Just Another Week in Guiyang

Hey!

So the last week and a half after getting home from Chengdu have been pretty routine. We had to teach last Saturday so we didn't have any grand adventures that weekend. Lindsay and I just went into town to do some night market shopping on Saturday night. 

School this week has been good and bad. Good because some of my classes kept getting cancelled for various reason which was nice! Bad because the teachers have been busy and I had a lot of classes without a teaching assistant in them. It is reeeally hard for me to control the class by myself. I had to discipline a lot more harshly than I like and yell a lot more than I would prefer... So hopefully my teaching assistants will be there everyday next week!

On Tuesday, my last two classes of the day were cancelled because the 1st and 2nd graders were doing some reading/performance something or other. We watched them do little performances and stand up and recite things. It was pretty cute seeing all my little ones performing. It was also fun because some of Lindsay's students sat by us and did our hair.. haha. 

These are some of the older students playing some cool gourd instruments

Love these little ones!

Finally got a selfie with my favorite little boy in the world!

My new friend Daisy having a party with my hair.. :)

She even added one of the bows from her hair 

Using my phone to take selfies :)

I found out all my classes were cancelled on Friday which was awesome! Some of the parents were coming to the school to observe and that changed the schedule which I guess meant I wasn't teaching my normal classes that day. Lindsay just had one class she still had to teach. When she was done we decided to head into town again. We did a little shopping, ate at Pizza Hut and then went to Carrefour to get ingredients for dinner on Sunday. I finally decided to clean up my kitchen and use it! We are making pasta for dinner and no bake cookies for dessert. We were able to find all the ingredients in the imported section (except vanilla extract). Oh, and on the bus home we met a guy named Steven who was studying English at the University here in Guyiang. His English was excellent and it was fun to talk to him for a little while!

One of the teachers at our school invited us to go out on Saturday but had to cancel so me and Lindsay decided to check out the bird, flower and antique market. It is always an adventure when you have to get on a new bus and hope the route takes you where you want to go! But we didn't have any trouble finding so it worked out :)

This place was huge! And really crowded! It was made of alleys and alleys of vendors. And this place had everything you can think of! Birds, flowers, antiques, bunnies, dogs, turtles, crafts, housewares, food, art. Everything. It was so fun walking through it! It was sad to see the poor condition of some of the animals though :( While we were here we met another guy who spoke English! He was talking to Lindsay for awhile before I met him but his name is Johnny and he makes some cool wire jewelry. He did try to ask for our WeChat (but neither of us has WeChat) and then our Skype names but we didn't want to give that info to a stranger so we declined... but he was very nice and also had really good English!

Cute little bunnies everywhere!

So. Crowded.

Gorgeous ceramics!

So we found THE cutest puppy I've ever seen! It took all I had not to buy him and bring him home to keep me company in my lonely apartment!

Cool bird showing off its wings right when I took the photo

Turtles of every size!

Mmmm.... brains.... how delightful.

Today we went to the boy's school for church. It is always so confusing taking a cab there because I feel like the drivers never know where it is and we don't really know how to direct them. But somehow we made it there and back! Then me and Lindsay made our pasta dinner and it turned out pretty good! Compared to cafeteria Chinese food, it was amazing haha!

Yay for the imported section!

Pasta, fruit salad and sparkling grape juice

They didn't set quite right but I'd say we did pretty good for having no measuring cups!

Now time for lesson planning... yippy. This week at school is International Week and I guess there are all sorts of things going on after classes. Sylvia asked us to give a tiny speech on Monday.. in Chinese. What. We've been trying to practice it this weekend but I have a feeling we are going to butcher it! Hopefully everyone gets a kick out of our horrible Chinese speaking abilities. Also, she asked us to be judges for some sort of talent show on Thursday.. and then want us to perform. Looks like we will be making fools of ourselves all week! Haha we think we are just going to sing along to "Let It Go" from Frozen because a lot the students love it and know the words. So hopefully we can get them to all sing with us!

Wish us luck!