Day 100! Speech Competition

Day 100

It is hard to believe that we have been here in China for 100 days now!  What a marvelous experience this has been! 

David and I left for our classes.  Today went well.  These students are so great! 

For lunch, we had grilled cheese sandwiches with the cheddar cheese we bought yesterday.  It tastes so good!!  We have missed cheese here.  It is hard to find and in rare quantities.  We have found some mozzarella, Edam, Gouda and American, but cheddar was not one we could find.  Just nice to have some once in a while.

David had another square dance session this afternoon and then we met the Clarke’s and the Pace’s at the canteen and we successfully ordered a meal from a menu that is all in Chinese… thanks to David’s students.  We had taken pictures of the menu, printed them off the computer and when the students were here to play games or for meetings, he had them go over the menu and write down what everything is.  There are still about 10-12 items that we don’t have translated, but we have enough to make some variety for our meal there.  We all felt very accomplished!  Eva joined us at the end.

David, Eva and I went to the building that we were to judge the English/Chinese speaking contest.  It is an interesting competition.  They have International students here that spend all of the first semester learning Chinese.  Toward the end of the semester, a Chinese student will pair with one of them and the Chinese student needs to speak English and the International Students speaks Chinese. 

The Emcees of the program.  The girl in the yellow gown is Nancy, one of my sophomore students.

The first round is a two minute speech from first the Chinese student and then the International student.  The international students were from Korea, Russia, Africa, and one other country, don’t remember.  They were given a topic to prepare a speech from and they all did quite well, some better than others.  The second round was a talent competition.  This was funny.  Some of the talent was done in Chinese and some in English, but there were some really cute skits.  The third round consisted of an impromptu skit from the top six teams in points.  They randomly chose a topic and then had one minute to prepare a skit and then two and a half minutes to deliver it.  They were amazing in how fast they came up with a cute skit and it was all very fun.

One of the talent competitions.

Another one of the talent competitions.

The two top teams asking the audience for their votes.  The team on the right were the big winners.  

Then the last round was the two top point receivers from the last round would ask the audience for their vote.  They gave tickets to 31 students in the audience and had the two teams stand on the stage and they 31 students would give their ticket to whichever team they thought was the best.  It may seem a little awkward to our Western way of thinking, but it works for them.  There were several of my students there and they were all happy to see me and came and talked to me.  They gave David and I each and pen and a nice journal for helping them out.