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.

Random Facts About China Part One

So, having lived here for six weeks (and also from visiting before), I have been gathering interesting random facts about China and Chinese culture.  As you probably can tell, I'm a big list person, so I thought I would start one.

1.China is on one time zone.  If you look at the outline of the time zone that China is a part of, you will see the typical strip of land, with the outline of China in the middle.  Everyone is on Beijing time, which makes it weird for people in the West, who should be three or four hours different.

2.  China doesn't follow daylight savings.  Our afternoon classes have been bumped up a half hour to let people get home before dark (at 5.30 during December and Janurary.

3.  Chinese medicine is based on a totally diferent system than Western medicine.  The whole internal temperature liked to spiritual energy thing.  Apparently a lot of it really works. 

4.  Chinese people sleep on wood boxes, for the most part.  Or with a slim, hard foam pad.  I have two slim, hard foam pads.  I am on the hunt for a nice foam pad.

5.  Chinese people tend to wear the same outfit for a couple weeks in a row.  They will wash it at night, but wear the same thing.  This is less true on the college campus, and the weather has been changing so people have putting on warmer clothes.

6.  It's rude here to talk with your arms crossed.  I do this when I teach, so maybe I should cut it out.

7. Weekends are not as reverent as they are in the States.  It's common to work on the weekends and there are very few 'weekend warriors."

8. Chinese women don't shave their armpits or their legs. 

9.  The 'comfortable' air temperature for houses and airplanes is ten degrees higher than the comfortable air temperature in the States. 

10.  Whenever the foreigners are playing sports, we draw a crowd.  We played a few rounds of volleyball and we had at least 20-30 people and children watching us play.  They just had an hour or two to stop and watch us play.  We played kickball afterwards in a field nearby and the same thing happened: 15 people showed us to watch us play.  It was almost like they texted their friends and said that some laowai (foriegners) were playing a weird sport and you should come and watch.  This happened in Tai'an as well, anytime we played games with the kids outside, we drew a crowd lined up along the fence.

This is good for now, I'll write more at a later date.  They will probably come in 10 list installments as I encounter them.