Rapeseed Oil

It's spring in Wenzhou! Complete with flash rain storms and the return of an increase in humidity. My hair is growing as we speak....

These are rapeseed flowers. The seeds are used for their oil, which is used in biodiesel, vegetable oil, animal food, etc. I had to google "yellow flowers in china" to figure out their English name because in Chinese their name just means oil flower, haa.

There's good ole Longwan High School

This is the view from my apartment building. I stole these pictures from a teacher who lives next door.

March has been a fun month so far. March 8th was women's day so on March 7th our school hosted a game tournament for all the women teachers.

When Shelly asked me if I wanted to play I was all:

That Friday we even got cake at lunch! Haa. I made the school website, which is where I stole these pictures.

Some of the teachers at my school! They all teach math
and Chinese so sadly conversations with them are limited... 

What did I tell you about the Chinese loving opening ceremonies...
we had one for Women's Day.

Shooting hoops, which we all know is not my strong sport...but they
assume it is since I'm American.
And "basketball come from America, Victoria!"

And when they say stuff like that I want be all "Well ping pong comes from China! So you are all good at ping pong!" But that IS true...and doesn't help my case.

This was a game where you had to bounce the
pingpong ball twice and it had to land in the bucket

You had to thread this crazy thick thread into as many needles as possible in 30 seconds. I did really bad. When she started counting down "wo, sih, san, ar, yi!" I got nervous..

Didn't even attempt this one. Chopsticks in a beer bottle 

Prizes!

Our special lunch! I'm in the background with Nancy, Shelly, and Celine.
I could almost be Chinese! If it wasn't for my pesky light hair....

My class lessons in March have all been a lot of fun. We did one sentence stories, which were so good! I gave the class a sentence to start with and that helped their creative juices a lot. The sentences I literally came up with on the spot, some were 

"There once was a magic horse..."

"My class won a million RMB..."

"I visited America and I saw..."

"An alien visited Longwan High School..."

"I was walking and got lost and I found..."

There were too many good stories. One of my favorites came from the America one. One group of students wrote quite a detailed story of traveling to America and finding me, and how I gave them a tour of my university. Another wrote that the alien that visited us fell in love with me and now me and the alien teach English together.

 Another week analyzed music lyrics, and sang Find Your Love by Drake. Which most classes loved. You can't go wrong with "Hey hey hey!"

I told them I think Drake is a 帅哥.
(shwhy-guh: handsome boy)

And I started a 9 week unit this month - Video Game High School. VGHS is a hilarious Youtube show I luckily found captions for and have loved the past few years. Seriously, it's amazing. I thought the students would like it because of the video game aspect, plus they use a lot of slang and normal words, too, which I love teaching.

That's what I'm getting paid to do, right... To teach the kids the meaning of noob and pwn? They need to know those things! They are out there online playing WoW and COD, so this is clearly vital information. They aren't going to get that from a Chinese English teacher...haaaaaa. Just kidding. Kinda.

Some of the boys I could see the light bulbs go on above their heads when I told them what pwn meant. They were like "oooooooh. That's what that means..." haaaa. But seriously, hey, I teach them other words, too. For example we learned expel, rude, and manners this week.

"Sure, Caitlin...sure.."

Anyways, they love it. Like can't get enough. And I love how much they talk about it. It takes some reigning in to get them to tell me in English, but we get it done. And that's all I really wanted, was them to talk in English. So now every week, we do 20 min. of normal teaching, then 20 minutes of talking about VGHS. It's turning out very nicely. They get upset when time runs out of class.

This is them when I tell them it's over.

Here's the trailer for the series, each episode is about 10 minutes, which is the perfect amount of time. LITERALLY PERFECT. And I have a little girl crush on the guy who plays the villain because he's hilarious. And it's just as much fun teaching it as watching it. I could go on and on about teaching this because it's just THAT GREAT.

This weekend I am going to a China Super League soccer game in Hangzhou, a few towns north of us. And I'm super excited. So. Excited.