China: Kunming City, Yunnan Province

Ni hao!

I've been in China almost a week now and I'm really enjoying it! The other volunteers are great fun and Kunming is a lovely city. The people are very kind and helpful, it's not too crowded and they can understand our broken Chinese! (Well, broken depending which volunteer is speaking!)

It's -10 degrees in the North of China
It's 0 degrees in Beijing
But it's 26 degrees in Kunming here in SW China

This was the first piece of news we heard from our teacher training teacher who picked us up from the airport and which meant we all knew we were in the best place in China from day one!

All this week we've been attending Chinese lessons and have been having teacher training specific for working in Chinese schools at a private English school in Kunming called "Robert's School". Learning Chinese is very hard, I have a minuscule vocabulary but my pronunciation is ok since I spent a long term learning "pinyin" (a romanized version of Mandarin) so I can at least say words properly. So I can go shopping and ask for directions, but understanding the reply is going to take some getting used to! Luckily, Zoe, my volunteer partner has been studying Mandarin for 7 years and together we're making a great team :) - at least I think so! The first few Mandarin lessons felt so overwhelming, but I'm slowing understanding more and more and went to the University today to practice our speaking with students on campus. We spoke to a lovely girl who just let us sit down whilst she was doing her maths on one of the outside tables by just asking "Women ke yi you yi he tao wun?" (Can we have a conversation with you?).

Teacher training is a lot of fun and yesterday I taught a class of 13-18 yrs vocabulary. It's great fun getting to teach again but I'm definitely back to being a beginner again since I'll be faced with a classes of AT LEAST 60 once I get to my placement. Tomorrow we're visiting a school in Kunming to watch a typical english lesson where the classes have between 50-100 students. Can't even imagine how that looks in a classroom so far! The teacher training is much more specialised towards Chinese schools and we're learning a lot about the work ethic and teaching practice of schools here, it's very interesting to learn about. 

We have a long day from 9am-6pm but we've still been managing to get out and about every evening to see Kunming. This is all the volunteers at a park in the city, in the evening we watched old ladies doing a sort of upbeat tai chi, groups of old men playing the erhu (Chinese 2 stringed violin) and children practice skating. There's 14 of us altogether, 4 Aussies, 8 Brits and a lone Canadian - 9 boys and 5 girls.

This picture is from an public English Corner by the side of a lake one evening. The English Corner is a really interesting concept which the Chinese invented to help learn english. As there weren't many foreign speakers whilst most Chinese started learning English or easy access to TV/radio, those that were learning would all try and gather in one place and. practice listening and speaking together. We went to this english corner and it was amazing how many people turn up just to try and improve their english - it's now a very common thing in schools and major cities for anyone from 6 year olds who want to talk about playing the piano to English teachers to students talking to expats living in Kunming about D.H Lawrence! It was a really, really fun experience and a real taste of how much people want to learn english here - really inspiring us to get teaching!

Saturday was a half day so a few of us took a trip to the West Mountains, here's Jeff (or Gao Shan/Tall Mountain which is his new Chinese name) and Joe walking through a small mountain settlement under a beautiful cherry blossom trees. It was incredible seeing Kunming from from the mountains, Kunming has 6 million people (the same size as London) and I bet most people reading this blog have never heard about it, but it is a great place!

This last picture is of our dinner yesterday.... we've been left to fend for ourselves and ordering in Chinese always turns out pretty exciting results! There are restaurants with pictures and english menus but yesterday we decided to go for one that just look incredibly popular with local people and had queues of people outside it. The staff looked slightly incredulous when we turned up but it turned out to be delicious and such great fun. There was a hole in the table and the dining party all share one steaming wok full of one dish which is popped into it together. So much fun, but very messy!

Orientation is turning out to be great fun, I'm really enjoying being with the other volunteers. Tomorrow we're going to go out altogether for karaoke with our Chinese teacher :D But right now we're going to take a trip into the city center - believe it or not, but in 6 days I still haven't ventured there yet, there's so much to do here!

Missing home, but really enjoying China.

Zaijian! (Bye bye!)