One last blast from Inner Mongolia

Well, it's the last day of classes here at Wu Dan Number One Middle School, and it is a complete madhouse. Classes have dissipated into what can only be described as a non-sexual orgy of photographs and shirt signing. I just stepped out of the office to check up on things and was instantly the subject of about a hundred photos. Chinese people like to make fun of my signature. I was held hostage by Ish's class, and Miles is pleading with me to get him out of there. But this isn't the strangest things that have happened over the last two days. 

For one, I have guided this weird ship through the great rain crisis by completely screwing everything up. You see, we had planned to do a mini-Olympics on Monday, but rain decided to intervene. Not a big deal, I had a whole morning, so I made a Family Feud activity, genuine noises and everything. Well, as with everything else I've done here, I saved it to the CSETC folder on Logan's portable hard drive, and gave it back to him at lunch. Well, that last part was a bad idea, as he took it back to the hotel, and left it there. Flash forward to 3:30PM, where I found myself with no powerpoint, and no way to get it. Panic slowly sets in. Fortunately I still had all of the sheets from the cancelled Photo Scavenger Hunt activity, so I distributed them to the teachers and retreated to the office. The film festival the next day went much, much more smoothly.

Last night was a doozy of a time, too. Remember that bar I found? We decided to go back, because we havenothing else to do. Well, as it turns out, it's not a bar, it's a restaurant. We were wrong. The good news is that we brought along a TA to translate, and wound up eating a fantastic second dinner. While we were there, one of the employees heard us speaking English, and asked us if we'd go to her house to speak to her English students. In the spirit of "Why not?" that guides all of our actions, we went back to her house and chatted with her students and her about teaching English. The kids loved having all of us there, and it was good to talk slightly broken shop with another teacher. From there we went to the square, where we have become celebrities. We danced, we took photos with people, we laughed, and watched some really, really good break-dancing. Apparently globalization exports hip-hop culture reallt well. Who knew?

We have two days in Inner Mongolia after today, then it's off on a train odyssey to Qufu. I probably won't have internet for the next three days, but when I finally get the Internet, I'll have a ton of stories. Talk to you soon.

-Cooper