Jane in China: April 2015

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Tragedy in Nepal

I am so sorry to hear about the earthquake, avalanche, and devastation in Nepal. My thoughts and prayers are with my friends and colleagues at PAHS, my friends at Sonrisa orphanage, and with everyone in Nepal and those affected in any way by this awful tragedy.

Friday, April 24, 2015

Our day off

We had a day off 2 days ago which was really nice and we had a great day. We stopped at the Intercontinental again for lunch - it is so amazing there! Then we drove out a bit into the countryside to an embroidery museum. The Hunan province is known for silk embroidery and it is amazing to see. Such skill and beauty - it's so detailed and intricate! I didn't take a photo of it, but there was a stunning black silk dress with light green and blue embroidery that I considered buying...until they told us it was $800! We did buy some nice silk there.

Wilbur using chopsticks at lunch

Wilbur enjoying a fruit similar to a lychee

Macaroons

Driving under the river

Herbie loving Wilbur

Cynthia and Herbie!

Those are live pigs in that little cart...

Embroidery Museum

An amazing tiger all hand embroidered on silk. With Cynthia in the background

Silk embroidery to commemorate the 1976 summer Olympics in Montreal

Everything was so beautiful!

Many of Chairman Mao

These are the women in the workshop making some of these beautiful things.

And the rules...take care of the old people...

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Course Design Institute Day 1!

We had a really great day on our first day teaching faculty from NUDT and a few other universities around China today! Some people travelled from quite far away to attend our workshop. Everyone was so enthusiastic and nice and I know this is going to be another great experience here in China. Thanks to Cynthia and Herbie for a great day of teaching and learning. We have a day off tomorrow! I think we need it...

Cynthia

Cynthia and Herbie

Faculty hard at work

Wake up!

Every day we have a 3 hour break for lunch here in Changsha. It's very luxurious and very common here. We head back to campus around 2:15 pm and we hear music playing. Yue and Herbie explained to us that this is music to wake the students up because it is time to head back to class. I love that! Herbie remembers when she was in school that they would play "You are My Sunshine". So sweet!

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

First sunny morning

We are off to start teaching faculty at NUDT today. The sun has cooperated!

Delicious lunch

We had some faculty members from NUDT take us to lunch today. They will be travelling to Victoria in August and September to get some more training. It will be so nice to see them there.

We had another delicious lunch! We are getting spoiled here!

We finished up our TA Training Workshop yesterday with the NUDT students. What a great experience! We had so much fun and just fell in love with these students, their energy, and really appreciated their hard work! Such a nice way to start our teaching here. We talk a lot about students in China being so quiet and different from students in Canada, but this is not true. It has more to do with the teachers...I think...

Today we start teaching the faculty and I have a feeling this will be a different experience altogether. We have met a few of the faculty over the past few days, but there may be close to 50 people there today!