Birthday Wishes and Signs

(There is no Internet at the hotel room like I was promised. I’ll have to find another time to update this blog.)

Today is my little sister’s birthday! She can’t really celebrate it as early as I did because I beat her to it 12 hours fast. Happy Birthday from China, Anna!

Today was a bit of an early rise and I wasn’t feeling very good from the start. Maybe it was the nerves, but my throat was tight and I was feeling a little light headed. I had definitely gotten enough sleep, and all my bags were ready, so the new camp must have knotted my stomach so much that it affected my head. We all came for a 7:30 am meeting with the student helpers, many of whom I had seen before in the summer school program (and I was sure that they were thrilled to see us!). We tried to get as much info covered as we could, but we needed to catch our bullet train from Shanghai to Macheng, and left on a large bus for the train station.

I must report that I was rather unconscious for much of this 6-hour train ride: I was in various yoga positions (much of them involving my nose touching one or both of my knees at any give time) but I was pretty asleep as we rode past train city after train city. I did wake up long enough to have some instant ramen and a Chinese hot dog (it is better not to ask what it was made of/from) thanks to the hot water dispenser in the car. Only in the last hour did we reach the mountain area with rice fields and farms. That brought us to Macheng and the happy man with the sign.

Here is something about the Chinese language that intimidates me to no end: they don’t make signs, they make paragraphs. You can’t just have a sign that says “Welcome Yew Wah Teachers!” or “Macheng Welcomes the Yew Wah Teachers.” Goodness no, that would be too simple. Instead, they greeted us with the following sign  Now, according to my professional Chinese translating, this means “Macheng Youth Activity Center warmly welcomes the teachers and students from Shanghai Yew Wah Educational School.” I’m flattered, really, but I was also scared to be met by such a block of lettering! At least it was obviously directed to us and not some other group of “Shanghainese” students/teachers that had arrived on our same train. There has to be something to be said for specificity.

The rest of the day was spent moving into the hotel, meeting the local teachers, having dinner, and explaining the final information session. That is, if you were a student. If you were working behind the scenes, or just watching poor Media scamper between the groups of adults, you realized this was much more. We moved into the hotel, sure, but we had been lied to about the types and amounts of rooms available, so Media spent the first hour trying to reorganize students and maintain some kind of order on the two floors that we had taken over. We met with local teachers, yes, but Media had to translate in English and Chinese, explain all the aspects of the schedule (which has only been printed in English), and keep control of the students (let’s be fair here, they were being asked to sit quietly in a hot room with nothing to do for quite some time). There was dinner, but not with enough tables as we were originally promised – I’m told that happens a lot in China, oh well. And finally, there was an information session, but I felt very nauseous by that time and was not able to attend, so the other teachers had to fill in for me, giving the students their final round of rules and expectations.

Side note - Bless their hearts, Media and Sara brought up a piece of watermelon because earlier I had commented about how nice it would have been to have one. However, when I sat up in bed and saw the fruit, I couldn’t stomach the sight of it and had to sadly decline the dessert.

I’m quite nervous for some of our teachers who are not used to working on their own, but it is out of my hands now. Everyone, students included, will just have to learn on the fly and make the best of it tomorrow!