Pardon Me, but you've got to be S**tin' me

Well it turns out they were putting it kindly when they said that what I was saying meant feces.... turns out quite literally it means well you can probably guess by the title of this post it's not a very nice word.... that would likely be the reason this little not so angle of a child thought it was sooo funny when I said it. It also turns out I didn't simply miss pronounce it and she encouraged it she intentionally told me the wrong world... yes sweet little innocent child is not so innocent any more! The proper word is quite far from what she told me....

Today was an extremely successful day with Lisa and I's group of boys and in general with the kids. After our outing day yesterday( which I will describe more momentarily- Lets just say after I told my sister all the things I'd eaten she told me she wouldn't share a straw or utensils with me any more) we realized that the kids knew very little about us. The only things they knew were trivial things like our favorite colors and our favorite foods.... so today as a fun exercise to practice English during our opening we had everyone write down at least one question they had for us. It could be about our families our friends the activities we were involved in outside of school ( They must have all been talking in cantanese about asking the same question or have ESP - we had them be anonymous just in case and we proof read them to make sure they were appropriate anyways we got 7 questions that all basically said the same thing... they said said things like do you have boyfriend? Whats your boyfriends name? how many boyfriend do you have? Do you like handsome boys? We would've attempted to make a joke out of it but we've quickly found sarcasm is easily lost in translation) The other questions outside of relational questions were do you like Hong Kong? How did you come to Hong Kong? Do you like Chocolate? Who is your favorite pop star ( justin Timberlake -duh)? What do you like and dislike? Do you like your school? Do you like the NBA if so who is your favorite team? and so on and so forth. We answered questions for about 20 minutes which actually turned out to be a good exercise in English( I'd have to say my favorite question was when you have boyfriend what do you do with them- now this was asking about what we do on American dates basically so we talked about different things you might do on dates like going to the movies or going ice skating- very cliche things I suppose, and then one of the girls said and you meet up at school ohhhhh sooo romantic... Yeah completely the ideal picture of romance right there meeting up in Johnny's )

Following our little question session we split up into small groups. Now after 2 extremely unsuccesful days of small groups Lisa and I decided it was time to totally revamp our techniques. If they want sports, we can do that( on a certain level) so based on a game I actually learned in Spanish today we played trashketball. For one point we would give them 2 words and they would have to use the 2 words in a sentence and for a 3 point shot we would give them a gramatically incorrect sentence on a piece of paper and they would have to correct it. They got pretty into it .

Today equals a big success.

now in regard to the field trip we went to the history museum followed by the ladies market and then finished the evening by a lengthy but delicious dinner at a Korean BBQ. Now the Korean BBQ was amazing. You go up and pick out meat and then put it on a hot skillet that's in the middle of the table. The kids made me try raw salmon and octopus tenticles...yummmmy
It was quite an evening.... Seriously i've never seen kids eat so much( I also learned it is important to teach them about idiums because when I used the phrase bottomless stomaches they looked at me strangely ..... I'm unsure if that's because they didn't understand or because they litterally thought they had bottomless stomaches.) It was a delicious but interesting evening....

All in all a wonderful 2 days and I'm looking forward but feeling a bit sad about tomorrow... Tomorrow marks the end of our camps. So this is a major marker and is very exciting and i'm very glad to be done, but at the same time a bit sad because it means the end of our time here is near and it is a bit sad to be done with the camps and done at the small group homes.. Well hope everyone is having a good week!

Tina

P.S. My Most recent Cantanese phrases i've picked up ( and these were taught to me by the cook and the 15 year olds that i'm teaching this week) are sit down idiot..... Chaw Die Saaw Tsi
The cook is like the funniest woman and speaks no English at all but she yells a lot of funny things in Cantanese....