My routine

I've been in China for two and a half months and I'm settling into a routine. Saturday and Sunday are the marathon teaching days, but even these are getting better. Planning takes a lot less time than it used to; discipline and managing a kindergarten classroom are going much better; and last Sunday my teacher's assistant said she really likes the games and activities I've been coming up with. Most of my students seem to like me. A lot of them seem to spend a lot of time at the school - they're around hours before or after our class. These kids will come up to me during lunch or break and try to talk to me in English or Chinese. The little ones just scream "Hello!"; the older kindergardeners say "I am Candy, I am a girl" or occasionally "I am a pencil case" (that girl needs to study more); and one of my Children's class students has a mother who speaks good English and coaches him to come up and ask me "Can you read Chinese?" He then runs off to get a follow up question from his mother. During the two-hour break, I usually order lunch with the other teachers and staff, and we have it delivered to the school. But now that the weather's getting cooler I'm trying to go outside and take a walk, just get out of the building.

Besides the weekend slog, I teach adult classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings from 7:30 - 9:30. My first term of adult classes ended last week and I started the new term last night. I switched branches of the school but I'm teaching the exact same course again, which is nice. My old adult class was at the same place as my weekend classes, about a ten minute bus ride away. Convenient, but a bit boring to go to the same place 5 days a week. My new branch is also about ten minutes away, but quicker to get to because more busses run in that direction. It's a more commercial part of the city, with a lot of restaurants and barbeques open late, which is really cool. I think it will be a fun place to teach for the next two months.

So how do I fill my days? We get up in the morning and usually eat breakfast sometime between 10 and noon. This might be standard Western fare like eggs at our house, or steamed buns from a stand on the street. There's also a bakery we go to sometimes, but it's nothing like a Western bakery. Think of a danish with hot dogs or dried squid on top, and not a blueberry muffin in sight.

We usually go out for lunch because there are so many cheap options. There's a place close to our apartment that we call the pick and point, because you get a plate of rice and just point at three dishes you'd like to eat. It's usually pretty tasty, but every few trips you accidentally end up with a scoop of bitter melon or duck fat, so you have to exercise caution. Next to the pick and point is the muslim noodles place: mostly bowls of soup with fresh-made pasta, a little beef or lamb, and some vegetables.

Timing dinner on teaching nights is a little tricky, since we leave for class around 6:50 and I hate being full when I teach. We cook dinner frequently (we have a lot of spices now and can fake most Western food that doesn't require an oven) or go out with friends. There's a northeastern Chinese restaurant nearby that's open really late, so about once a week we'll end up eating dumplings there after English class.

Twice a week we have Chinese class in the morning and lately we've been spending a lot of time studying so we can get better. We're currently at a level where we can understand when people say "I don't think they speak very much Chinese, haha" so it's time to push it to the next level. We try to go out and do something at least once a week, whether it's shopping in a different part of the city, hiking on the nearby island, or even going to Macao. This past Monday we went to a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of the city. We go shopping frequently, usually for groceries or stuff for our apartment. Every shopping trip is an adventure, whether we're speaking Chinese to a saleswoman or trying to determine which bag of white powder might be flour. The easiest place to go is Jusco, the Japanese supermarket, but it's also expensive and full of women who follow you around trying to help you. We buy a lot of vegetables and some fruit from the stalls set up near our apartment; we've basically chosen two vendors we always go to and now they're charging us a little less. And we watch a lot of DVDs, because you can get almost anything here if you look hard enough. We finished season 1 of "Mad Men" last week and are currently watching "30 Rock" and "Generation Kill."

I hope this gives you a better idea of my life in China. Leave any questions in the comments!