Let it snow and new China family!

Last night, we had the second snow of our China experience. I went outside and bits of it could touch my knee! To be fair, that was where old Chinese people were shovelling all of the snow off from the road, but I'm going to pretend that it was naturally that deep. The untouched snow reached mid-shin though, which is still very impressive!
So. That's all very exciting.
Here are some photos of me and Tessa enjoying the snow!

The past week of teaching, I've been playing my students 'Mulan'. They've found it utterly hilarious! There are bits which I never really noticed before but each class was roaring with laughter! To be honest though, after watching the first half of one film 18 times in a row, it can get pretty tiresome.

(The next section of blog was written about a week after now.....)

The week of lessons AFTER Mulan consisted of me teaching my classes sections of 'Fairytale of New York'! It was so much fun and it all felt very Christmassy and parts of it were hilarious. I filmed them when they got the hang of it and put it all together into a China Christmas video! When I was planning the lesson, I thought that I'd really need to stretch out the learning of the song or that I'd need to put some extra things into the lesson but it turns out that 45 minutes is a good amount of time for Chinese 16 year olds to learn a verse or two of the song! To be honest, parts of the song are VERY fast so it is pretty impressive that they managed so well! I think the bits that were particularly hilarious was when the most innocent class of mostly girls had to sing 'you scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot...etc'. Very comical. Obviously, being a good teacher, I outlined what it all meant which caused great amusement for everyone.

Click this link for the video of the finished piece! A link to the youtube clip will open in a new window.

Yesterday (sunday 9th) was a brilliant day.
Y'see, in the past week or two, my friendship with a girl called Roxy in one of my classes has grown. First, she offered to take me home with her friends every day as she lives just across the road from me which was lovely. She has really good English and her dad is very funny so it's always nice to be with them all. Then last week, Roxy, Tessa and I went out for lunch together which was also lovely. We were slightly worried it might be a bit awkward as sometimes the Chinese don't really know what to do in casual situations.. But she's completely normal and fine. And then yesterday, we went out shopping together with Tessa and one of Roxy's friends. After getting myself a lovely Christmassy jumper, she took us to the cinema. Best thing ever. There is a huge games arcade which was SO busy. Because Chinese school runs from monday-saturday, when it gets to sunday all the kids rush to the arcade to let loose! There were what seemed like professional drummers on a guitar hero game, amazingly fast dancers on those dance mats and guys who took the shooting games VERY seriously. It was so much fun! There was also popcorn for sale which was amaaaazing! ALSO there was a 5D room which cost 15 kuai each (about the same for one the popcorn) and it was so fun. We were having roller-coaster films and the seats moved and the screen was 3D and in parts of the film, when you went outside, you'd actually get rained on! In the second film it was winter and it started snowing inside the room! It was amazing. I cannot stress how much fun this whole thing was.........
Anyway, then it was about 7pm so we went back to her house as were we previously invited over for dinner.
The whole family is beautiful! Also the mum is such a good cook. We had these chicken wings in a sticky BBQ-y sauce, AMAZING prawns in I don't know what, a very spicy chicken dish and various vegetable dishes. It was all so good. Then after the meal, because it was my boyfriend's birthday, I went onto my laptop which I conveniently brought with me and had a good chat with him :) we had to leave at about 11pm though...
Apparently the whole family loved meeting us and we're welcome at any time! So we are very chuffed with that. We will definitely make the most of that offer and make sure we see them at least twice a day. So they are now officially our China family. Huzzah!

This week and next week in class, I will be showing my students 'Elf' as it is a very good Christmas movie. Now I know I showed the Mulan the week before last, but Chinese students are always so overworked so I try and make my lessons as fun for them as possible. And when I was a student, there was nothing more fun than films in class! Also it's Christmas so that deserves some fun. I promise I'll do more actual teaching after our holiday!

So that's all really.. I'm pretty chuffed with how things are going. And now, whenever we're bored sitting at home, we will just pop on over to the best games arcade in the world.