Day 15: Here Comes The Sun

Another song reference? Yes. We had a full day of sunshine today; it was hot and humid but the rain stayed away.

Today in class we taught our students how to describe people. We divided the adjectives into certain categories, such as physical appearance and personality traits. We still haven't gone over what I would call the "mental traits" category (this would include words like "smart"), and we plan to also teach the words for various common emotions. This return to vocabulary was brought on by an acceptance of some of our limitations as teachers. The main one is that we aren't trained, and so teaching grammar, which is a very complicated task, has been a struggle for us, and it hasn't seemed to make as much of an impact on the students as straight vocabulary. These sessions go well, and most students remember more than half of the words that we teach on any given day. I brought the camera into class and got some great shots of the kids, which I will put up once we get back to a city. Tao Yuan stayed home today, as he had his hands full with some of the accounting work I mentioned in yesterday's post.

We headed out to work immediately after lunch. We took a public bus to the outskirts of Tonglu, and we walked to a local riverbank, which had many stones on it. We need these stones to put on our paths at the park, in order to form a nice pattern on the cement. Therefore, we had fairly strict standards (which, admittedly, loosened as the day wore on and our patience wore thin) for which rocks to choose. We needed thousands of stones, and we were hand-picking them one at a time. This was a tedious task, made ever more excruciating by the presence of a strong Sun. It was not physically onerous work, but by the end of the day (we worked for about four hours) I was extremely tired, both mentally and physically.

For dinner, we went into Tonglu. There had been another student from Hangzhou who spent a couple of days helping us teach English; his name is Ken. I hadn't mentioned him before because he only spent that time with us and he didn't do very much of the teaching. But his parents took us out to dinner as a thank you (this is Chinese custom). In China, eating seafood is a sign of wealth, so of course they ordered seafood, which is not my favorite genre of food (I really only like fish). But I was obligated to eat many of these foods out of politeness. It wasn't terrible, and the non-seafood dishes were actually quite good. Afterwards we picked up some groceries and headed home.

I didn't get a chance to go see the progress that was made on the park today, as I wasn't in town all day. But I imagine that we are close to finishing laying the tile, so the stones are one of the final pieces of the puzzle. I'm heading to bed now as I am thoroughly exhausted. Good night.