Summer schedule.

It’s been over a week since the last blog post. Public school classes have come to an end. We went out to the park the day after public school classes were over. The weather that had been 38̊C had cooled off to 29̊C. The next evening we took one of the teacher assistants out to eat at Flolon’s Pizza. She never had pizza before. We had three pasta dishes, a small supreme pizza and two orders of onion rings. The total order with drinks was just over $15US. We took our parmesan cheese that our friends sent us from Beijing because we had not seen any here. The owner thought we were trying to take his parmesan cheese when we started to leave. He gets the same Craft brand and size from the province capital, Harbin. It was a great time for all of us. The temperature had dropped to 15̊C for the July 4th weekend. Over the weekend I was assigned two new baby classes. On Saturday I had six in the first class and seven in the second. Because the first day is free the attendance for the classes had changed by the next day. The first class only had two and the second had five including one that was not there for Saturday. It is very exhausting to spend an hour teaching two children age five the letter ‘A’, the words ‘apple, ant, alligator and album’ and the phrases ‘Hello, how are you? Fine, thank you.’ I also received my summer schedule teaching spoken classes at Ivy. I lucked out with having only one class three evenings a week. The kids are around 15 to 16 and all speak pretty good English. It was a nice change from the baby classes. Other than finishing up her history, Suzanne has nine A’s, two B’s and a C for 7th grade. Tomorrow she is going with one of the TA’s, Yen, to visit a local orphanage. Destiny has a tooth on the top coming in to go with the two on the bottom. Deb has started trying her on 3rd foods and she really loves most of them, especially the family favorite, spaghetti.