Haňule z Kyjova

Today I woke up with a start. I was full of energy and feeling well. I went to school with homepa, and we stoped for a breakfast at a traditonal chinese breakfast shop (don’t know how to call it). I got some hot food, something between a pastry and a dumpling and a filled dough, very difficult to describe, and a cup of soya milk. It was all very different, form what you get in CZE but I think I can get used to it, and the soya milk was very good.

When I got to school, I went to english teachers’ cabinet looking for Claire, but because she wasn’t here I started talking with other teachers and one of them took me immediately to her class. It was 1st grade 6th class, children around 16 and 17 years old. First I wanted just to watch how they study and how the teahcer is teaching, just to know the school system here. The teacher went with them through a text in textbook, they have done the vocabulary before. And then she explained all the sentences and grammar in chinese. For you to know, it is not easy to teach in the classrooms. There is always more then 40 students in one class, and they are quite noisy. Some just lie down on the desk and fall asleep during the lesson. Some go walking around the classroom just like that They are often shouting on the teacher and discusing with her… Sometimes a mess a bit!

After the first lesson I wanted to leave, but the children wanted me to join them and go downstairs for a lunch with them, so I agreed. They took me 5 stairs lower where is the canteen, chose me a meal in a box and payed for me!! They are so nice! Then we got back to the classroom. There is one thing, we had to use the stairs because children are not allowed to use the lifts. But it is good for me, because I’ll definitely put up some weight beacuse of the food I am always given. So I continued with them in the english lesson, and after that I stayed to eat the lunch with them in the classroom. They surrounded me and had so many questions that I couldn’t eat at all! They were really sweet, but Claire nearly must had come to save me. She wanted to have lunch with me but couldn’t find me. But I got a lemon drink with jelly (they put jelly everywhere) from the other teachers.

After that I met with Sarah, another eng. teacher and another kiond person. We talked a lot, she told me more about Taiwan, for example that there are 4 main groups of people – the taiwanese, the Hakka, the aboriginals and immigrants (a lot of them from China). Also they have different dialects, but nowadays you can rarely tell by there speech if they are Hakka or taiwanese. The dialects are dissapearing. She also told me to be careful to discuss the politics, because of the history. There are people that support the democracy and separated Taiwan, and some that want to join China. This is more difficult theme, so I will certainly try to know more later…

Then I was invited to watch an english speech contest between the students. There was about 20 students form 1st and 2nd grade. They had to make a speech or some story about a picture that they were given only 6 minutes before, and they had only 1.30 minutes for the speech. Some of the children made really good perfomance, very interesting and fluent.

The last thing today at school was a lesson with Daisy. She is a teacher in special english class, so the children are a bit better in english. They had 10 minutes to ask me some questions. In the start they were very shy, but then they started asking a lot After school i went home with homepa and Jamie and after that we went to Bani’s brother’s house for dinner. This was really something delicios, so I took pictures for you. It is a fish and than a hard tofu with meat and we had also bamboo and califlower. Really good! Auntie is a very good cook.

Oh it’s really late! I have to go to bed, because in the morning I have to wake early and get ready for the lessons!