Hanging with the students
So after basketball on saturday the students were still anxious to hang out with us which was cool because I have learned the most from talking with them. I have been pushing for situations where we can interact with them individually and as one big multicultural group. We took Angel, Pass, June, and John to the Golden Hans which is a really cool buffet next to the bowling alley and pool hall. It is fun and incredibly helpful in learning their culture to take them out and interact outside the classroom. Not ony do i have all sorts of questions but they usually follow up with similar questions to those i ask. This is fun for both sides and i think this is why they have been around and apt to doing things with us. The free time outside the classroom and trips is like the tutoring center for what we have learned in lecture, where we address any unknown gray areas to the students for rephrasing or clarity.
Also the students have shown us a lot about their youth culture in our age group, and it is interesting to learn how different some areas are and how similar others are. LIke for example a lot of the students have mentioned computer games world warcraft, and counter strike, and things like that that are commonly played in the dorms. Also Pass is extremely good at basketball, which was interesting to see them so eager to test their skills on john. I have found that snowboarding is very uncommon and so is the bowling and pool, some of the common things that I do back in the states. Also the dating seems to be different in that it is very uncommon to have multiple ex-girlfriends where as in the states it is not uncommon to have 5-10 ex girlfriends. This just shows a higher committment level in their relationships which is how Lu made it sound to be.
After the Golden Hans we brought some of the students back to our room to hang out and tought them some common American card games in return for them teaching us a common chinese game at the resturant. Their number game was similar to our high-low version with some slight variations. One thing i found very interesting was that the students that live in the dorms on campus have a kerfew, and are locked out if they are not back by 11:00 pm during the week, and 11:30 on the weekends. This lack of freedom was something i found very undesireable, and spoke with Lu on how there are less boundries for us for such things.
Sunday we met up with the chinese students again, and also met Eric, who is an exchange student from HongKong going to Nankai for a semester. We had lunch and beer with them at the Golden Hans again, and just talked for a few hours. Then we took them bowling which was very interesting to find out that most of the students from the Tianjin area have only bowled a few times, while Eric from HongKong bowls on a fairly regular basis. This difference in area/culuture within China shows that the more traveling we do and people we meet, the better understanding we will have of the culture variations. We then rested for a while before meeting up with them again for dinner, which started by a 20 minute 5-cab adventure across town. We got lost and never found the resturant we were looking for and ended up at Alibabba's bar and grill. It was an extremely interesting place due to the different backgrounds of people that go there. It seems to be a multicultural hot-spot, and i met people from Venezuela, Sadi-arabia, Spain, Brazil and Africa. It was very neat to communicate with so many different people from all over the world. Also a German exchange student named mario was there with the chinese students we went with. The amount of information gained from being with all these different people just for a few hours is incredible, and i feel would be very difficult if not impossible to teach in a classroom.