Yellow Sea

August 13, 2006

This is the view from outside my classroom. I am currently teaching in the port town of Shidao located on the Yellow Sea. Highlights from today's lessons include:

- The three forms of "what is up?" (what's up, what up, whassup)
- How you doin' vs. how's it goin'
- What time is it? You know what time it is, it's time to eat.
- The high 5

The high 5 was particularly popular amongst the students and very well may be a keeper. Tomorrow I might introduce fish out of water, feed the birds, and it's raining, it's raining.

I learned today that an hour and a half is also a long time for the students. As I was prying one last sentence out of this delirious Chinese boy it occured to me that maybe the kids were tired. I made him say something anyway. One has to maintain standards.

Following class, Mrs. Soon, the headmistress, and her gigantic husband Yan took some of us out to lunch at a Korean restaurant. For one brief moment, my feeble grasp of the Chinese language threatened to make the evoutionary leap from unawareness to dim perception before collapsing under the sheer weight of inebriaton. To be quite honest though, when Yan drinks, we drink.

After lunch, we toured Shidao briefly. We drove through the port and stopped at a few sceneic overlooks.



Then we went swimming in a huge saltwater swimming pool at the Shidao Bay Tourism and Vacation Resort.