We’re On Weifang TV!| 5 min read

Hi all, us again!

So last night we got told that from 9.30am tomorrow, till lunch all our classes were cancelled and we had to go to a Kindergarten to “maybe take some photos”. I had to teach a class at 8.50 – 9.30 so didn’t get to sleep in and then we were picked up by two ladies and taken to the Weifang Foreign Language Kindergarten. We were greeted with a few camera crews, trees and shovels. We had been selected to help plant their friendship trees! Chris, Bogdan and I were each given two adorable children to work with and plant trees whilst being filmed for the local TV station and taking interviews for the local newspaper! The kids were so cute and got really muddy planting the trees. We were each given a plaque to write our names on and hang on the trees, we will be there forever now! 🙂

During the whole activity we were approached by the principal and offered jobs and told to work when we have spare time. They were once again ‘smitten by me and my lovely eyes and lovely hair’ as Chris says. This I’m starting to get used to :). After we planted all the trees, did our interviews and took photo, after photo, after photo, we were presented with big dragon kites! They are great, although I don’t know how to put them together :S

We then got a tour of the Kindergarten, which is huge! I remember the Kindas back home and they are maybe three rooms at most with a total of 30 kids, and that was big! Here its like a high school with different classes and they stay there all day. Anyway we met this little boy Owen. He came out in front of me and started having a conversation in English. He asked me my name, my age, where was I from, told me all the colours, answered all my questions and then told us a story about a Chinese boy and a pear in perfect English and he was only 3! He was amazing!

In other news we decided to check out the Weifang bar scene last Saturday and went to a club called Boy and Girl. It was crazy. We went into a room with dancers and lots of people and asked for a drink and they told us you can only buy 16 at a time for 200 RMB, it took us so long to explain we only wanted one drink each and they still said it cant be done. After some help from our friend Kurt who speaks Chinese we eventually got one drink each. We didn’t get a choice though, they only served one drink and it was like a Japanese Crusier. After a while people started to come and talk with us and play some dice game and drink after drink kept getting bought for us, one guy bought me 16 drinks! It was crazy and then to make it even crazier Chris told me to turn around and as I did there was a man dressed in a Tiger suit running around and sparklers were going offeverywhere and all the dancers were on stage dancing to a German song! It was like being at a concert.  Chris had asked for some water to which the waitress replied “ah, you mean vodka!” “No, water” Chris said. “But water is not good for drinking alcohol’ was the reply, ‘and we don’t serve water!”

After leaving there we went into the main part of the club. It was like a game show. In the middle of the floor was a huge square lit up like in Saturday Night Live with people sitting all around it while the “host” called up people to play a game. After the game they auctioned off giant stuffed toys, fruit platters and flowers. People payed a ridiculous amount of money for these like 600RMB for a teddy bear!

As you may, or may not know Tuesday was International Women’s Day. Which in Australia, we don’t take much notice of but in China they do! All the women got roses in the morning and the foreign language teachers had photos taken. I now have my three roses sitting in a water-bottle-vase on top of our TV in our room. One of the teachers we met in Jinan who is teaching at a different school had the ‘honour’ of signing a song in front of the whole school and all the women at her school got 100RMB! At our school we also got cake, so I was quite happy 🙂 We also had a wonderful banquette dinner that night with lots of ‘gumbai’ (cheers, where you have to skull your drink)

Another fun fact about China – where we say “oh my God” if something is amazing, the kids at our school and I’m sure other schools say “oh my Lady Gaga!” I love it!