Third Week of China

Yikes. What a week. For lack of more time to write I'm going to have to keep this update short.

Teaching can be brutal when you realize it takes five or six hours to prepare for class. But living in a village can be fantastic when you have the chance to slow down and enjoy the scenery.

Highlights of the week in bullet form:
1) Meeting a red/black striped snake in the process of devouring a huge toad. A farmer took a hoe and clamped off its head, but we learned later the snake would've killed one of us (poison) if we weren't careful.
2) Having a Holiday Learning Day, where we taught kids about Thanksgiving and other types of holidays. It was pretty awesome.
3) Spending LOTS of time with my teaching partners and my students, which is the biggest blessing ever. It's getting me thinking about my personal identity as either Chinese, Taiwanese, or America. Or none? I love the students here, both my partners from Nanjing (some of the most competent people I've met) and my students in the village. I've come to realize that I share much more in common with the people here, and I'm many, MANY times more comfortable with their way of living than in America. But more on that when I have more time. It's hard to unpack.
4) Much of this experience is preparing me implicitly for a real challenge in Beijing later in the year, and I'm trying to master the Chinese language as well as the underlying cultural norms that surround the perhaps-sensitive topic. Many of my students have parents who are migrant workers, and it's interesting to be able to see how they cope in the villages.

Out of time. Will write more later =p