Exploring my hood!

So much exploring has been going on in the past week! Its crazy how I have been here for a month now and I am still finding AMAZING stuff right here in my neighborhood.  It all started last Saturday when me and Jami decided to turn right intead of left after we exited our apartment.  Its really weird but everytime we left our place we would always go to the left and wonder around. There are tons of shops and restaurants and metro stations to the left so we never even thought we needed to go right. And how wrong we were!! There are GREAT things to the right of our apartment.  We have this great little Chinese style park with gorgeous trees and nice little benches to sit and enjoy the beautiful weather we are having.  As we continued down the street and made just a few little turns we found the coolest little art area. Its called TaiKang Lu and is a ton of little alleys that are all intertwind that are lined with little boutiques, art vendors and delicious restaurants.  Unfortunately it is kind of touristy so everything in there is pretty pricey. But its really fun to wander around and see all of the art. 
After Taikang we hailed a cab to take us to our next destination.  Jami had written down an address that was supposed to be holding a Chilli Cook-Off! So we told the driver where to take us and climbed in.  I turned to Jami and asked her where exactly the cab was taking us, so I could know how much the cab was going to be costing us. But....she had no idea.  She read about the cook-off and just wrote down the address. Since we live in the French Concession where everything is and happens we just have a tendency to assume everything takes place in our neighborhood:) Luckily it wasnt too far away! So the driver drops us off and we walk around the corner and find this wing and steak restaurant! when we walked in it was a total oasis.  Inside the fence was a really cool boardwalk lined with tall trees with a waterfall on the other side. we did not feel like we were in Shanghai at all.  the feeling of being back in the states was intensified by the fact that there were noooooo chinese people in this event. It was ALL expats(people living in china that are foreigners).  sadly we got there a little late so we were only able to taste a few different chilli's.  But we had so much fun anyways. everyone in there was super nice and I ran into a bunch of people there that I had met the previous thursday through a guy I hung out with.  But the BEST part was the spotting of my "teammate".  the night we got stranded in the typhoon while we were hanging out in the Apple store we saw this older gentleman sitting at a computer and he was wearing the SWEETEST outfit. I cant do the outfit justice so when we spotted him again at the 2010 Shanghai Chilli Cook-Off, wearing the EXACT same outfit, we had to take a pic. so I attached it below:)
we did some more great exploring this week for our three day break. first we went down to Old Shanghai which is a big area that still has old Chinese architecture and traditional Chinese gardens and tea houses.  this place is lined with little shops that sell every trinket you could ever need! in one store we found everything from a shovel to use in your garden to Hello Kitty cell phone covers to cooking utensils! (again I attached a pic to show you the craziness of the store;)  as we wondered more into the center of the area we found the main square which is gorgeous. there is a pond that weaves around this huge old tea house that is three stories high built in traditional Chinese architecture and is connected to the square by this really pretty stone bridge.  the weather was absolutely perfect that day(it is FINALLY starting to cool down!) so me and Jami decided to see what this tea house was all about! we wondered up to the second story and found the cutest little table over looking the pond. all of the windows were opened and there was a relaxing breeze going through the room. we sat at the table and camped our there for a good few hours just chatting. It was easily the most relaxing day in Shanghai this far! we topped off the day with standing in line for about 20 minutes to try the famous Shanghai dumplings! and we were NOT dissapointed in any way!! they were soo freaking delicious! they make them right there in front of you so they are super fresh. the fill the dough with the meat and veggie filling and then steam them adn hand them to you! aaahhhh...so tasty:)
the next day(being today) we wondered down to the fake market once again. that place is soooo DANGEROUS! its the place where you can get tons of knock-off stuff for super cheap.  today we were on the hunt for shoes. I was in desperate need for a pair of black flats and a pair of brown flats and Jami needed some blakc flats as well. we were also on the hunt for a Chinese Rosetta stone.  And do not fret....WE FOUND EVERYTHING WE NEEDED! .....and maybe a little more:) right when we walked in there was a guy sitting on a little stool in front of his shop and as we passed he totally whispered to us "dvds?". when we looked down he was holding a stack of dvds down to his side.  it was sooo sneaky! but me and Jami have been looking for illegal dvds since we got here. hahahaha! so we followed him into his shop and he sits us down on these tiny little stools and digs out the huge suitcase from under a pile of clothes! and when he opens it up there were hundreds of dvds in it! we went through all of them and ended up buying 9 movies for about  $6 U.S. dollars! pretty much the best deal ever.  but before we finalized the sale he asked us if we wanted any TV serious. and since we are stranded here with no english TV we naturally said YES. so he hands us a book and opens it up to show us a list of any TV series you could ever think of. its basically a menu that we can choose from.after looking at the menu he then proceeds to turn towards the wall, moves a few items out of the way and opens up the panelling off the wall of reveals a bunch of TV dvds! it was insane! I felt like I was in some kind of movie and that the cops were gonna come rushing in at any moment.  the dvd market is being really watched right now becuase of the World Explo taking place here in Shanghai. once its done I dont think it will be so intense. 
After the market we decided to go check out Ikea. we had a little trouble finding our way there becuase we had to take a new metro line and transfer to another line, but now we are getting pretty good at manuvering through the metro system. anyways...HOLY CRAP, that store is so flippin intense. neither of us had ever been in one so we were a little overwhelmed by the massive size of the store. you can litterally get every single thing you need to furnish a new house, right down to the lint roller. but our main focus there was getting some stuff to spruce up our house. once again....we had great success here:) we walked a way with some cute palce mats for our table which makes our dining room look so much better, some decorative mirrors to hang in our living room, some silverware(which was badly needed) and the best part was our new bedding!! our bedding that we have been sleeping in was so gross. they were ugly old used sheets and hideous comforters.  we never looked forward to climbing in our beds. but now our beds are so cute, so clean and so inviting!

So now that we have some much needed shoes, wonderful new bedding, a few things to start making our house feel homey, and a great new sense of what is around us....we have to go back to reality. we go back to work tomorrow to work 6 days in a row and only had a one day weekend last week. the chinese school system is super strick about the number of school days in a semester so whenever a holiday falls during the week we have to make up school on the weekends. luckily we get a 7 day break after the 6 days in a row! woop woop!

First Week of Teaching!

So I am writing this blog entry at 8:15 pm on Friday night, which means that I survived my first week of teaching! Woop woop! The week definitely started out kinda rocky. There were two things that really gave me a run for my money. The first thing was figuring out timing, such as how long it takes to teach a song, sing a song or play a new game. The second thing was creating a lesson plan and using language that the kiddies could understand. Along with these two challenging aspects of learning how to teach was the overwhelming interference of my classroom facilitator. While I LOVE having her in the classroom because she is so sweet and helps me out so much with figuring out what the little ones are saying to me, she tends to take over teaching a little too much and doesn’t allow me to try and be the teacher. I would have a lesson all planned out but when she would come into the room she would start doing what she wanted and telling me to do something besides what I was doing. So it kind of made me feel like I wasn’t doing anything right and that I am a complete moron. But the classes in the afternoon that she didn’t come to went really well because I was able to go with my own flow and was able to figure out my own teaching style. As the week went on she slowly stopped going to every class with me and I was able to put a good lesson together by Thursday! Don’t want to toot my own horn or anything….but my classes on Thursday ROCKED! I had so much fun with the kids and my timing was perfect Finished all the lessons on time and didn’t have to struggle to make things last longer.

I was hoping that my Friday lessons would go just as smoothly as Thursdays. I felt pretty confident about my lessons so I wasn’t too worried. And when I walked into my first class(the 3 year olds) one little girl walked up to me as I am putting my stuff down and handed me a little thing of some kind of candy. And then another little boy walked up and handed me some flowers. Naturally they were both accompanied by a few pals, meaning I was surrounded by a group of three year olds just chatting away to me in CHINESE! They were so stinking cute but I could not understand a word they were saying. I quickly turned to Christy(my classroom facilitator) with a panicked look and my face and said “Christy! What are they saying to me! They just keep handing me stuff but I don’t know why!”. Hahahaha! She giggled and informed me that it was teachers day today so the children were giving me presents! I seriously just wanted to cry because of how precious they are. They were so cute and excited to give me these presents and I did not understand ANTYHING! Throughout all of my classes my students gave me flowers, chocolates and handmade cards and paper flowers Although they were all so sweet and I LOVE all of my presents, I do have a favorite. It was given to me by a little girl with the English name of Cathy. She made a card for me and placed it in an envelope. She came up to me at the beginning of class and handed it to me. I melted instantaneously as she looked up at me and said “thank you teacher” in her tiny little voice. But the gift became my favorite when I looked down at the envelope and it said “To Mike. From Cathy”.

My first week of teaching was an amazing experience. Even though it didn’t start out very smoothly(not only were the lessons hard to configure, but on Monday I got on the metro going in the opposite direction that I needed and wound up at Shanghai Railway Station. Not SOUTH Shanghai Railway Station. Had call some peeps from my school and they had to talk to a security guard once and the taxi driver 3 times to figure out where I was and how to get me to school. I was over an hour late after my 35 minute taxi ride. Sorry for the long side story) it ended up being fulfilling on so many levels. The fact that the week ended on a good note is so encouraging. I left school today in the most amazing mood. I just kept thinking about how amazing my life is right now. I AM A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER IN SHANGHAI! I feel so blessed that I am able to live here for the next year and get to have these children in my life every day. I am so looking forward to getting to know each and every one of them.

My pad here in Shanghai!

The apartment:
Here some pics of the apartment! If you are saying to yourself "kinda looks like they have to go outside to get to their bathroom" you are absolutely correct! we have to go through a little courtyard kind of thing to get to our bathroom:) and that pic of the cat plate is a 3-D fluffy cat plate. totally freaks me out so I had to add it to the groups of pics cuz it really gives character to our home! we also apparently have an excape latter in our "courtyard". not really sure where is escapes to tho...

second story

Second story:


This one is pretty awesome. So as one may assume, nothing about living in Shanghai is easy. From the language barrier to the bathroom situations, things are just very different. Here is the first incident that proved that life in the big city can be a little rough sometimes. This past week my roomie Jami was having some problems with her Mac computer. The night that the problems started we decided that it was probably best to take it down to the new Apple store downtown Shanghai. Unfortunately her computer problems coincided with the occurrence of a serious typhoon. A typhoon is not your typical rain storm, the rain comes down in literally sheets if rain, umbrellas and rain jackets will not help keep you dry in that kind of weather disaster. So we throw on some sweats and decided to hit the road. Since it was kinda late in the evening both of us were just wearing sweats, I had on some leggings, a mens Hanes t-shirt and some vintage old navy flip flops, Jami was wearing some athletic short, a t-shirt and some sandals as well.
We head to the end of our street to hail a cab since we didn’t know what metro line would take us downtown. We had written down the address and Jami had the taxi help line saved in her phone. After about 20 minutes of trying to flag down a taxi, turns out it is IMPOSSIBLE to get a taxi during a typhoon, a westerner tells his cab to pull over to us. He rolls down his window and tell us that he is only going about 2 blocks up and we can jump in the taxi and take it when he gets out. We were elated! He was pretty much our guardian angel of the night. After he asked us where we were heading we found out that the address we had gotten off the internet was way too broad and that the taxi driver didn’t know where it was (he spoke fluent Chinese). So he graciously jumped on his blackberry and figured out the correct address for the taxi driver to take us to. Once our taxi was on the way to the Apple store we thought it would be smooth sailing from there. Yeah…didn’t turn out that way. The taxi driver dropped us off just a little ways down the street from the store.
As we walked up to the mall that it was in our jaws totally dropped. There in front of us stood the mall that housed ALL of the top designer’s stores. We are talking Dior, Dolce and Gabbana, Louis Vitton, the list goes on and on. Plus it was attached to the Ritz Carlton so as we are walking through the parking lot there were Bentleys, Rolls Royce’s and Ferraris parked in the parking lot. So we stroll on into this upscale mall looking totally classy drenched head to toe and squeaking as we walk the pristine hallways of this marble palace. People are staring at us as we walk with WIDE eyes in amazement of the gorgeous clothes and the smell of luxury(the air really did smell wonderful in there, it was definitely the cleanest air I have experienced in Shanghai).
After walking around for a few minutes we ask the help desk where we can find the Apple store. She told us to go out a set of doors and it would be right outside. So we followed her directions and stepped outside to find this AMAZING structure with the Apple logo floating in the middle. The store entrance is a massive glass cylinder with a spiral staircase that leads into the underground store. The store is also located in a spot where if you look up you can see some of the most amazing skyscrapers in Shanghai. So we walk across the courtyard towards the store. We are walking with our arms interlinked so we didn’t slip with our eyes glued to the skyline and the crazy Apple structure. Well, it turns out that the glass structure was surrounded by a mote of water that was not blocked off. So as we walk we don’t even see this awesome little mote and tumble right into it!! I seriously doubled over with laughter! As if we weren’t wet enough already, now we just fell right into the Apple mote! All of the guards around the building were laughing at us and were in laughing hysterically at ourselves.
After gathering ourselves we venture down the glass spiral stairs into the apple store. We drop off her computer and have to leave it there for a few days while it gets repaired. So we head back outside to find that it is now raining even harder than before. And when we get to the road we find that the streets are totally flooded. We are waking in puddles seriously up to our shins on the street as we try again to get a taxi. This time we wonder up and down the busy street for about 45 minutes. After slipping a few times on the pavement and chasing flip flops down the streams of a busy Shanghai street, we decide that it is time to step in somewhere and call a friend to help us out. But once we got our cell phones out we discovered that Jami’s cell phone was dying and mine wouldn’t make any outgoing calls and when I tried to text it kept switching to Arabic as the input language! We were able to make a quick phone call to our friend Jake who called our program director who tells him to tell us that when we were in the mall we were literally standing on top of a metro station that could take us home so now we had to treck back to the mall where we stuck out like a sore thumb and find this stinking metro station. Finally we found it and were able to navigate our way home where we actually had to wring the water out of our clothes.
In the end this was the craziest story I have to date about traveling and surviving in a different country. Luckily Jami and I both have a good sense of humor and an optimistic personality. I couldn’t have asked for a better person to be stuck in a typhoon with, we seriously were laughing the entire time. And I wouldn’t take back that situation for anything. It will remain one of my funniest memories FOREVER!

a couple good stories

I have a few good stories that I HAVE to tell before I start blogging about whats goin on now:

first one:
So during the week of orientation CIEE took us to the World Expo, which is like the world fair. Hundreds of different countries from around the world come to the expo and build crazy buildings where they display different things from their culture and country. These buildings are insane. Usually people wait anywhere from 1-11 hours in line to get into these pavilloins. There was noooo way we were going to wait that long to get into a building because it was insanely hot that day. So we all headed to the African pavillion where there was no line and a lot to see. In this pavillion a ton of African countries came together and each one had an area that in which they could display things that are significant to their country. So we wondered around the pavillion, Me,Jessica,Jami and Alice. As we walked through one of the smaller countries pavillions and were standing in the middle of the display when one person asked to take a picture with us. We of course said yes, not knowing that this would lead to 30 minutes of people asking to take pictures of us. We seriously stood there while people took turns jumping in the middle of us and took pictures! We were laughing so hard and our faces serioulsy hurt from holding a smile on our face for that long. finally we were able to break away!but as we walked around some more people kept asking to take a picture with us. AND we noticed that people were taking videos of us! It was like they had never seen someone from America before. so after much love at the African pavillion we wondered outside and found that the Cuban pavillion had no line to get in either. naturally we seized the opportunity to escape the heat. but once we were inside another photo shoot began! I timed this one and it seriously lasted over 45 minutes. Of course by the end of this one I had my red carpet and Miss America smile down to perfection:) It was out of control how people just kept asking to take photos with us and jumping in as soon as one person left. People were pushing their kids into the shot to take a picture with the Americans. here are just two pics of 129,387,291,837,129,387 that were taken that day1

hello from Shanghai!

yay! I can finally blog! so..I have been in Shanghai for a little over two weeks now and I am absolutely loving it! I dont really know where to begin because so much has happened so I will start by just summing up where I am now. After having orientation for the first week, which was a blast and I have the best people doing this here with me, I moved into my house last Sunday. Originally I was supposed to live in an apartment by myself but at the last minute one of the apartments fell through and our program director asked us if two of us would be willing to share a place. Me and Jami instantly jumped on the offer. I was so excited! I love Jami and we got a long so well right away. As we moved in and have been exploring our neighborhood I have become more and more grateful for having a roomie. I dont know if I would have survived my first week without her! We have been having so much fun and had quite a few adventures as well. Every day is something new here. Even going out and trying to find a place to eat is hilarious. We always look for a restaurant that has a picture menu or if we are lucky, a menu in english. An english menu rarely happens tho.

Our apartment is very interesting in itself. It is very spacious and has a lot of good qualities. such and a large living room, which doubles as my bed room, and a nice loft above the living room where Jami's room is. It is also in the best part of Shanghai. Our area is know as the French Concession and is where a lot of great restaurants and shopping is:) The only drawback to our apartment are the kitchen/dining area and the bathroom. The kitchen is just small and not really that inviting, we need to make it a bit more homey. But our bathroom on the other hand....is OUTSIDE. We have to walk through a really small courtyard, I would say its about 4 feet by 8 feet, to get to the bathroom. Plus there is no airconditioning in there so it get so flippin hot! Its not really a big deal tho, me and Jami just laugh at it and say that its all about roughing it in CHINA!

I also started school last Thursday. I have 7 classes a day and I teach 3 and 4 year olds. I have one class of 3 year olds and the rest are 4 years old. They are sooo CUTE! I seriously want to take them all home with me! It is a lot of work tho. They can get pretty roudy because they are so little. Its also hard to know what vocabulary I can use becuase I'm really not sure of what they know yet. They school are also dont have AC. For the most part they all have a few fans in them but after jumping, dancing around and hugging/giving high-fives to about 30 students in each class, I am a hot mess. It definitely doesnt help that it is so FLIPPING HOT here and the humidity is out of control. I'll be honest with ya, I am constantly dripping with sweat here. I am pretty attractive by the end of the day:) I have never ever experienced heat like this! needless to say I am stoked for Fall.

All in all I am really ecxited for the year to come. I cant wait to get to know all of my students(I have over 200 of them) and see how they progress and grow. I already love them and they just love their english teachers. at the end of the lesson I go around and give all of them a high-five or a hug and each of them just melt my heart.