We had a pretty awesomely enjoyable Saturday in Weifang so I wanted to share it with you. 

Many of Chad's students told him they were participating in an English competition, so we decided we wanted to see that go down. At first, I thought an English competition was kinda weird, but then Chad pointed out that in America we have spelling bees and academic decathlons and speech competitions so really not weird at all. Stop being so judgy Michelle! (edit: it sounds like Chad wrote that bold line, but he did not. Those are her words. Please refrain from attack. I love my wife and think she is practically perfect in most ways.) (edit to the edit: I am being told that she is, in fact, "practically perfect in *every* way" and not just most ways like I had erroneously believed. I officially apologize for my mistake).

Anyway, the way it goes down is that each person prepares a speech. It's supposed to be about 2 minutes (I think) and I'm pretty sure it can be on whatever you want. Some very popular themes were: mothers are great, money doesn't buy happiness and believing in yourself. It was cute to see a super shy Chinese girl talk about believing in yourself. And then cry during a two minute silence when she did not have the confidence to hazard a guess at a terribly phrased question. More on that to come.

Then after their speech the judges ask the student a question in English and then they need to respond in English. This was rough... not only for the students, but for us! First, some of the questions were not exactly "proper English." For example they asked: "How do you find the traffic situation in Weifang City?" or "You go city center, you use bus or bicycle. Why?" or "There are many more private cars these days, the government should control them. How do you find that?" Second, the level of difficulty of the questions varied widely. One student was asked "What is your favorite season in Weifang City?" and another was asked "Mo Yan, the Chinese author, won the Nobel Prize in 2012, what do you think of that?" Yeah... how is that fair? The final thing that made it uncomfortable was that it was a 1 minute response - whether you answered or not. So if the student didn't understand the question at all they just stood up there on stage silent with a scared look on their face. I wanted to cry for each and every one of them. I also said to Chad, "in America we would most likely cry and run off stage" so I'm impressed they didn't!

The third part of the competition is called "Show Your Talents". This is where the awesome really begins! Most of them opted for singing an America song... which was great because they only know like 4 of them, so we got to sit through about 7 renditions of the following:



Yeah...classic song. We also got some sweet poetry read to us... for some reason all the poetry was read to us with music playing and a sweet powerpoint of random images playing behind the orator. It made us feel like we were watching an Enya music video. We also were told a few jokes by some people. The first joke that was told was really long and the funniest part was that Chad and I laughed and pretty much no one else did...it was a pretty rough joke, but he was proud of it.

Sweet examples:

He was actually really good, and should not have gone first. The bar was way too high for what was to come.

This girl was amazing. She was wearing a lady suit which she ripped off - much to the audible astonishment of the audience -to reveal this dazzling number.

They were pretty good dancers, and the only ones to do so. Again establishing a precedent that was not exceeded. EXCEPT WHEN ONE GIRL STARTED KRUNKING ON STAGE! IT WAS SPECTACULAR AND MY BIGGEST REGRET THAT I DID NOT HAVE A CAMERA READY. I DON'T KNOW WHY I'M STILL YELLING.

Gotta love Adele. I wanted to celebrate this boy for daring something different. Everyone says they love Adele, but do they sing her in a competition in front of their peers and literal judges? Like literally being judged for singing Adele? Yeah.

After HOURS (1:00 pm -5:30 pm) of English competition watching, we went to dinner with our newly acquired Chinese friends. They are a very funny bunch. It's a couple that has a 13 year old son and they are very well to do. They like to take us places, in fact we are heading to Qingdao with them this weekend, but since the parents don't speak much English we spend most of the time conversing with their son - which is part of their goal, so win-win. It's a funny situation, but he always has some friends around who are practicing their English too, and they are pretty cool kids.

This is the entrance to the restaurant we ate at. After you parked in an abandoned construction site, walked through a veritable Department of Mysteries (including the infamous Sirius Archway), and a surprisingly beautiful courtyard, this sight greeted you.

This was called a towel gourd I believe. It was just hanging on some huppa we had to walk under. They asked us what we call it in English. I asked them what they call it in Chinese. We hit an impasse.

Things in courtyard.

After dinner we went to the "tearoom". We have been told it's the only tearoom in Weifang. It looked more like a small gallery or boutique, but it was fun to watch the art of the tea making... because trust me, it is an art.
Big kid tea set.

After the tea ceremony, the kids all came back here and practiced their Chinese calligraphy. It's a lot of work and even though I thought they all did really well, I was informed they they all weren't very good because they did not practice enough.



The boy we tutor is the super tall one in this picture.





One of the dads slid his way in and wanted to draw with the boys... he was soon escorted out haha sucker (don't fret, he comes back later)


This little boy was ADORABLE. He knew very little English so he wrote a few random English words on his paper to show us!


We were then encouraged to try... it was pretty comical. We learned how to draw the symbol for people (ren) and the symbol for big (da). It was surprisingly complex. Did you know the order of each stroke is part of drawing it? So for "people" (the upside down Y) you first draw the left side of it, then trace over the top and then draw the right side. 


This epic series will show you the process as well as how bad Chad was at this. It was pretty funny. This little girl did not have the patience for him, she thought he was hopeless.






My turn! Did you know there is a proper way to hold the brush too? That was rough for me - again with the left handedness...

Got a few more English words in there :)

So right when the kids got sick of calligraphy, the adults came out and this man wanted to teach Chad the proper strokes and curvatures of all the characters. You can't see it but he also has his arm around Chad's waist. It was pretty epic - also he is a little tipsy, just enough to be handsy.


Notice you can't see his left hand...that's because it's on Chad's waist/lower, lower back.

I'll let you guess which ones are Chad's and which ones were the calligraphy masters 
 The next day we had a tutoring session with Louis. He is really very smart, his parent's goal is to have him go to University in America and I think he will be able to no problem. He retains what he learns quite well and his English is very good. Anyway, after our lesson we were invited to get dinner. We were told Weifang was famous for it's "Weifang pies" and they wanted to know if we wanted to try them.

Here's a picture of the pie preparation. We would call them burritos... kinda... basically it's a tortilla with whatever the heck you want inside of it. We tried 2 types. One was a somewhat sweet pork and the other had hard boiled egg and meatballs. They also order pig's ear ones but luckily we were not offered them. The one thing that makes them way different from a burrito is that they fold them into a cone type shape.

Sorry, no picture of cones, but if you look really closely, there are a few of them on that pile of plates

Afterwards we went to Starbucks. Yay Starbucks. Starbucks is insanely expensive here- a small treat was 26RMB which is only like $4.50, but when you can get a huge meal for $2 for the both of us, it's quite expensive. They had holiday decor up, English everywhere and Christmas music playing, so I almost forgot I was in China. Win. Look! They even had holiday drinks!

Cranberry white chocolate something or other.