The flight to Weifang was short and sweet (compared to Thursday’s, of course). It was under two hours and despite being on a smaller plane, the ride was probably smoother than Thursday’s. We had to take a bus shuttle out to the plane and climb the stairs (I’ll admit, I felt a little like a celebrity, or a member of the Royal family). The drive to the city was a nice change from the Shanghai sights. On both sides were rows and rows of trees, fields, farms, and water. It kind of felt like home!
Before getting to our hotel, we stopped at a different hotel to eat lunch. Our hosts, Miss Kerri and Miss Liu, had pre-ordered a slew of dishes that were brought to the rotating table once we arrived. Of these dishes, one was particularly interesting— cooked cicadas. MMmm! Only one member of our group tried it and he said it wasn’t too bad, meanwhile, our Chinese hosts were popping them in their mouths whenever they would spin by them. You’ll see them in the front right in the picture below:
Our hotel certainly isn’t as luxurious as the airport hotel we stayed at in Shanghai, but it is more than I expected (Brock prepared us for the worst possible scenarios, a good strategy I think). There is a spa, gym, art gallery, tea house (not cheap to have tea here!), and games floor where you can “rent out” a room for free with a small group of people– there is a Mah-jong table with all the little pieces for you to set up. After exploring we were able to unpack before our dinner with the principal of the school we would be at for the 5 day summer camp this week. Yes, we will be teaching at two different schools while we are here. This came as quite the surprise to us and was a bit of a disappointment as we would only have 5 days to get to know our students, and then we would be leaving and teaching at another school. But, at this point, we were still trying to remain positive about the situation and we were excited to teach.
The principal of the school did not speak English (strange for an International Foreign Language School) but brought along a woman from the school who did. During our dinner, another family-style meal, we received a few more surprises. Each of us would have 2 classes (teaching one group of kids in the morning, and the other in the afternoon), with up to 32 students per class (poor Heather!). Our group leader Anne expressed her concern about the situation as Brock had informed us we would have one class of no more than 20 students for a whole day. Again, we tried to put that aside and remember how much they were paying to have us at their school. They had already paid for all our meals in Shanghai, as well as subway passes and tours.
Upon returning from dinner, we had a group meeting in Anne’s room and determined (by pulling from a hat) who would be teaching which age group. I ended up with two grade 1 classes with 28 and 21 students. We sorted out what we would try to accomplish for our first day and called it a night. We were being picked up at 7:20 to be taken to the school for breakfast in the morning, and we needed a good night’s sleep before our first day!
