Papermaking Museum

About an hour's walk from Jietou, tucked away in a small village surrounded by fields of young tobacco, is a museum dedicated to the art of paper making. The museum itself is a strange sight. On the edge of a traditional village, it looks like a modern summer home in the US, with oddly angle roofs and large glass windows.

Inside there are displays and explanation of the local traditional paper-making process including some old basins and frames.

This is dipped into the water, a thin film of pulp settles on it, and it is peeled off onto a stack of wet paper.
The horse is a watermark of sorts.

Don't know what these were for, but the dragons were cute.

People in the town still make paper and it's sold online.

The wet paper is stacked up in the upper right and is draining through the spout back into the large basin.

Here's a write-up in the Global Times about the revival of this style of papermaking.

New Ping Pong Tables and "Special Interests"

How many people doesn't it take to assemble a ping pong table? 

I think we got these because of the new "special interest" classes that we have. There are things like sewing, harmonica, recorder, dancing, choir, basketball...and English. So I have an extra two classes a week. A couple of my best students are in the English special interest class, but several poor ones as well. And it's second through sixth grade altogether. I'm really glad my students are getting the chance to have these, more extra-curricular style, classes. Last semester we had looked for a time to do something like this and there just wasn't time in the schedule. I just wish it had started at the beginning of a semester so I could have planned accordingly, instead of having approximately eight weeks, and sprung on me a few days before. Luckily, it's more relaxed than a normal class and my cofellow and I teach together, which is a lot of fun.

Children's Day

In China, June 1st is Children's day. This meant that on Friday, instead of afternoon classes, we had a field-day-like event. Each teacher had an assigned station and grade level (lower grades, middle grades or higher grades): mine was blindfolded string cutting (or pretend cutting) for the fifth and sixth graders. Good thing I asked at lunch if I needed to prepare anything, because I had to scrounge up string and blindfolds! My favorite part of the whole thing was watching the kids interact. My least favorite part was watching them try to cheat.

The teacher at the next station over setting up. Her event was similar, but with hitting the suspended drum.

The girls were great about helping each other tie on the blindfolds, turn around a few times, and start in the right direction.
The boys, not so much.

 

Introducing Evie

Hello everyone! My Chinese name is 黄兴楠 (Huáng Xīngnán). My English name is Evie. I live in China. I am honored to be Miss Nan's student. I also want to get acquainted with her friends.

大家好！我的中文名字叫黄兴楠英文名字叫Evie 我住在中国。我很荣兴是南老师的学生。我也想认识南老师的朋友。

Decision

It is with a heavy heart, but also a sense of relief, that I have decided to take an early exit from Teach for China. I will be teaching through the end of this semester (sometime in mid-July) but will not be returning for a second year.

This was an incredibly difficult choice, primarily because I have grown to care about my students and I wish that I could stay and teach them. It's almost irresistible the way some of my students light up when I talk to them. Or when they learn a word they particularly like. Almost. But the visa situation, the subsequent changes within the organization, the lack of teaching support, and the lack of incoming American fellows have all combined to convince me to leave.

I've talked to many of you over the past few months and you've heard me wrestling with this decision. It was helpful to talk through it over and over,  so thank you. One friend helped me a lot by pointing out that "continuing" for another year was really less like continuing the program I'd signed up for, and more like signing up for another year of a different program. And that program is not one that I would have signed up for in the first place.

So although I am extremely thankful for this past year, and am so glad that I did sign up for this, I have decided not to return. I don't yet know when I'll be home or what I'll do when I get there, but I look forward to seeing many of you at some point.

Introducing Pat

Hello grandmother. My name is Pat. I am Miss Nan's student. I won't say much here, but I wish that all your hopes may be fulfilled and you live a long life of 100 years. Goodbye!

你好奶奶我叫Pat是南慧英老师的学生，我在这几就不多说了，祝您万事如意，长命百岁。再见！

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A little more about Pat...

Pat is my best male student. He's very enthusiastic. In the typical fashion of a young boy, he'll often say something before thinking, but he's getting better about correcting himself. I've been writing challenge sentences on the board for the best students to talk to me about after class and if I forget or don't have one on a given day he will actually ask for one.

He also tries to use what English he knows whenever possible, something which most students have to be explicitly encouraged to do, so I appreciate it a lot. Today we learned fruit and the question "Do you like _____?" After we had completed our challenge questions (including "Do you like cats?"...I was glad to find that all four participating students did), he turned to me and asked "Miss Nan...Do you like raber...?" At first I thought he was asking about rabbits, but then I discovered he wanted to ask about strawberries, which is honestly a very difficult word to say. I was happy to tell him, "Yes, I do like strawberries!"

So Many Temples!

Walking through Vientiane I couldn't help but wonder how many temples there are. How many in the city? How many in the country? When were they built? Who paid for them? What determines which monks go to which temple? Unfortunately, I don't have answers to any of these questions, but I do have more pictures.

Why does the elephant have six tusks? And why are they green?

Can you tell that I really like roofs?

Painting a Naga. First they were spray painting the gold, and then hand painting the scales with glittery green paint.

Patuxai

Along the main avenue in Vientiane there is an arch called Patuxai, meaning "Victory Gate", modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Inside the arch is a sign with the following text:

At the northeastern end of the LaneXang Ave. arises a huge structure resembling the Arc de Triomphe. It is the Patuxay or Victory Gate of Vientiane, built in 1962 (B.E 2505)*, but never complete due to the country's turbulent history. From a closer distance, it appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete. Nowadays this place is used as leisure ground for the people of Vientiane and the seventh floor on top of the building serves as excellent view point over the city.

*No, this is not a typo, they have an alternative calendar system by which we are now in the 26th century.

This seems rather harsh to me, especially to be posted on the monument itself. Although it's certainly a strange fusion of East and West, it has its own charm.

The ceiling of the arch.

Like it's Parisian counterpart, you can climb through the inside up to the top, with interesting views along the way (and shop as you go: most levels have at least one shop).

A decorative window from the stairwell into the arch.

View #1

View #2, the Presidential Palace

Said palace at night...

More proof that I was there!

To be fair, there's a lot of English in Laos--written and spoken-- and it's mostly pretty intelligible.