Xi'an Day #6: Kindergarten and campus tour

We started this day bright and early by walking to a near-by elementary school to visit. My parents use to volunteer here to teach the kids some American songs and games. The staff was very gracious and excited to have us tour the school.

I mostly got video of the school since that captured the experience better. Before school starts each day, the students go out to the playground to follow their teacher in doing exercises to music. When they started playing "The Yellow Rose of Texas" I had to join in! Afterwards, one little girl quoted all the verses of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" to us and the students wanted to shake our hands so that is what we are doing here:


There are 1000 students in this school ages 3-6. School is from 9am-6pm with a 2-hour lunch/nap during the day. Some classrooms have bunk beds lining the walls for this purpose. Here are the students participating in a music class. This song involved playing with pink netting:

Here's another class where the students performed a form of the Beijing Opera for us:

After the Opera performance they signed their name on their shirts and gave our kids the shirts they were wearing! What a nice gesture.

And also a kickboxing routine:

Then we got to join the kids for a craft project:
The principal and her interpreter then took us on to the roof of the school to show us the vegetable garden they were working on.

After the school, we went to another market to buy fruit. It's not so easy when we can't understand each other to communicate price and such. Fortunately, a calculator usually comes in handy where they could punch in a number and show it to us so we can understand the price.

Then we took the 45-minute bus ride my parents took everyday to the University they taught at. Northwestern Polytechnical University has a science emphasis with military purposes. One of my mom's students was the translator for our tour. There was a lot of heavy machinery that the students would learn to use. For example, this one was used to crush big metal objects:

It was a little difficult for me to follow with the translator and the technical terms, but still interesting!

After dinner on campus with a group of students, Ben and his family, and Nicholas and I gave a lecture on American life. Here I am giving my portion and even had Nicholas speak a little:

Here's Ben talking about experiments he does on pigs for research:
About 350 students attended. Afterwards we mingled with the students and answered questions and asked them questions too. I noticed a great kindness, respect, and innocence about these students.

Some observations: even though we were in a large city of over 3 million people and around a lot of college students, I never saw anyone jogging for exercise and I only saw one overweight Chinese guy. The culture has an active lifestyle and lots of transportation by foot, bike or bus. Most kids don't get a driver's license until they are out of college. The Chinese are not sloppy in their appearance. Button-up or polo shirts and short haircuts for the guys and many girls wearing dresses/skirts. My dad pointed out an interesting observation that the writing on the t-shirts were all in English! I searched for people wearing t-shirts with Chinese writing but only found that on tourists.