July 11 | BCCSC, Beijing

Hi friends, currently sitting in the school library during the lunch break where students always get 2-hours for. To see how intensive education is in China makes you really appreciate how easy you have it back home. School days are literally 12 hours here, hence why the long breaks. Once a day, the intercom system would blast some incredibly creepy, eerie song accompanied by some female voice for a good 5 minutes. I asked my students what that was and its an ‘exercise break’ for their BRAIN and it comes on once a day. The voiceover is telling the students to do some exercises to rub their eyes and massage their temples… what is this. Some things I will never understand. Then again, a lot of weird things happen here and you definitely get desensitized. For example, one of the students has a casual pet snake he carries around in his pocket. Guess what made a surprise appearance in class yesterday? I shall upload photos of the sheer look of terror on my face. BUT. You will be proud of me as I held it… twice. Border line about to pass out, but so proud of myself for going through with it (after a couple minutes of screaming and others trying to physically restrain me, of course).

Since today is the last day of the conference, we’re already thinking about our game plan for the weekend. BCCSC (the boarding school that we are staying/teaching at) is located on the outskirts of core Beijing so we don’t really have much to do after the day is done here. However, we do have our own driver to take us into the city on the weekend so tomorrow, we’re off the see the Great Wall of China! As cool as it is to do all the touristy things, to be completely honest, it’s the little things that I enjoy the most. For example, one of my favourite things about this trip so far is being immersed in an every day lifestyle that is so different than ours – for example, as dumb as this sounds, one of the highlights of my week was something as basic as walking to the market in the pouring rain. Although this is an extremely wealthy school, the roads around it aren’t paved so we were walking through pools of rainwater and mud, our clothes were soaking wet, and I didn’t have an umbrella so I just wrapped a scarf around myself – and I absolutely love it. We are so used to living in such a developed city and take our infrastructure for granted, forgetting that not everyone lives the same way we do. Don’t get me wrong, I’m super excited to see all the sites but nothing will be as memorable as the little details that will make this trip worthwhile. (Minus the washrooms here, one thing that I will never miss, ever again.)

Almost time to go back to class. I am absolutely in love with my kids. I had a really (k, really is an understatement) roudy group of kids last week, and their English wasn’t as developed as these guys are, so this week was definitely a breeze in comparison. It’s really touching to talk to them and listen to their life goals and wishes – for being so young, they already want so much in life and are already planning life beyond China. Since SCCSC is positioned as a school that combines Chinese and Western education, all of these students will be applying to overseas universities upon their graduation. Not a doubt in my mind that they will grow up to be incredibly intelligent, seasoned individuals and jet set around the world. :’) So proud.

On a sadder note, I don’t know where the time has gone. I think I am in major denial of how far we are into the trip… I genuinely believed we were on Day 8, when Graeme corrected me saying that we were on Day 12 (I refuse to believe this). Shenzhen felt 4x longer than the Beijing conference but all the content and even our schedule was identical. It could be a couple things – since we already ran all of this content once, we have a better gage of how it runs the second time around. The English level of these students is exponentially better than last weeks, so in comparison, it feels like we barely need to lift a finger here. Also, since the school is located in a more remote area, there is absolutely nothing to do at night so it feels like we live in this micro-bubble since every night is pretty much the same.

It’s hard to say whether or not I liked Beijing or Shenzhen better – both are incredibly beautiful cities in completely different ways. Since the trip is so long, we are starting to feel really accustomed to living here and we have created a new norm. With that said, most of the time it doesn’t even feel like we are in China and you forget that you’re actually going to go home. As normal as every day feels now, I’m still trying to remind myself and how much of a blessing this is to be able to experience what we get to do every single day.