mission trip & gala

We've had some new foreigners in town lately, which has caused a bit of a buzz. There are 14 Americans here from a high school in California. They're here on some sort of mission trip type thing, not so much for the whole "spreading the word of God" bit, but more for the "volunteering in schools and planting trees" bit. They're mostly girls and mostly cheerleaders, with two guidance counselors, two college aged kids and a random boyfriend that got conned into tagging along.

There is a Chinese foreign exchange student in their school in California who is from Songyuan and whose father has stake in another of the English schools here, which an American friend of mine also happens to have stake in as well. So they set the whole trip up for the kids. It seems like a random but awesome experience for them. One of the guidance counselors was telling me she has trouble getting students to consider just going to a university as far as the midwest after high school, so this is really important.

Because of the kids, the school that brought them out put on a "gala" the other day. Really it was like a talent or variety show, but whatever, they called it a gala. Because of the name I convinced some of the other teachers to dress up and it was literally the first time I've had a proper dress up since leaving the states. Exciting stuff.

Normally when us foreigners are out and about, sure we get stared at, we get people asking to take pictures of us (or more likely taking pictures of us without asking) and other kinds of attention, but NOTHING like what we got at the gala. The staring and crowding and picture taking was insane; I felt like a celebrity (or zoo animal... maybe a bit of both). I was literally signing autographs. It started with signing money, then inflatable balls, then clothing and finally people. Serious 15 minutes of fame.

The whole thing was pretty cool, in that it was something different for Songyuan, but it could have been so much better. There was some rain, a brief power outage (rumored to have been caused by my school's government connections because the whole thing was generating attention towards another school) and the mics weren't loud enough, which all amounted to a bit of chaos. The Americans still got to put on their show though (singing, dancing, cheering, etc.) and the Chinese got to do theirs (traditional singing, dancing, comedy, etc.), so that's what counts.