Day 79: Xiaolan

Earlier this week, our school and Shiqui's school were asked by the head coordinators at Bond to each prepare a lesson to teach a group of students in Xiaolan, for the school there is considering adding the IlP program into their curriculum. The parents and teachers wanted to see how it worked, so we demonstrated the method early this morning. However, they not only wanted us to teach, they wanted us to do a performance for them. We didn't find out about this performance until a day or two before the event, naturally, so we threw something together last minute.

Since about half of our group bought ukuleles in Beijing last week, we figured incorporating those into our performance would be a fun experience. Konner and Zach bought guitars earlier in the semester, so we decided to join forces, and make a band. All of us had learned how to play, "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz, so that was what we decided to play for everyone.

We practiced for about an hour last night, mastered it, and performed it this morning. It went quite well, even though we didn't all quite start playing at the same time.mWe picked up the correct beat, eventually, and the song turned out just fine. I guess composing and practicing the night before didn't entirely work in our favor this time, as it had last time.

After performing and teaching the students, Bond treated us to lunch, family style! These sort of lunches are somewhat tricky, because you never know what you're going to get. However, this lunch was rather successful. They served two noodle dishes, lots of vegetables, some weird jellyfish looking cakes?, dumplings, etc. They did, of course, serve some nasties, like the array of mysterious fish/meat balls, deep fried green bean bread (or something like that, couldn't quite tell what it was), fatty meat still on the animal bone, noodle rolls cooked in fishy water, etc. Eating out, or eating wherever really, in China is almost always bound to be an experience. We did, however, enjoy ourselves as had funny conversations with some of the girls from Shiqui, as well.