Mike In China

Happy Chinese National Day! Or week. Or something like that... All I know is that I have a week off of work and there are big fireworks shows every other night. Two of our co-workers that live together had us over on Saturday night to watch the big fireworks show from their balcony that over looks Century Park where the fireworks were. It was a pretty good show (it lasted an hour) and there were some fireworks I hadn't seen before. There were crazy amounts of people everywhere and cab drivers were basically ignoring everyone that wasn't Chinese so that was frustrating. It is really great to have some time off to relax and explore Shanghai some more. We were talking and it is crazy because after this, we won't have two days off in a row until mid January which is a crazy long time from now. People keep asking about teaching and I don't know what else to say!? I go to class, teach the kids a couple new words or a song, act like a clown, bribe the children to behave with games involving candy, get fed a lunch which I rarely eat much of other than the rice, and then teach some more kids the same thing. I really like the kids and try to play around with them as much as I can between classes. They like running up to me and calling me monkey teacher because Chinese men don't have hair on their arms. We got paid on Friday and I was told I'm doing really well for a new teacher and that my boss was actually surprised with how well my reviews were, so that's good. We went back to the sushi place again and this time we ordered something that came to the table still flopping, literally the fish had just been killed and they placed the pieces of sushi on top of him and he would still flop his tail and open and close his mouth for awhile as we ate him. I'm starting to get nervous about the fact that I brought no winter clothes. I hope to have my mom send me some of mine but it might be expensive to have her ship a ton of jeans, sweatshirts and winter coats. So I'm not sure what I'm going to do. It's not cold yet but some nights you can tell that it is going to be. Hopefully I will have some exciting adventure to share to get more than one post in this week.