Day 9 - Tuesday June 30, 2009: The Great Gender Debate

Woke up at 5 am today to a loud tapping sound. Turns out water from the AC unit above our is dripping loudly onto ours - it sounded like someone was knocking on the door from 5-9am....Awesome.

Woke up for real to run with Danika and meet some of the students on the track. We did the same run as yesterday up to the track where we met with Sanya, Jenny, and Mickey. They ran about 2 laps with us. One of the students, Mickey, is of mystery gender. Geoff and I think he/she is a girl and CKE and Danika think he/she is a boy. I will feel horrible is he/she is a boy because I kept saying "Good job girls" on the track certain I was surrounded by women....thank god for the language barrier.

My first conversation class was from 10:20-12:10 today. I have 12 students mostly around 20 years old with one student, Peter, being 45. I had them all stand up in front of the class and introduce themselves: name, age, what they are studying, and what their dream job would be. Then I would ask them some follow up questions. I was shocked at the "dream job" answers. Some students wanted to own a bank or a store while others said be a hotel worker or be the secretary for my future husband...aiming high I see. Maybe they misinterpreted the word dream.

Oh, I also found out Mickey is for sure a boy because his dream job is to be a soldier and the students said only boys can be soldiers.

For the rest of class I asked them what they wanted to learn and asked random students random questions to fill the time and keep them speaking english. Then we ate lunch that Luke ordered for us. They were the same boxed lunches from last night but this time our chicken was boneless and tasted alright. It was called a "Chicken Platoon," a great translation to English - at least it sounds and tastes better than ordering a "Fish that sets the table"......

From 1-3 I had a two-on-one with Lydia (or Egg Egg) and Iris. This one was a little more difficult because they spoke a lot of Chinese together.

So NOW we think Mickey is a girl. Apparently, during the outdoor activity (badminton) Geoff spotted sports bra lines on her back. We are lost.

We had our singing class from 6:30-8 where I just had everyone read through their lyrics and then we watched the videos (Karaoke style) on youtube. After class CKE and I went to the 7-11 and bought "Bar Beer" which was really expensive, but good. We drank that and went to visit with Geoff and Danika about some hard to handle children named Eric and Jungle - you can imagine with a name like that. Apparently they don't listen to CKE, sexually harass Danika in Chinese and English, and talk constantly in both classes.