Culture Week

There is a Sias tradition called Culture Week.  All of the foreign teachers do a presentation each day of the week on different regions. Except for Monday, which is China day and the whole school goes crazy and Chinese.

We split into groups based on regions and I chose the day Latin/South America and Africa.  There is also Asia Day, Europe Day, and North America and Austrailia Day. 

Culture week is awesome, but also infamous.  It is certainly a high stress week for everyone and for some more than others.  Each groups has many big tasks they have to accomplish, and no one really knows if it's going to all come together until five mintues before show time.  It actually reminds me of all the Girl Scout camps I did, only on some serious steroids and minus all the little girls running around.

Each group has two parts: day time booths and a night time performance.  Our booths look pretty awesome, there are a lot of informational boards about different countries and cultural traditions.  We are also going to hand out food samples and mini passports to get stamped with some different countries' stamps.  We have a huge grass hut that people last year made, as well as a huge velvet (don't ask me why) crocodile and anaconda.  Vernon and Ashley also repainted these huge murals of a hippo, zebra, giraffe and water buffalo.  Needless to say, Italian Square looks pretty bomb.

Jess dressed up as an African lady (hiding her blonde hair of course) and was outside for basically the entire afternoon.  She estimates that she has at least one thousand pictures of her now on Chinese cameras and phones.  I love the little girl frowning at me in the picture.

We served some sort of orange drink (I've forgotten the name already), which tasted pretty good. 

We also had a soccer shoot out, which was crazy difficult (for me, anyway).  You had to move the ball through the cones and then hit the smilie face.  I couldn't get enough lift to actually hit the smilie face, but they gave me a peice of candy anway.  (Holly and Danielle, you would have been pro).  Side note: I ironed and hung all of those latin American flags you see in the background hanging off of the balcony.

This was really cute, we had a huge sandbox and toys in front of our Carribean Islands poster board and all the little babies came to play in it.  They are SO adorable. 

I don't think I could find a better example or picture of split pants if I tried.  I feel like I talk about split pants and people can't really imagine what that would even look like, it's so far against our culture and sense of hygine.  However, every baby looks like this and all of them pee on the street.  And you thought that cats peeing in a sandbox was bad, it only gets worse with a baby.... (Note: this baby didn't actually pee in the sandbox but it could have and that is my point.)

Here is our velvet crocodile. There was also a pink dophin (apparently they are only found in the amazon) but it was in really rough shape so we decided not to use him this year.

Our grass hut was a big hit, and now I wonder how many Chinese people it can fit.  It always had a lot of people in it hanging out the sides for pictures.

I love this painting of the Mayan ruins, the bottom three steps are 3D so you can take a picture on them. 

We also had pinatas that we had students hit at every hour.  This one was decorated as Sponge Bob Square Pants (I have no idea why) but there were also traditional style ones too.  I watched this pinata get taken down by really enthusiastic Chinese students, after the first couple solid whacks one of the taller boys actually grabbed hold of it and tore it in half.  It was really effective.

Faith (in the plaid) and Jess decided to compete in soccer and it was really close.  Though, Jess did have the handicap of being in a dress and in cowboy boots but she did pretty awesome.

I don't have any pictures from the night performance (since I was in it) and I'll post some as soon as I get them.  In brief, there was a lot of latin style dancing, soccer, a fashion show, and boxing.

I will post another section about this, probably, but I want to get this one up.  Check out my facebook if you want to see me as Hermione Granger with Harry Potter.

Yellow River Trip

One of the trips that Sias provides for its teachers is going on a hovercraft on the Yellow River and spending time in the park near by.  While the trip on the river wasn't terribly awesome, I did get to ride a horse and be in a hovercraft.  We got some pretty awesome pictures in the park.

This is a pretty awesome picture of Jon, who is a sophmore English teacher and coordinator of all the foreign teacher activites.  He went with us to the banquet (which will be my next post).

The Yellow River is filled with silt and it was also an especially rainy day that Saturday, so things were pretty muddy.  The hovercraft was pretty awesome and glided over all the mud and water no problem.  I think it was the first time I had ever been in one.  The tour guide said that having lots of Yellow river mud on your shoes meant that you would be prosperous.  My muddy boots are still in my room, I haven't cleaned them yet.  Those two facts are unrelated.

Halfway through the trip was a camp with all of these horses that you could ride for ten kuai.  They looked pretty healthy (not like other places I've seen) and it was pretty fun.  The woman wouldn't let me have control of the reigns, though.  She thought it was tood muddy and I might do something stupid.  I actually had worn my cowboy boots that day, so I was super prepared for horseback riding.

There was a lady selling pomegranates as well and they were pretty awesome.  It reminded me of the time we made pomegranate jelly out of all those ones sent by Nanny Gomez with Danielle.

After the ride was the park, so we spent two hours wandering around.  It began to drizzle halfway through so I ended up taking a nap on the bus.  But they did have these cool bell things that didn't actually make noise.

J.I. (one of the foreign students who lives in Peter Hall cause his parents work at Sias) taught Nick some break dancing moves.  Well, maybe one.  I just happened to get it on camera.

There is this huge statue of two of the early Chinese emperors that were built in the 1980s as a tourist spot, but it's pretty cool to to look at.  It makes for a nice park, and an awesome thing to take pictures with.  Erin did a great job of lining us up.

I just need a beard to match.  I already have the pensive look down.

There were a lot of rock faces that were fun to climb.  J.I. ripped a hole in the crotch of his pants because they were too tight and David hurt his heel jumping down from one of the higher rocks.  It does provide some cool shots.

All in all, it was a good day.  I was super exhausted afterwards, though.The rock climbing channeled my inner child (and a wayward youth spent climbing trees).