Thursday, December 18, 2008

My Chinese Students

I had a nice experience with a group of college students today. They're from the earthquake area in Sichuan and have been here since the fall. One of their teachers brought them in for library cards. I asked where they were from and when they said Sichuan, told them that Fred was in LuZhou. They were so surprized!! They wanted to know exactly where he were and why he was there. I showed them his address and several started nodding as they recognized it:

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�㎣��ƾ����泸��40857;马�Ў�����坝泸ŧ�㎤��
LuHua Middle School, GaoBa Town, Luzhou, Sichuan, China
Fred Riggs ȭ


(They couldn't understand my pronunciation of LuZhou and Goa Ba at all!) They wanted to know what he liked about China ( the people) and what he didn't like (no heat).
They like it here well enough except for the snow...the novelty of it wore off quickly!! And they miss the street vendors. Oh, and our Chinese restaurants don't serve Chinese food according to them! They had filled out library card applications (some signed it in English and with Chinese characters!) and they were surprised when I asked if they wanted to use their English names, too. (They did.) They were so polite and their English is very good...they must have had a good English Expert in school. They were all about 20 years old but seemed younger and they are a lot different than the kids around here...just like Fred had said. Most of them took out books from the YA area and Kids room and wanted to look at magazines like People and US. I think they'll be spending some time with us...especially at night and on Saturday so they don't have to walk back up the hill to the college. I enjoyed working with them and I understand a little better how Fred feels about his classes.

Tomorrow is my day to cook lunch at the library so I thought I'd try a stuffed bread again. This time I'm going to make the dough from scratch and stuff it with sausage and peppers but no tomato sauce. Maybe it will hold together better than my last attempt with store-bought pizza dough!

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