Basketball, but no credit cards

Allright, time for a quick blog entry.  Nothing major happened the past couple of days, except we’ve been busy teaching (and playing basketball), so I haven’t had time to play with photos and get more up online.  I have 200 pics to sort through and pick 30 or 40 to upload, so it’s not a 10-minute thing.

Classes yesterday were pretty chill, same with classes today.  Plodding through reading, writing/grammer, natural speech and the elective I’m teaching, American Culture.  I actually got completely caught up last night with my grading/paper correcting, which is good.  Some of these kids are pretty amazing, it’s great.

The big event of the past 24-hours was the students vs. teachers basketball game we played this afternoon.  They challenged us yesterday, and today was the only day everybody’s calendars matched up, so we played this afternoon.  The hoops are a little lower here (here meaning the development we live in… I can’t speak as to nation-wide).  They’re at about 8 feet or so… which made it a little difficult.  The game was three-on-three half-court, so me and the two other teachers thought it would be a good idea to practice on the lower hoops before the game.  Only minor problem with that is that the only opportunity to practice before the game was at 6:30am this morning.  Most of you know me well enough to know that 6:30am is NOT Seth’s favorite time of day.  But I did in fact manage to hall my ass out there at 6:30 to practice… bundles of joy and fun, let me tell you.  Good that we practiced though, cuz we definitely were missing more shots than we made, even lay-ups.

So, game on at 4pm today.  Now, due to the fact that the kids play basketball almost every day and are in far better shape than us teachers, and since they are used to playing in the heat and humidity, pretty much everyone was of the opinion that the students were going to kick the teachers asses, but lo and behold, we actually put up a good showing and won three out of four games.  And hey, we only lost the last game because we were so f-ing beat.  I am ready for bed, let me tell you.  Being soaked in sweat is fun.  Game was also a little rough-and-tumble.  My height was a big advantage, but it also meant that elbows and fore-arms were at face level when fighting for rebounds, and I took one good elbow to the nose and several other smacks to the face.  Nothing 600 milligrams of Advil can’t cure, fortunately.

Big news from China, eh?  We played basketball. =).  Anyway, have a few action photos of basketball, plus many others, which will hopefully get up there tomorrow.

Random observation: everything is in cash over here.  Just came to my consious attention when we were in line at the grocery store today and I had a minute to think.  I have cash on me at all times here… in the States, I rarely have cash, pay for almost everything with my debit card.  Interesting difference… no one pays for anything with credit cards or debit cards here, everything so far has been cash only.

Peace out.

-Seth