Blessings and Oral English

I completed my first full week of teaching this week, and as I thought adjusting to my schedule is going to be difficult. I'm teaching 12 hours per week right now. I teach three different classes of "Listening and Speaking" or "Oral English."

Last night a group of four students came to my apartment to teach me to cook dinner. It wasn't that difficult, but controlling the wok was, which we found out when Leo almost started a fire in my kitchen. He wasn't phased by the giant flames, but I was. I was about to grab my fire extinguisher until I saw he had regained control of the situation. The food (five dishes plus rice) was amazing. I'm inviting them over again soon.

As dinner was finishing Cayce called to invite me out with some other PC people downtown. He was with Kristen and Pierce, two China 12s I had language classes with and thus saw 4 hours everyday during training. It was fantastic seeing them, as I haven't seen any of my training mates since the night I arrived in Lanzhou.

On the way home, Cayce wanted to eat some shao cao (I'm not sure of the spelling)--it's a type of bbq street food available until late at night, like the kebab stands in Oxford, England--so we stopped at a place near our school. We got into a conversation with two other people buying food, and they invited us to their bar just down the street. We decided we'd stop by for a little while as it was already late. They had a really cool bar. It reminded me a little bit of the tiki room or a Mexican-Chinese cantina. The guy and girl we met are cousins, and so they invited her father (who owns the bar) to meet us, and he proceeded to sing to us Tibetan blessings and they toasted us repeatedly. We stayed about an hour I'd guess and left. They were very friendly, hospitable, and warm and speak almost no English, so they'll be good people to practice my "Oral Chinese" with.