Thursday, September 29, 2011

Quick Pics and Stories

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while friends!!! It takes a horribly long time to get pictures up here but I will do my best so you can see where I live! These are pictures of the school I teach at. This is the No. 1 High School in Huangshi. 
 This is the main building. It is where Senior 2 and Senior 3 are taught. They are like Juniors and Seniors in America. I teach one Senior 2 class here every week on the third floor!

 This is the building to the right of the main building. (the building on the left not pictured is for offices) This is Grade 1, where my other 8 classes take place. Grade 1 are freshman in high school.

This is Camille and I's office. It is located in the Grade 1 building and is shared with the teacher who is the head of Grade 1 and some university students who are teachers in training. We just met these girls this week and were excited to have new friends close to our age!



Last week our waiban (foreign boss who takes care of us), Diana, called to tell us the night before our classes that we had a week's vacation because our Grade 1 students would be at military training! AWESOME! So we spent the week exploring a little bit more of the city and then watched our students perform what they learned at training on Saturday! It was fun but it turned into a paparazzi shoot of Camille and I! The students AND the teachers and then even the military people were coming up to us to take pictures! It was crazy! 
We taught a normal week this week. And next week is the National holiday so we get another week off from teaching! What?! This is ridiculous! And I still get paid? Yesssss! Actually, I am more excited to get into a regular routine at school so that I can fall into a groove with students...all 500 of them and get to know them better! Today in the hallway one of my students said "Hello Ms. Lesley!" and I said "hello Ricky!" Then he got so excited "You know who I am? Oh my gosh!" I told him "of course I know who you are, we talked yesterday!" haha I know who he is because he loves Harry Potter and wears HP like glasses!! So basically, he is awesome!


More Pictures!
This is a picture of downtown Huangshi on one of the main roads. Camille and I live right off of this road and it is always busy with people and cars! 
This is one of the more peaceful areas of Huangshi where you can actually see all of the mountains that surround the city. This is at on of the other Zhong Relations teacher's home. 

About a 20 minute walk for our apartment, but it is really pretty and quiet (which is rare here!) so it is worth the walk!

The entrance to the park alongside the lakes.

Inside the park! This is one of my favorite pictures! 

On our week of vacation, Camille and I had team dinner at our house! We made baked potato soup with dinner rolls! YUM! And then we surprised them with chocolate chip muffins! We had to bring the muffin mix with us because they do not have any baking supplies here! These are the Huangshi team members.

The entire Zhong Relations team! This was taken during the Huangshi group's trip to Wuhan, the city that the rest of the team lives in. Wuhan has over 8 million people in it! Crazy! 

Chinese pose! hold up a peace sign and only sort of smile!

Silly pic!

Diana took Camille and I to a traditional Chinese tea house for tea! We were quite excited!


The tea is good for your organs and for burning fat! yes please! Diana also taught us how to play
an easy version of Chinese checkers. The picture to the right are the coasters for the tea that have the chinese symbol for tea on them.







Entrance to the flea market....
    
                   
                                   Where Camille, Chelsie, and I bought huge sheets of foam to make our beds soft!
                                                                                           
Our typical lunch, jaozi. They are delicious dumplings made by a sweet street vendor down our street! They cost 2 RMB which is about 30 cents in American dollars!


More Stories!

So I want to tell you about my Huangshi team since they are the only people I really know here and I will use their names a lot in my blog. Here goes... There are seven of us who live in Huangshi from Zhong Relations. Paul and Erin Korson are the married couple from Michigan and teach at the No. 3 high school. Aaron Noble is from Michigan and lives with Kevin Bruce, the Canadian. They both teach at the No. 8 middle school. Chelsie Priest is from Ohio, but lived in South Carolina during college, so she understands southerners! She teaches at No. 16 middle school. Just wanted you to have a little info about these peeps!

Last weekend, the Carpenters (founders of Zhong Relations) came to visit in Huangshi! They took us to the flea market where you can buy just about anything, literally!! You name it...shoes, yarn, clothes, bikes, vases, giant pieces of foam....its there! Obviously this is where we got the foam for the beds! We all went to get massages together because it only cost about $6 and then the girls got their nails painted! Okay maybe I feel a little pampered ;) On Sunday we celebrated one of the Carpenter daughters, Sophia, on her birthday. It was also Jessica's daughter, Ray Ray's birthday! Jessica is Paul and Erin's waiban. Sorry if this is confusing! So yeah, we had a princess party at KFC for the birthday girls! After, we had fellowship together. Our team meets together every week for "church" since there really isn't another place for us to go. It was an amazing afternoon of worship and praise in which I witnessed His power and ability to heal! I feel truly blessed to have been a part of what He was doing! 

Other fun things.... Camille and I found a DVD store where we bought the entire series of How I Met Your Mother, Arrested Development, The Big Bang Theory, Growing Pains, and a packet of 10 Julia Roberts movies for 140 RMB! Yeah, thats about $20! SCORE! I have begun to "punish" my students for talking in Chinese instead of English/sleeping/not doing their work by making them stand up and sing or dance! I borrowed this genius idea from Aaron, who has been doing this in his classes! It is so funny, I have such hard time not laughing with all the students! Justin Bieber is a big hit and my students often choose to sing Baby! Speaking of JB...one of Camille's students gave her a gift....a giant poster of Justin himself! Can't wait to hang it up in our apartment! Camille and I also joined a gym this week, but have only been twice so far. Last night we went to the jazz class. The entire gym stopped to stare at us when we walked in and then a group of people came to the doors of the class just to watch the Americans dance! It was our first time and we didn't really know what to expect. It turns out the class had already learned the routine so Cam and I had to catch on quick, so we looked pretty silly at first but finally got the hang of it and it turned out to be pretty fun! Tonight, we are going to try Hip Hop! haha

Some days are great like the stories I've told and other days have been quite difficult with no hot water or electricity, but we are learning to adjust and be flexible! Today, I entered a battle with the largest spider I have ever seen in my entire life! Seriously, the thing was huge and I'm pretty sure it was just waiting for me to walk in my room so it could jump out at me and scare the daylights out of me! Did I mention this was at 6:45 AM!!! Not the best way to start a day! Anyway, the spider won because it was just too fast for me...not for a lack of me trying my hardest to squash it. Hopefully, I will never see it again, but I'm a little frightened to go to sleep in there! 

"The Lrd is near. Do not be anxious about anything." Phillipians 4:6. I know He is with me in all that do here and I pry that he uses our team in big ways this year. Please continue to pry for us, I am feeling a little under the weather with a sore throat and really don't want to get sick here!  I appreciate all that you have been doing!! And keep the email updates coming!!! 

Monday, September 19, 2011

Can you believe its already been two weeks?

Where on earth to start?
Today makes exactly two weeks since my life began in China. So much has happened but I will try to give you a decent overview of what it has been like! I think it has finally started to hit me today that this is my life now....I actually LIVE here! It has been fun and crazy and frustrating all at the same time!

The day we arrived in Wuhan our waiban, Henry, picked us up at the airport and drove us the hour or so drive to Huangshi. He and his assistant, Diana (she basically takes care of us), took us out for our first Chinese meal. Diana asked me what we liked and I said "Well, I know we both really like chicken." You know, try to play it safe, right? Don't want to get food poisoning on day one. Nevertheless, Diana ordered pigs feet, goose and eggs, spicy tofu stuff, and some kind of soup. I can't say it was the best meal I've ever had but we managed to eat some of it! We got to see our apartment for the first time, which looks a little bit rough around the edges. Luckily, our amazing Huangshi team had come to our apartment before we arrived to clean up the place for a few hours. From what they described, I'm pretty sure Camille and I would have cried had we seen the mess it was in before they got to it! Theres no making the "squatty potty" look any better though...it is what it is! We are very grateful for their help though! That night, a few of our team members came to rescue us and took us to a tea house, not far from where we live, that has western food! This and KFC (also right by our apartment) are the only places with western food...so frequent them quite often!

Camille and I were taken to our school, shown our classrooms and office, and were introduced to some of our bosses. Chinese schools have a chain of command because they are so large, so we are basically the lowest on the totem pole! We got our class schedules and discovered that we were going to share Senior 1, meaning I would teach 8 classes and Camille would teach 7! Going in, we though we would each have our own grade and be teaching 15 or 16 classes a week! When we heard this, we almost freaked out because we thought we'd have way too much free time on our hands and get incredibly bored! Then, the school decided it was unfair for me to have more than Camille so they gave me one Senior 2 class and Camille two Senior 2 classes, so that we each have 9 and all can be well in the world once again! Nine classes is the equivalent of teaching 6 hours a week, less than one day of teaching in the U.S.! This is so crazy! It is surprisingly harder than it sounds, though, because each class has 60ish students, which can be difficult to manage and theres also that one major factor, the language gap, that makes your brain hurt from trying to comprehend and understand what the students are saying and trying to help them understand what I am saying! Basically I've started to speak incredibly slowly and use body language and hand gestures to convey what I mean. I do so much with the Chinese people that it is starting to become a habit and I do it with everyone! Camille and I are starting to annoy each other with our profound annunciation and slow speech...its still really funny though!

Huangshi is described as a town, but upon arrival, we realized that this is sooo not a town!!! It feels more like a major city like NYC. There are people everywhere, cars everywhere who are about to run over you at any second, and there are stores everywhere! Seriously, I've never seen so many stores in all of my life! We haven't had much time to go shopping yet, but soon we will be hitting it up! Camille and I live right in the heart of the city, right off of the busiest road. Sometimes this is annoying because it can be loud and crowded. But on the positive side, we have a lot of restaurants, street vendors, a mall, grocery stores, a gym, and even a coffee place right outside our door!

Because it is a town in China, we really are like celebrities here! Especially with our blonde hair, we get gawked at everywhere we go! Some people are really funny about it though, taking triple or quadruple takes just to make sure we are real. We've had people stop us in the street to ask for pictures. I've even caught a lot of my students taking out their cameras or phones to take pictures while I'm teaching. Our team jokes about it because sometimes it is funny and you feel like a celeb but other days you just kind of feel like a freak and wish people would stop staring! These are usually the days when we find ourselves getting an ice-cream fix from KFC! haha

This weekend we got to go to Wuhan for some team meetings and bonding and it was a ton of fun! Wuhan has 8 million people in it and has become more westernized than Huangshi with things like Starbucks, DQ, McDonalds, and Papa Johns. Our Huangshi group basically gorged ourselves with American food like pizza, burgers, and milkshakes!!! It was awesome! It was the first time I've actually felt full since being here. Unfortunately, we were all feeling a little sick and sluggish on Monday! Luckily, Camille and I do not teach on Mondays!!! woo hoo three day weekends every weekend! Food has probably been one of the hardest adjustments for us. We are having a hard time finding things that we like and it is very different from American Chinese food. We have found ourselves a street vendor down from our apartment that sells jiatso (dumplings) and these are really good! We've gone like 5 days in a row for lunch!!! At the store we can get fruit and veggies and we found skippy peanut butter, which was basically all we ate for the first week! Once we get our kitchen a little more cleaned up, we are hoping to cook for ourselves a little more!

Overall, it has been a great and exciting experience so far! I know this was a lot at one time but this barely scratches the surface! Now that we have internet, I'll try to keep you updated more regularly with shorter stories :) Camille and I found out last night that our Senior 1 students have military training this week so I only need to teach my one Senior 2 class....AWESOME! We are going to try to finish getting our apartment together and decorate so it feels more homey. I want to do a before and after series of the apt for y'all so hopefully that will be coming soon! Please continue to pry for adjusting...I am nervous now that the initial excitement of being here is wearing off, we will start to feel homesick and secluded because it so hard to form relationships we you can't speak the language! Also, I told each class that I was Xn and no one had even heard of this! Please pry for the opportunities this year and for the seeds that will be planted!! I love you all so much!!! Keep the emails coming with the updates of your lives!

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Contact Me!


Hey Y'all!

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up on how to contact me while in China!  My main point of contact will be e-mail. I am trying to transition everything to my g-mail account and not my tiger mail since I am now an alumni of LSU!  My g-mail address is lesleybergeron2@gmail.com.  I also have a Skype account, which is lesleybergeron (super creative, right?).  Facebook is not a guarantee, because it is blocked in China, but I purchased a proxy and it seems to be working well so far. Granted, I have only been using it for one day, so we will see!

**Some important info for you to know if you email me or comment on my blog**
Please be careful with the language you use when contacting me.  I will be using some new "lingo" when writing and hope you will do the same, such as Father, Him, prying, Book, Xn, etc.  I think you get the picture.  Just be sensitive to religious or political topics.

Thanks for all of your love and support! 

My Story


The story of how Camille and I ended up Huangshi, China is quite a long, amazing tale. It all began three years when I studied abroad in Germany. I completely fell in love with Germany and knew that once I finished school, I wanted to go back and teach there. A year later I met Camille through the Holmes Program at LSU and we became best friends, spending practically every day together for two years trying to finish school along with the rest of our Holmies. Camille thought that teaching abroad was something that she would like to do, too, so we decided that we should partake on this adventure together. At first we thought that we would move to Germany. As time went on our options for where we wanted to, grew.            
            Our friend, Crista, who we also met through the Holmes Program, was the first person to put the bug in our ear to consider moving to China. Initially, Camille and I both laughed at her and agreed that there was absolutely no way we were going to move to China! Then, more and more people began telling us about how wonderful China is and how much they loved the time that they had spent here. So, we added it to the list of possibilities of where we could end up.
            In May, we graduated from LSU and I left two days later to go to Prague, Czech Republic for a Trip with The Refuge. At this time, Camille and I were sending out resumes and emails to different schools, but mostly trying to figure out exactly where we wanted to move/ where our Father wanted us to be. During my trip, I realized that whatever I did this year, I wanted it to be more than about myself, more than just teaching, more than just a fun adventure. I wanted to teach English, but I also understood that I was being called to do something more Meaningful. I talked to Camille and we decided to take some time to pry about where the He wanted us to go. The next time we spoke we shared that we both felt a pull towards China so we abandoned all efforts to move anywhere else. Within the next few days we received a few offers and schools to consider, but they just didn’t seem to fit. My sister, Amanda, got married at the beginning of September and I obviously wanted to be there for it, but school in China begins on September 1st and ideally we would need a week or two to settle in and adjust to a new life.
            Then, just a couple days later, Camille and I were contacted by the head of Zhong Relations, a non-profit organization that helps to pair teachers with schools. Everything with this organization fell into place perfectly, because it was completely orchestrated by the Father and he is perfect. Camille and I just know He was looking down laughing at us, telling us to just chill out, He would handle it all for us. And that is exactly what He did. I returned from Prague on July 6th and we accepted the job offers just days later. Everything happened incredibly fast as we tried to get ourselves physically, mentally, and emotionally prepared for this journey. We left Louisiana on September 5th, just two days after my sister’s wedding and arrived in Huangshi (our new home) on September 7th. Today is our 10th day in China and we are still adjusting. Life here is quite different but very exciting and challenging! This is where He wants me to be and I will be obedient and follow Him and not be anxious for anything!
             I am sorry that I tried to make this a quick recap of the story and not great details, but I just wanted to get the blog started and out there for y'all to see. I will have lots of free time next week so I promise to post pictures and interesting stories!!!