The Elite Club and Other Miscellaneous Experiences

Yesterday was a pretty eventful day.  We started off our morning with a delicious taste of dragon fruit, something I had never tried before.

After that (and some other food, don't worry mom, I eat a wholesome breakfast every day) we went to the office, as usual for 8am where we worked on some lesson preparations for the rest of the morning.  At lunch, our supervisors invited us to go with them to a local restaurant for some sandwiches.  They were delicious, and very cheap (about 12 Yuen for 3 of them and some soup as well).  Each sandwich consisted of some kind of pastry wrapped around a filling of cooked vegetables and meat.  The meat was especially tasty and I asked them what it was.  They told us, (a little ambivalently because they know we are westerners) we were eating donkey meat.  I had no qualms about this, I enjoyed it immensely!  (Sorry I have no photos of it).  My colleague asked them about trying dog meat, and they smiled and explained that it was a popular culinary treat in Weifang.  I'm not quite as outgoing when it comes to new food items though.  They explained that it is seasoned with a spice that numbs the mouth, however, coupled with dog it is supposed to be quite nice.  I got a sense for the numbness of certain foods today.  Here's a photo of my lunch.

It's pretty straight forward, you just go up to the counter and choose some vegetables and meats you would like cooked.  They weigh it and you pay per 100 grams.  Between the two of us, this meal cost only about 30 Yuen.  When the manager of the restaurant asked us some questions in Mandarin, we could not understand him.  Turns out he was asking us if we wanted "spicy" or "numb" seasoning.  He ended up giving us the numb (look carefully at the photo and you will see red chilies).  This caused my mouth to feel extremely tingly and I lost most of the ability to taste anything.  It was like I had just taken a trip to the dentist.
After lunch, we were taken to a place called "The Elite Club" with a series of students in the Hospitality Management field of the university where we were given a tour of the building and its facilities.  We even tried our hand at our golf swing following the tour!

The Elite Club was an absolutely stunning site to see.  We learned that a meal in one of their rooms costs 5,000 Yuen to start.  The views from the rooms were stunning, usually overlooking the golf course or the river.

Today we learned how to use the resources in our classrooms.

I will be teaching two listening classes and one oral English class.  I'll be teaching business students how to use formal and informal language in the business world.  The classroom technology here is far superior to what I've seen in Canada.  They use an integrated system with (I would estimate) around 50 computers for students in a classroom and two master computers at the front for the teacher.  I can tell the students to press a button and they will see anything I control on one of my computer screens on theirs.  I can talk to them individually or as a group through headsets, and I have a master microphone as well.  I also have a projector for power points at the front or I can just instruct through their individual screens.  I can see what the students are up to easily and if they are not engaged I can tailor my lesson or get them to pay attention.  Basically, teaching here is going to be a lot of fun.

You can see from this photo that I have two screens, the main one is the one in the center of the picture.  That's where I control sound, media, etc.  You can see a series of symbols on the yellow-ish screen which actually indicate all the computers in the classroom.  Each one becomes colourful when a student has plugged themselves into the system (meaning that they should see on their screen what I want them to see and hear what I want them to hear).  If I see someone is not plugged in, I can walk up to their desk to make sure they are connected.  The screen on the right can be connected to the system with a switch of a button and I just drag a window on the main screen with my mouse to the right and like magic it switches over to the other screen.

Some photos of the campus.  There's a man-made lake and a bridge and beautiful trees and shrines for a calming atmosphere.  We assume that the lake will freeze in winter.

A three wheeled car! Surprisingly common here.  We often joke about how precarious this mode of transportation looks.

One last view of the campus :)