Here's a good picture of the school a colleague took on the first day of
classes. We've grown numb to the tall building all around us and when I
saw this picture I thought, "Wow, I forgot those tall buildings were
there."
The elementary school is to the left of the soccer field. Across the soccer field are some residential apartments where mostly local people live. Students that work in the lower school have good stories about what they see out their classrooms. Last year, Bri watched a lady hang her underwear to dry every week. This year a friend told me that the guy outside her window goes to his balcony to smoke AND water his flowers 4-5 times every day. She thinks he has marital issues.
We've only been in class a little over a week but I'm really enjoying getting to know the new kids I have in class. Its always fun to hear where the students are from, what languages they speak, where they traveled over the summer and other interesting facts. One of the most interesting student backgrounds we've had is a new student of Bri's that is Canadian but has a Mexican parent and a Polish parent. My students this year hail from.......North Carolina, Texas, Florida, California, New York, Canada, Sweden, France, Germany, Indonesia, Korea, Israel, Japan, Philippines, Ohio, Holland, Japan, Finland, China, Taiwan, Denmark, Brazil, Portugal, Iceland and Hong Kong.
I love teaching, but I also love a day off. Sometimes in Colorado we'd pull for a snowstorm along with kids. Bri and I never thought we'd be hoping for a typhoon though. Its funny how much our snow dance looks like our typhoon dance.
Holy
moly we are back in Shanghai!I have lots of
blog topics swirling around in the ole’ brain after having many conversations
with our blog readers this summer.Just you wait….
For
now, I will share with you what has been on my mind since we left Stratton on
Monday morning….. all of the things that I forgot!It seems this time around I was a bit more confident
with my packing and I shouldn’t have been.Perhaps it was denial that created the packing nightmare
that I created for myself.I did
not start packing until Sunday night, a mere 12 hours before leaving Monday morning.I didn't even make a list. Here is the list of items that I have discovered missing so far.
1.My black flip-flops
(although Chinese women find them far too casual for their taste, they were a
fashion staple for me)
2.My tailor-made natural colored
blazer (need I say more!)
3.My aviator sunglasses
4.Cough drops (I have tried
the herb tasting, tongue numbing ones here and they are no bueno)
5.My teeth retainer!
6.Guacamole mix
7.My book from the SCIS
library (shhhhhh)
8.My orange travel handbag.
9.A healthy supply of candy
10.The last of Elizabeth Gilbert’s books that I have yet to read.
I
am so mad at myself because I had room to pack all of those items.Why did I wait so long to pack?I wish I knew. Lesson learned.
We're back to Shanghai after a whirlwind of a summer. We landed here Tuesday night and both kept repeating how different it is to arrive a year later. From getting a cab at the airport, to walking into "our" apartment and sleeping in "our" bed instead of some sheets on a board like last year. It was fun to see and feel the different feelings.
Before we went to bed Bri did some scheduling with her masseuse so we both got a much needed massage Wednesday morning. I made it to the wet market for dumplings and a breakfast burrito before it was my turn to get a massage. All of my acquaintances were still there and seemed happy to see me. The dumpling guy seemed to forget that I had a very limited mandarin vocabulary. He was talking to me in a stream of incomprehensible sentences and laughing when I said I didn't know what he was saying.
With the morning mostly consumed by the massages we'd saved the afternoon to run some errands aimed at replenishing our kitchen cupboards. That was interrupted by typhoon Haikui (Click here for article on Typhoon Haikui) that came ashore south of Shanghai yesterday morning. It was our first typhoon experience after a typhoon last August missed coming onto shore entirely. Most of the morning there had just been brief showers and gusts of wind, but as the day went on the showers became harder and the wind more consistently volatile. We decided to forget the grocery store run and just let the storm blow by.
So what do you do on windy rainy days? You read books, watch a movie, take a nap. That's exactly what we did during our first afternoon back. The only problem was our one hour nap turned into a five hour nap and that's not very helpful when you are trying to flip your biological clock. Oh well, it sure is a good way to pass a rainy afternoon.
