, we had our class party. The party committee bought the cake, chips, some Pepsi and a case of beer. I taught them how to shotgun beers. That entertained them more than anything else I've done for them. Not only that, but only a few people were drinking the beer but as soon as shotgunning caught on, we finished the case in about 10 minutes. The only thing is that my Chinese students hardly drink and all the sudden they were downing entire cans in a minute. Then I went out for pizza with 15 drunk Chinese boys. Oh, and it was 10 in the morning.

After all that fun, we had the teachers banquet...not too exciting. Everyone got dressed up and took pictures and ate a really good meal. We went out to some Huo Hua, the nightlife district of Beijing before going to another R&B club Mix and across the street was electric/trans club Vics.

days 46-47: beijing

Today was my first day of teaching and I think it went pretty well. This morning was the opening ceremony that explained the outline of the camp and showed the creativity of previous years students. My ipod alarm didn't go off and thank you, Flo for letting me use your alarm clock because it saved me and gave me 15 minutes to run out the door with everything. I rushed to the building across campus with 5 minutes to spare only to find out that the class started 30 minutes after I thought...so I was 35 minutes early...Anyway, the opening ceremonies were kind of boring with cheesy inspirational music and definitely not worth being rushed that much, but I had to be there. My two classes afterwards were much better. We played a good warm up/get to know you snowball fight game and introduced myself and volunteers. One activity I did was each of 5 groups had to write any questions for me or the volunteers and every one wanted to know about our boyfriends. Like, how many we had, what is our ideal boyfriend, do we like Chinese boys, and my favorite, do you share a piece of love with your current BF? My other favorite answer was this one guy's favorite color. He said something like "#345674 (RGB)" when everyone else put down "blue" or "white". I hope tomorrow runs as smoothly as today. As far as first days go, today wasn't so bad.

This afternoon wasn't as smooth. An other teacher and I tried to coordinate the singing competition, but that will be better tomorrow. I really hope it's better tomorrow.