First, the trip to the zoo. On the 12th of October, our school planned a trip to the Xi'an zoo for all our students. None of the older senior-level kids came along, but there were still a good hundred or so students, with ten adults to manage them.
To begin with, we arrived at work far too early for a reasonable person, and then waited for the kids to arrive. After that we herded them back out again and into the buses - I forget if we all piled into two or three. They were big buses.
This brings us to the first photos! Namely, of kids on buses, and not being very badly behaved either. Good on them. This lot of kids is all of J4O that showed up, plus a random kid from J4C. They're good kids, actually, even for a class that only has boys in it. From left to right: Austin, Tony, Jake and Mark. I don't know who the kid in the background is; she's not in any of my classes.
These kids are from J2H, which I used to teach, once upon a time, before I was put in the awful S11D class because no-one else could teach it. From left to right: Helen, Shannon, Cici and Janet.
If you thought these kids looked younger than the others, you're right. They're from K2F, and are five years old, I think. They're adorable kids, although the one on the left is trouble. Mostly adorable trouble. The one on the right is a good kid; she likes to play and run around screaming outside of class like everyone else, but she knows how to listen when she's actually in the class. From left to right: Lily and Fancy. Yes, some parents here are working hard to make the namespace of English speakers larger and a little weirder.
These three are from J4C. The one in the middle is the most trouble, although that's not saying much; this is a very good class, I never have any problems with it. From left to right: Betty, Becky, and Emily.
After we finally made it to the zoo (the bus trip was over an hour), we stopped for more photos after herding the kids together, just before going in. I'm there! So is Ivy. This is two groups merged together; each group had one foreign teacher and one or two Chinese teachers.
One of the first stops we made was to a circus in the middle of the zoo. They had a man and a young girl doing acrobatics while being swung around the inside of the cage, suspended from a length of fabric. If you've ever seen anyone "climbing the silken ladder" then you know the deal - I don't know what the real name for this kind of acrobatics is. I also don't have any photos of that - I rather sensibly took movies instead, which I can't be bothered uploading. Sorry! I did take photos of what came before, since I was still wildly optimistic about my camera's ability to take photos in the dark interior at that point. So, before the acrobatics, we had:
Alright, so it's kinda hard to see what we had in this picture. We had boxing bears! Yes, those fuzzy brown things are bears, wearing boxing gloves. At first I was a little horrified, the bears go for each other very convincingly. I never really felt comfortable watching it, but eventually I saw the funny side, after realising that they can't have been hurting each other. The oversized boxing gloves saw to that, preventing their claws from causing what would be real damage. Also, they never bit each other, and they always backed off immediately at the end of each round. After the boxing, the gloves were taken off and the bears performed acrobatics tricks on parallel bars, among other things.
Then we had tigers! Yay, tigers! The big cats put on the kind of show you can expect, seeing the picture below. Standard circus stuff, including jumping through flaming hoops. The tigers were very uncooperative that day, and several times didn't do what they were told. At any rate, the tigers at Dreamworld are much better; this isn't the place to go for an impressive tiger show. However, they're still tigers, and tigers are still worth watching.
This picture doesn't really need much of a caption. It's two kids and an elephant. I took it mostly to tease the kid on the right, as we'd been making fun of each other. I don't know the names of either of these kids, though, as they're not in any of my classes.
This is me again, with some of the kids from my group, in the stuffed animal exhibit.
This is from another part of the same place. You can see Ariel amongst the kids there; she was the Chinese teacher in charge of our group. The kid in the front wasn't originally in frame; he ran in to steal the show just before taking the picture.
There were other things at the zoo - a seal show, for example, that was pretty good - but I forget most of it now, so I'll skip straight to the monkeys! The baby monkeys were dead cute:
Especially this one, who become enamoured of a plastic bottle that ended up inside the enclosure:
Eventually we'd all seen enough, and went to lunch. We swarmed a restaurant and took over all of the seats they had upstairs, and a table or two downstairs as well. Have you ever been to a child's birthday party at McDonalds? Imagine that, only with three or four times as many kids. On the plus side, we just had traditional Chinese food instead of McDonalds, so it was actually pretty good. The restaurant is run by what is, from the sounds of it, a farmers' collective. The restaurant is a very large place, with a lot of the eating areas outside; the complex doubles as the farmers' homes. Lunch was several dishes in the middle of each table, from which you helped yourself. The kids decided they were full long before any of the teachers did, so they ran around downstairs while we finished up.
After another long bus ride we got back, and got all the kids to the right parents. Nobody got left behind, so it was, overall, successful. Some parents took their time coming to pick up their kids; Fancy, who you should recall from an earlier picture, was the last kid to leave; she stayed at the school for a good half an hour after everyone else had gone. She didn't seem to mind it; she's not a kid that cries easily, and we (well, mostly I) entertained her by running through the hall and playing games.
After everyone left, we had one last group picture, just the teachers. From left to right: me, Sally, Vivi, Ivy, Kiko, Melinda, and Apple.
Later today I will finish my backlog and post about the Hauqing hot spring and the Terracotta Warriors!
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