South Asia Trip: Day 6

Here's Day 6:

On Tuesday, we woke up early to go to class. We journeyed up the hill and down to our classroom across the street. This day would bring us a new teacher. She came in and from the very first moment spoke every word in Chinese and asked us to speak in Chinese. During our lesson she read each sound or word and then we repeated. Then, she repeated each section 3 times. Talk about repetition! She also made each person in the class repeat each section on his or her own. This really intimidated us! By the end of the class I felt like I had learned a lot, but it was still a very impersonal, bland lesson. We hoped the next teacher on Wednesday would be better.

After our class, we ventured to the cafeteria and met up with the girls who helped us on Monday. They were so sweet and wanted to make sure we had their numbers in case we needed anything. That is what I find so welcoming and comforting about being here – all the students we meet are so concerned about our well-being and comfort. They go above and beyond to be helpful to us. God has definitely blessed us in that specific way.

Keeping with our new routine, we came back and had our bible study. We specifically prayed to God that he would help us not find class so intimidating in the future and that we would meet new students. We took a nap, and then went outside to the basketball courts. We kind of just hung out and met an old man who collected bottles. He tried to talk to us, and we failed miserably! However, we did tell him “Jesus loves you.” in Chinese. We also tried to talk to a few more students, but they were not as fluent in English as the English majors normally are. Later in the afternoon, we met up with Vivian and taught her Phase 10. She was very good! She helped us take the bus to get some famous rice noodles to eat. Lud recognized the area as a place where he had some really good steak one time. He led us on a wild goose chase trying to find this restaurant, but we never found it. Ha! Fortunately, Vivian was very helpful and understanding, and we ended up eating some really good rice noodles.

After dinner we ventured to a sweet shop where I had some amazing Oreo gelato and other people got pastries. We also visited Wal-Mart (How many times can we go there in a week?) to pick up some sunscreen since it has been so sunny. This area of town has beautiful LED lit trees and buildings that are very cool. We got a cab and made our way back to the university. We stayed up a little while talking and went to bed.