Tour of the School

It's only been two days into school at Jing-Shan and I already love it there. My favorite class so far is English, firstly, because it's the only class I fully understand and secondly, because the teacher is so nice and friendly. The teachers first name is Shirley but I think we call her Li Lao Shi. She is the nicest teacher I've met so far at school.
Today, Ms. Jang (the head of the exchange program in China) and Ms. Wong (an English teacher at Jing-Shan who went to America last September) gave the American kids a tour around the school. They showed us the language lab. It has many computers lined up along the walls and a circular conferance table in the middle. Wha'ts amazing about Jing-Shan's language lab is that the students there don't use it just to do listening activities or partner speaking, they also do a lot of international communications stuff with other students living in different countries like France. For example, if the Jing-Shan students had to do a project with students from France, the Jing-Shan students and the French students would go to their own language lab at their own school and then chat with each other via webcam or something. It's kind of like skype. It's really cool. Also, The Jing-Shan school does a lot to help other schools around China with fewer resources. If a school in Sichuan doesn't have a textbook but a teacher from Jing-Shan knows the material well, the Sichuan students would go to their language lab in their Sichuan high school and the Jing-Shan teacher would go to the Jing-Shan language lab and then he//she would teach the Sichuan students through the computer. It's really fascinating how advanced our technology is now compared to 50 years ago.
Afterwards, we went to Jing-Shan's trophy // memorabilia room. They have many framed pieces of paper with Chinese calligraphy written on it. They're written by important people and hung all around the room. Jang Lao Shi then showed us this one picture of a little girl talking to an American astronaut and the principal of Jing-Shan. It turned out that that litle girl was a genius and came up with an invention that would help spin silk from silk worms in space. This happened many years ago, so I'm guessing by now, she might be in her 20's. There are pictures of her early childhood hung all around Jing-Shan.
Later, we went to see the gym and the swimming pool. To get there we had to go through this corridor filled with plants and fish for biology classes. On one side of the corridor, you can look into the science laboratory and see the 30 microscopes lined up on top of the tables.
We walked through this hallway that looked like it could belong in a science museum. The walls were all painted nicely and there were leaves and gourds hanging from the ceiling. There were dinosaur foot prints and different types of rock displayed in a glass case. It felt as if we got transported to the children's museum in Boston.
The pool in Jing-Shan is huge. It's 50 meters long. There's a shallow end and a deep end. In order to swim in the deep end, you have to pass a test, which is to swimm 100 meters. You basically swim to one end of the pol and swim back. You can use any swimming stroke you want, including the doggy paddle. Haha.
Another cool thing about Jing-Shan is that it's got the coolest rock climbing wall. You can't use it unless you're with an instructor but it's still pretty awesome. The furthur left you go on the wall, the harder it is to climb up it.
Tomorrow's Wednesday, so my classes are as follows: first period= chemistry, second period= chemistry, third period= physics, fourth period= English, fifth period= English, 1 hour and 20 minutes of lunch and recess, 6th period= Chinese, and finally 7th period= Chinese. I'm so excited for school tomorrow because we will be starting morning excersices! The Jing-Shan school is definitely the school to be at in Beijing.

(I really wanted to post pictures but couldn't because my internets kinda bad. It keeps failing to upload the pictures for some reason.)