The other windy city

So I know that it's been forever and a day since I last updated. I'll work on it. Here's this past weekends highlights.

Wow! We've had crazy wind for the last three days. I've woken up to the wind howling outside my window. I was biking this morning and it was just exhausting. i was pedaling as hard as I could and still barely moving. Sarah and I were trying to figure out why we're always biking into the wind and it never seems to be at our backs. Thankfully it's just wind and not clouds of sand although there's still a lot of dirt ect blowing around. Biking by the construction sites is almost a guaranteed faceful of dirt. I've been getting good use out of my glasses. No contacts in weather like this!

On Saturday, I made s'mores with one of my classes. It was the last class for the book so I thought we should do something special. The unit were we doing was a culture unit on food from around the world and s'mores was the cheapest and the easiest. One of the foods was guacamole. The kids couldn't say that for anything and they had no idea what an avocado is. I borrowed the toaster oven (another novelty for my students) from the teachers at the the other school because it was closer than my apartment. The lady who oversees the teachers coming and going at the school had a fit when I walked in with it. She wanted to know how I was going to use an oven to teach English and was worried that it would overload the circuits. Of course all in Chinese. Luckily there was a dad of one of the students who spoke English and he translated for me. I couldn't get actual graham crackers so I just bought some sweet cookie crackers closer to Nilla wafers than graham crackers but oh well the kids didn't know. They were so excited when I took out the bag of marshmallows (also not easily found in China). They had never seen marshmallows before! I showed them the bag and they all poked at it surprised how soft and squishy it was. Then I gave them each a marshmallow to eat plain. A few of them looked a little afraid. I had to convince them that it was ok to eat. "Teacher, this is marshmallow? Can we eat it?" The s'mores were even more exciting. They really liked them! Except for the one kid who didn't eat his or his marshmallow. At the end of class they all wanted to take a marshmallow home to show their parents. Who knew marshmallows were so exciting?