Money Money Money!

Today we had our morning meeting and sang our song in front of the supervisors, guys, and girls. We (Kate, Tara, Me, Kerri) sang a version of row row row your boat in French, and the French Canadians (France, Helen) on our team sang the English version of the song. It was fun, but I will tell you that the real version of the French song did not say row row row your boat. But no one else knew that and we all laughed about it. At our meeting we went over important stuff, then…. WE GOT PAID!!!!!! Yea! I love money! We were compensated for all of our days here, so I am happy.

We really didn’t do much today, today was just a day to relax and do nothing. We did go back to Wanda Plaza and go to the grocery store. Stacey came with us this time and we showed her the produce and meat section. Stacey looked disgusted and was freaking out about something she saw; when she finally found words to tell us what she saw in the produce section we were disgusted! She saw a lady grab a green pepper like thing from the stand and look at it, take a bite out of it and decided it was not good and threw it back into the pile!! That is gross!! We also saw people handling the meat again in the meat department and people started to stare at us because the looks on our faces were probably that of disgust when we were watching the unsanitary ways the food was being handled and thrown around.

After the grocery store we went to the men’s game USA vs Japan. Usa was winning 2-1 after the first period but then USA took a ton of penalties and Japan took the game and ran with it and won 6-3.

After that little bit of fun we went back to the hotel where we ate dinner and just hung out for a while talking. I went back to my room, packed up most of my clothes and gifts, washed some hockey socks and got everything organized. Now I’m watching highlights from all the events on tv in Chinese. Of course I have it on mute though I don’t understand a word of it. It doesn’t make sense that they are speaking in Chinese and have Chinese subtitles at the bottom. Maybe they should put English subtitles, but oh well.

I can say honestly that I am looking forward to coming home and sleeping in my own bed, eating food that I am used to that is not rice based or staring back at me, and being around people that speak English. Don’t get me wrong, I am having a great time here and this is an awesome experience for me, but I think 2 weeks is quite enough. Matt leaf was telling Kate and I at lunch one day that we were set up for different world tournaments before he told us about going to china, but those tournaments got canceled. So he was telling us if we can survive in china with the language barrier and being immersed in a different culture for a tournament we can survive in any other country because China is so crazy. Another plus about coming here is that we (Kate, Tara, and I) would have the comfort of having Matt and Stacey here to supervise us, and we would have each other. I will not always have the opportunity to have primarily English speaking supervisors who are very good at their jobs and give excellent feedback, or to have a familiar friend or face to hang out with. This is a great learning experience for me and I lucked out for this being my first international event.