Nimen Hao!
What an amazing day! The day began with a visit to the Confucius Institute and Hanban Centre here in Beijing. These two organisations are reponsible for promoting the Chinese language in other countries, and are our hosts in Beijing. They talked to the teachers about how they can support students learning in other countries (like New Zealand) by helping with resources and maybe even send a visiting teacher or teacher aide to Christchurch to help us at Ladbrooks School, and other schools in Christchurch! All the New Zealand teachers had their photo taken together - very nice!I was pretty impressed to meet a very famous Chinese man called Confucius. He is considered one of the wisest men in history so the least I could do was say hi and get my photo taken with him!After that, we were back on the bus to a far-away location. It was the first time we had been out of Beijing and we drove for an hour and a half toward some mountains. It took ages to get out of Beijing, but finally our bus was winding its way up a mountain road, past lots of fruit orchards (a bit like Central Otago) and then we were there - at the Great Wall of China!We didn't have a long time there, so we took a cable car up the mountain to the Wall and walked along the top of it! How incredible it was, to think that it had originally been built over 600 years ago! It gave a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside down both sides of the steep mountain. The soldiers who used to work on the wall in the old days must have been pretty fit because parts of the path on the wall are very steep. Sandy and Sue were pretty excited and wouldn't stop taking photos - I just found a quiet viewpoint to look out over the countryside and imagined what it might have been like all those hundreds of years ago.By the time we got back to Beijing it was dark and dinner time. After dinner a group of Kiwi teachers got taxis into town to go to the night market. You will have to ask Sue to see her photos when she gets back... you won't believe what they sell at this market!!! It is a food market - but most of it is made of items you couldn't image actually eating! Most of these things you don't see at the West Coast Wild Food Festival! Tomorrow is our final day of the education programme and we get to visit some Chinese schools! That will be exciting! I'm really looking forward to seeing what Chinese children do at school at what their classrooms might look like!
talk to you again tomorrow
Puji, Sandy and Sue
No comments:
Post a Comment