Intro: It's finally a real spring here which is great because next Spring in Ithaca it could be snowing at this time of year.
TV Tower and Flowers
Qingdao Beach Town
Last weekend, we had a 3 day weekend for QingMing Festival. The festival is also known as "Tomb-Sweeping Day" and is a day of remembrance where many people return to their rural home towns or ancestral homes and clean the tombs of their family members. On our train trip to Xi'an, we noticed many families have conical burial mounds in their fields with a few trees on top that hold their deceased relatives, and speaking with some of my friends here, they went back and took care of those spaces this weekend. As the festival is mostly family-oriented, I left the city and took the train down to Qingdao, a beautiful beach town.
Qingdao has decent sand areas, but the more isolated parts (the areas I prefer are rocky beach and cliffside which felt very New England.) The sandy area, and the main space in Qingdao is the home of the annual Tsingtao beer festival and its year-round brewery. (Tsingtao is the most famous Chinese beer.) That space indicated to me that the allure of The Jersey Shore/Gatlinburg exists worldwide. Slightly cheap carnival games, carts selling shitty beach toys, kites flying, go karting, and infinite family fun abounded. I enjoyed my time spent in the area, but on Saturday I took a long walk north along the shore. The whole shore area had a trail for miles, so I spent my day strolling the area. I climbed up the hills, wandered through beach side/clifftop campgrounds and bonded coffee shop/bookshop to bookshop. My favorite place was a little bookstore built into the side of a cliff at the rocky shoreline. It was so cute and fun, and I was able to sit and read and have a pomegranate lemonade. IN each shop, I would get a little treat and read a few chapters of Emma by Jane Austen. (I am trying to get over a high school hatred of the author and I have to say I love the messy disaster that is twenty-one year old Emma but I abhor Knightley (38 year old weirdo).)
Window seat from my beach bookstore
I spent my first night in a horrible hotel that had noises throughout the knight keeping me up inside an interior room with no windows to the outside that did convince me I would die in a fire, so I switched to a (shockingly cheap even for China) beachside Hilton, and it was beautiful. It is clearly a wedding destination for many Chinese people, because they have a whole separate wing for it, but unfortunately it was too early in the season for the outdoor pool to be filled. (It was pretty cold all weekend which also lent the area New England beach energy.) Monday night, I hopped back in the train and headed home.
Teaching in the Spring Spring semester discipline is gone. I now understand what teachers mean, and it is exacerbated this year by Lunar New Year being so late, because the semester is only 12 weeks long. My students now get either extremely nice Sara or they misbehave and immediately do dictation because I can't deal. The stores around the neighborhood are all now selling water guns for cheap, and I don't care when they use them between classes, but I now am starting a collection of ones I have had to take during class. Also, I have come to the firm conclusion that a class's behavior has little correlation to their teacher. I have some classes with the same homeroom teacher who behave WILDLY differently, regardless of whether to not their teacher is in the class. (Also Chinese classes are panopticon vibes because their homeroom teachers have cameras into the room that they can watch at any moment and there are giant windows into the hallway that monitors can walk past.) Apparently panopticon eventually stops working though because some kids genuinely do not care about getting in trouble.
Spring is also fun though. The kids are full of energy and run outside to play between classes. I have taken to playing soccer and jump rope and volleyball with them when I have a few spare minutes. They fully understand how school works now and take every opportunity to be creative in class now that their English is better. They ask questions and seem more willing to participate.
A Student Menu from Class Recently