Day 9: At Least the Fog Is Pretty

Gaoxiang is a village on a mountainside, and on the rainy days, the fog rolls down into the valley; the result is a very picturesque scene. However, that is about the only bright side of the rotten weather we have been having recently.

Only the teaching continues unabated. This morning we began by providing some alternative answers to the question, "How are you?" The students have been replying, "I'm good," and we all know that's bad grammar, so I wrote something on the board that looked like this:

Q: How are you?
A: I am well. How are you?
A: Fine, thank you. How are you?
A: I am okay. How are you?

I couldn't help but think back to my days reading Gödel, Escher, Bach (part of this has to do with the fact that I just started the new Hofstadter book), and that this sort of setup could lead to an infinite loop of conversation. However, for the most part the kids understood to only ask the question once and leave the second sentence off the second time.

We then moved into new territory: place names. We started with things like post office and museum and moved onto things like police station and convenience store. By the time our list was done it was at least 30 in number and I still am confident we forgot at least one common item. But we drilled the names (with correct pronunciation) and translations into the children's heads for the rest of the day. We then split the kids into groups and will have them write skits involving at least 3 of the place names we learned. As an example, Eric, Tao Yuan, Cherry, and I will be performing our own skit tomorrow morning before the kids start writing. Today they only picked the places they would use.

After class was over, a journalist from Tonglu (a suburb of Hangzhou) stopped by to talk to us about the park, although at least a small portion of the discussion concerned the English teaching. We took her down to the park site, where the cement had thankfully dried before the rain started. While down there, I reflected with pride on how far we have progressed; I just hope the weather lets us complete what we set out to accomplish.

As we could do no work in the rain, we instead took another tourism-inspired trip into Tonglu, this time to visit the world's tenth biggest underground cave. The cave itself was beautiful, but there was too much artificial colored lighting for my taste. It was also quite wet down there.

After we returned and ate dinner, we stopped by two local businesses to pick out some marble tables and chairs for seating areas. The chairs themselves were somewhat unconventional by Western standards: they had no backs and were cylindrical like barrels. The first set actually looked like barrels, and were a little bit to small for one to sit comfortably. The other set was flared in the Greek style, and as a result had slightly more surface area for sitting. That set was slightly more expensive (100 kuai, or just under $20), but we decided it was worth it. There is still some debate as to how many sets we will get, but it looks like it will be somewhere in the vicinity of four. Afterwards, we walked down by the river, and on our way back up we saw a group of villagers socializing at one of the park sites; this was heartening to me, as I am glad that there will be people to use the tables and chairs.

I am hoping against hope that tomorrow will bring more favorable weather; I would think by now that there's no more rain left in the clouds. I guess we'll see if I'm right. Good night.