field trips

In the past three weeks I've gone on two field trips with my favorite class (my only class actually, but I love them regardless!). The rule for field trips is theoretically "English only" and the majority of the class must go. That class is a really fun group with good chemistry and they also happen to be adults with really good English; I think of them more as my friends than my students.

Field trip number one was a picnic. It's been raining basically every day for the past month or two, but luckily on picnic day the weather was absolutely amazing. There was one point where we thought maybe it was going to rain, so we packed up all of our stuff, but we ended up just relocating our base.

Enough of my students have cars for them to have been able to drive us all about 30-45 minutes away from school near the river and Long Hua Temple, basically in the middle of nowhere (yay for nature and green things).

Yep, some cows were hanging out with us. They made fun of me for taking a picture of them though, "Haven't you ever seen cows?"

...and some farmers.

Everyone brought food or props or something; I was in charge of games. We played tradition American picnic/children's games (Capture the Flag, Telephone, Red Light Green Light), some Chinese games (some kind of awesome blindfold game and the card game all the old men always play outside) and some we all knew (Charades, Hot Potato, soccer, relay races, three legged races).

Class is supposed to be four hours, 8am to 12pm, on Sundays, which picnic day happened to be. My students picked me up at 8am and I think I got home from the post picnic dinner at 6:30pm. I got to hang out with people I really like all day, enjoy nature and great weather, be active and get paid for the whole thing. It was kind of awesome.

Field trip number two was to play badminton (with a sprinkling of ping pong) this past Sunday. We were going to have class from 8am to 12pm, do lunch and then go, but we ditched class an hour early for more game time.

My students all work for some subsidiary or other of CNPC, the big oil company here, and we went to one of their offices to play (none of them actually work together). His office was kind of nuts, it was in an old hotel and you could definitely tell, they hadn't remodeled the majority of it. The carpet was my first clue, and not just that there was carpet, even though you rarely find that here, it was that "main-hallway-of-a-hotel" pattern also. In his office there was a bathroom and a bed (granted it was a twin), but it had clearly been a hotel room. There was even the standard fire evacuation map on the back of the door.

The ping pong was in the same building, in what might have been a conference room. They had special sport flooring and maybe ten tables, with balls, paddles and homemade hoppers (like in tennis, containers on handles that you can push down on top of a ball and the ball pops into the container so you don't have to bend over to collect them all). It was legit.

I mostly stuck to the badminton. One of the guys came into the badminton room and he was really sweaty, I asked what he'd been doing and when he said playing ping pong I was sliiightly confused. And then I went to watch. They're really intense about ping pong. They put all kinds of crazy spin on the ball and stand literally almost a full table length away from the table to play.

In a separate building, in what appeared to have been an auditorium of sorts, the company had recently built the single badminton court. The guy who's office we were at said everyone could play for a half hour of each workday. Since it was the weekend, we had the place to ourselves. We ended up playing for something like five hours.

I keep meaning to tell them about Sunday Funday and forgetting. We're essentially starting the Sunday Funday Field Trip Series. Next up: bbq and strictly English ktv!