I'm currently living in a level 6 world pandemic... or something in of the sorts. Currently in the news headlines will read that Asia is taking extreme measures to prevent the spread of the Swine flu, but indeed it is spreading, people area getting quarantined to hotel rooms, airplanes, schools, and now one of the schools we were supposed to run a camp at for 2 weeks is closed for 2 weeks by the government and then they will reevaluate. The 2 week closing will only affect one of the weeks of our camp, but still we were unaware of the severity of the situation. Siu Cho came and talked to us yesterday more about it and told us that because of the Sars out break everything is taken very seriously.... So if you see us in the news you'll know to be more concerned...
Anyways, yesterday we had our firstday of training which was fun and very exciting. Siu Cho came to our flat and we had the chance to as her a whole bunch of questions that we've developed both about our program, expectations, resources, etc. We literally have had no idea what kids English level is, background, or schooling is and so we're pretty much going into this blind and hoping we've put together good programs. After a day it's pretty easy to judge what kids are responsive to and what they aren't but I mean right off the bat it's pretty hard so right now we're trying to incorportate a lot of things and that way we can see what might work and what won't and then also we'll be able to evaluate then for future camps for our other 5 camps. Being able to talk to Siu Cho was a huge help. We found out we have a lot more resources than we expected which is such a great suprise. We spent a few hours working on what we need still for our camps and planning and then decided to do a bit more exploring.
We walked down into Central which is a very upscale and main area of Hong Kong. It is a hub with tonnnnns of shopping. We wandered around and people watched in a park for a while which was sooo great! I'm continually amazed at the number of seemingly permenant or semi permenant foreign residents there are here. It seems that many people who are non-asian are here on a perminant or semi perminant basis... Which I guess is for some reason to me very unexpected... After some wandering around including a trip into the coach store( mainly for my sister Kate and Jenny so I could report back to them) we headed for some what we thought was semi authentic food, turns out it was like what we think may have been comparable to the Hong Kong version of Waffle House..... It was interesting to say the least and a few of us left feeling less than pleasent... We intended to go see a movie, but the only movies showing were either in random language subtitles, which as appealing as that sounds we were much to tired to even attempt to try and follow a crazy plot( or make up our own plot if we couldn't actually follow it), and so we instead went to the harbor for a bit took some pictures and then tracked down a taxi for an adventureous ride back to our flat... After a few wild and somewhat dangerous games of egyptian rat screw we were all tired. All in alll a very eventful and fun day. Today we are heading to Stanley market which should be... memorable... We are taking one of our camp groups there for an outing day. Here you are encouraged to barter and they sell lots of random crap soo we will see. We are going out with Dianne who is one of Laura's friends who lives here. Also More pictures from yesterday :) at
http://tinawestra.shutterfly.com/
Happy Birthday Jules Steph and Kendall!! Wishing I could be there to celebrate with you all!!!
Tina
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