Coming upon the conclusion of my fourth week in China, I have met some unexpected events that I did not expect. The malfunction of my laptop was impromptu—granted I never really used it anyways—aside from writing these blog posts, which for this week is available thanks to the generosity of my fellow Duke students (shout-out to Irene).
For this week of English classes, I decided to stray away from the teaching aspect of classes and focus more on the application of English; something that I have learned from the foreign language classes at Duke. I felt like the students were more engaged this time, and thoroughly enjoyed the activity in comparisons to previous classes. I think it is more important for them to use English and not so much on learning new vocabulary that they will most likely forget in five minutes (something I’ve experienced while learning Chinese).
As for new events, this week I went out for dinner with my host family for the retirement of one of their colleagues, in which I had some new dishes such as cow stomach and century egg, to which my palette was very confused. If I had a theme for this trip entirely, I think it would be that I’ve eaten so many things that I never thought I’d try before.
My host family and I are getting along really well; I played badminton with my host dad who is always energetic and excited to talk and interact with me and my friends. They keep saying that my Chinese is progressing well, even if I think that it isn’t improving as much as they think. Most nights I end up talking with my host brother Qian as I help him review English and while he helps me with my Chinese, leading us to stay up quite late.
