Update

This week has been busy, busy, busy!!
Through the China Care director, the interns were introduced to a young Chinese woman who works with the Shunyi government (a neighborhood of Beijing), and she is working with a bank system of 43 banks to prepare for the Olympics. So she wanted the China Care interns (as native English speakers) to go with her to test the English abilities of staff members. I went on Tuesday with one other intern, Tim (we had to do this Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday so the interns all took turns going). We met up with Vera and visited some banks in the morning. I would go in and ask to open an account at the bank, and see if they could understand and help me to do that. Most of the time they did really well! The staff were alot of the time younger Chinese who spoke pretty good English. In the morning between our visits we also stopped to watch an exercise competition between high school groups - that was pretty fun. Vera (her English name) told us that everyone in high school does the exercises every day and they have competitions regularly. We went to lunch and had some noodles - which are hard to eat with chopsticks :( Our driver for the day laughed at me because I was so bad at it :( We visited more banks in the afternoon and I had a few awkward encounters with people who spoke no English and just stared at me really scared (most of them knew that there would be tests of their English). Then we went out for dinner and had Beijing duck!!! It was so good!!!! (and it was meat, so I was happy). Vera told me and Tim that you eat Beijing Duck in three ways: first, you eat the skin which is oily and crispy, so Chinese people dab some sugar or jam onto it to make it sweeter. It tasted like sweet pretzels which was tasty :). Second, you eat the meat of the duck with some cucumber, sauce, and bean sprouts all rolled in a thin piece of bread. The third way is to either cook the bones and leftover meat into a soup, or to fry them. We had ours fried, and that was also sooo good :)

On Wednesday, me and Ysabelle, and Tim taught our preschool class (which means, playing with a lot of play-dough). But then the real challenge began because we started to teach English classes to the older China Care kids. Tim taught the younger kids because he has Chinese language abilities to talk to them, and Ysabelle and I took over with the older kids who are already really good with English. I did some spelling with them, and then taught them about vowels and consonants which they didn't know about :( Apparently I am going to have to start teaching grammar too because they don't know that yet. I did English class for almost 2 hours (with a break) and it was exhausting. Then Ysabelle took over and did an awesome art project with them.
And from now on I am going to be doing English classes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and I have preschool every morning on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
So now I am really really busy!