Zhuhai and the Summer Camp

Hello all! It's been awhile since I've been able to update :( I finally found some time to sit at the smokey internet cafe and write about my experience so far. As some of you know or don't know, I am teaching at a summer camp in Zhuhai, China. Zhuhai is located in the Guangdong Province in Southern China. About a two hour bus ride from Guangzhou. Zhuhai borders Macau and you can cross the border there. Zhuhai itself is broken up into three areas – Gongbei (we call it “big Zhuhai” the main city center and where you can cross the border); Jida (we call it “middle Zhuhai”); and then Xiangzhou (we call it “little Zhuhai). Our camp is located on a university campus, which is past little Zhuhai, it’s about an hour by public bus to get to the city center. We joke around that our campus is kind of like “Alcatraz” because it’s on a small island, over a bridge far from the city center. Our dorms where we stay are a just room with bathroom, hard bed, and a locker. We do have a TV but it only has one English channel. The bathroom is not the most glamorous - it is NOT a western toilet and the shower is right over it. We eat food in the cafeteria on a metal tray. The food is defiantly hit or miss – watch out for chicken feet and fish bones! But I’m dealing ;-) I don’t want to sound too negative, because it’s really not THAT that bad, it just takes getting used to.

The camp is set up by the New Oriental School. There are about 12 foreign teachers from all over the US and we are all teaching English here. The camp is set up into two, ten-day sessions. The kids range from 7-17 years old. We actually just finished our first session a few days ago and started our second session today. It’s been tiring but a lot of fun. The kids last session were wonderful and I was actually able to remember all there names! We each have about 50 kids, and teach half of them at a time. The morning is all English class. We try to make class interactive and fun for them. The afternoons are filled with fun things like a water splashing festival, water melon eating contests, it’s a small world, plays and other fun things. The water splashing was defiantly fun – especially getting back at the bad ones in class LOL. I was sad to say bye to the first session, and I hope this next batch of kids are just as fun. We had an opening ceremony yesterday for the second session camp, and just like we did for the last batch of campers, we had to do a little show. We did the “Cupid Shuffle” and taught them the dance. They really enjoyed it. The kids here in China really love to sing and dance, it’s really cute. We also have a great group of us foreign teachers that make it fun – both at camp and outside of camp.

*Will add pics when I am able to put them on*