Balling

3-22-13 Friday

Today started out a very good day! We headed off in K-C 7768 to our ELE school and got a head teacher to tag along with us! Alicia came to do evaluations and she observed my first class. That kind of blows because after every class I feel like I get better and better and sort of feel bad for the first class because my last ones are bomb! I taught my first class and then headed outside to watch our kids do their little exercise routines. Its really cool to see them all in sync doing the same thing at the same time. In fact its pretty amazing, I can't imagine in America, my school ever pulling that off. While we were standing there, Rachelle found herself being pulled over to play basketball with the gym teachers and I was being drug into it! At first I was ready to refuse but.. What the heck, I’m in China! So I ran over there. After splitting into teams we started our 3 on 3 matches. Yeah just so you know, my team PWNED! Yeah boy! In the middle of the game we asked what their English names were.. HOLD UP! They didn’t have English names! 3 of them were playing Basketball with 2 American English teachers without English names? We had to fix that, not going to lie, it wasn't that hard... we just played b ball with Colby, James and Jordan ;) long story short, they were more than happy to accept our English names:)

 we headed back to class and I taught my last two classes and Rachelle and I headed to lunch. I was starving so we just headed over their without an escort (we are usually waited on hands and knees if you haven't noticed) and got our trays... I wish I would have taken a picture because its my first meal that I have honestly had to gag down. This lunch set so many records in my book. I have never had so much tofu on my plate... Gag. The sea weed tasted just like it was pulled from the ocean and the fish probably had more bones in it than I’ve ever had before but the most confusing part of it all was the taco flavoring... get me outta here!

I headed home and got into my room and realized that the meal wasn't so bad compared to the news I was walking into.

I am really bummed about my sweet Grandma Olsen's passing and not being able to be there to say goodbye to her. I am really going to miss my Grandma. I guess I can only be grateful that it was so fast for her and that I was able to get an email to her before it was too late. I do a pretty good job masking what I am feeling inside over here. I find that even though I feel like I am breaking down inside, if I put a mask on and push it to the back of my mind as much as possible, pretty soon the mask becomes the face and I am able to enjoy myself for the moment and as long as I don't think too hard about it then I am alright. Its so hard to accept the concept that I can't say “you should totally meet my grandma” “or my grandma is” but now she is a memory. The “is” becomes a “was” and “you should” is now “i wish you could have” I suppose it’s all about growing up, but man it sucks... even though my heart was heavy and my head was hurting from the tears and emotional roller coaster this week, I put on the mask and moved on to the next part of the day. Face Timing Morgan!  While I was face timing Sam came in to tell me that our travel plans fell through. Everyone in the group except me and Crista wanted to go to a mountain and hike it for their vacation. To be honest, any other day I probably would have been totally down with that but with all the emotions and stress from today that was the furthest thing I wanted to do so Crista just jumped groups and now we are headed to this place where there are caves with a ton of Buddha’s carved into them and some other stuff but I am not really sure. Right now I also don’t really care. We decided it right as they were leaving to buy tickets for the train. We ran and gave them the money and passports. Fingers crossed that it all works out and it is fun! Haha

With all this stuff going on, I have felt pretty bummed. So I laid down for a little bit as Sam and Rachelle went to the store. It was good to get some alone time to just cry things out. But then I got an invitation to go to the city and get some noodles from the noodle house and then they all wanted to go to the KTV which is a karaoke place. I was game for the noodles and getting out. So I put the mask on and headed out to the city. I actually ended up wearing the exact same scarf as Sam (the boy) so they were joking around saying we were a cute couple and then we look like we are getting engagement pictures and then all of a sudden we were going to have cute little scarf children... man this group of teachers move fast haha we were all laughing about it and it was a good distraction while were  waiting for the bus freezing in the cold! I actually had a lot of fun we went to the noodle place and we actually ended up running into Sam and Rachelle, they were tired and wanted to head back and I didn't feel like going KTVing and neither did Ben so we ditched that group, ate my favorite noodles. We hit up KFC's bathroom and I wanted to get one of those bread doughnuts but I just didn't want to walk around in the cold. So we caught a Taxi and headed home. I had this idea though, the noodle place is so random and in a little alley I never would have known it was there and I am not sure how we found it, but I thought how cool would it be if ILP gave us stickers and we could have “ILP approved” places and we left a log of the places we go and like and stuck a sticker in the window of a place so if other ILP teachers walk past they can see it and know its good! But every time you leave a sticker you have to add it to the log so the teachers can look it up and find it too. Anyways, I am going to try to sleep. Goodnight!