"I'm getting too old for this..."

Another incredibly busy week here in China. This time, the business was the product of one event and one event only...

CULTURE DAY!!

Before we dive into Culture Day, I need to first clarify some things about my school because I have a feeling I have not been very clear about what I am doing here. My school is a private international school, meaning, that all the students speak English and, to the best of my knowledge, not a single student was born in China. Most students have come to China with parents that work here. The school is ran just like a western style school (except we have grades k-12 and we operate out of about 15 rooms...) and all our teacher are from the U.S. (with the exception of one brave Canadian).

Now that you know a little more about our school, we had our first big "education fair." This particular fair was called Culture Day. I've been hearing about Culture Day since the first day I've arrived in Xi'an. It's a big event where each class picks a culture, learns about that culture, decorates their rooms for that culture, brings in food from that culture and performs a presentation for that culture. Needless-to-say, it's a little overwhelming (hence, the early warning). This week, my classroom was transformed with the help of my fifth graders into an exciting experience of RUSSIA!

Although I only have a few pictures, I plan to hunt down more; it was a lot of fun but a ton of work, so I need lots of proof it happened! In our classroom, we made a huge time line from Imperial Russia to USSR to the current Russian Federation, we created a replica of Saint Basil's Cathedral in Red Square and we created a tundra and added snowflakes to the class (see below). The students even had the idea of turning the air conditioning way up to make it fell like winter (although, not quite the -34 degrees Celsius that Siberia experiences).

Each student did a project and we covered the subjects of Russian money, language, geography, architecture, art and dance (we even had the Nutcracker playing on DVD). The parents brought some amazing food: potato pancakes, apple cake, stuffed tomatoes, macaroni and some drinks. And this was only my room! We also had Thailand, Czech Republic, China (hosted by the Chinese teachers), Japan, Greece, Mexico, Canada (yep, the Canadian Teacher), Scotland and a couple others.

Then, for our performance, our class acted out the play Peter and the Wolf. Having only one Boy, Tommy was Peter. The other girls played the various animals and other characters while I was elected to be the wolf (and I gladly excepted!). There is video footage of this yet to be uploaded to the internet, so I will let you know as soon as it is!

Lethal Weapon

Due to the chaos of Culture Day, there was little time for other adventures. The other major highlight was a journey that Cari and I embarked on last Wednesday and finished just today. Due to some "flexibility" in the area of movie sales, you are able to buy DVDs in China that have up to 8 different full length movies on it. Because of this, whole box sets are sold on single disks.

Cari bought one such disk.

This disk is part of a series called "Hollywood Picture Collection" and this particular volume was titled "Bloody Fighting Man Mel Gibson." Here are some of the other volumes of the "Hollywood Picture Collection" with spelling as it appears on the DVD case:

Sexy Man Brad Pit
Bold and Passional Tom Cruise
Cafard and Wild Nicolas Cage

One evening, while I was borrowing Cari's computer (because of this), she decided to put in the film Lethal Weapon. It only took a minute of watching, and I was committed. We decide we would have to watch all 4, and we did! I think my favorite is either the second or the forth. I remember watching the fourth before, but I don't think I had ever seen any of the others. They were way better then I thought they would be. Ok, so, yes- the movies are incredibly cheesy, but that's what makes them so fun (Mel Gibson + Mullet = Awesome)! Plus- each movie carries a serious theme with it: LW1;Race Relations/Dealing with loss, LW2; International Affairs/Apartheid (don't believe me? watch it!), LW3; Gang Violence/Urban Sprawl (ok, urban sprawl was a stretch), LW4; illegal immigration... and China- what an appropriate way to end the series.

With all the stress of Culture Day, nothing could relieve the stress quite like Danny Glover and Mel Gibson taking out bad guys and muttering "I'm getting too old for this shit."

I'm not even sure if this happened in the last week, but here are some crazy pictures. The one on the left is of a dog Cari and I saw in downtown. We couldn't get a good picture of it, but yes- that is a full warm up suit for a dog! It was hilarious. It even had a hood! The picture on the right is of a man flying kites in downtown. Although it is very common to see these strings of kites as vendors try to sell them, I have never seen on this long. It was incredible!

There you go, a long blog for a pretty uneventful week.
Thanks for reading!


(old picture... too busy this week for Tang Paradise- only time for Lethal Weapon)