Chinese Club and the Trip (The TRIP!!!)

I am skipping around in the questions a little because I don’t have time to write a really long answer this morning. I will get to them all, I promise.

Kate asks:

Can you talk more about the Mandarin immersion program that you are taking M to? How was it started, and how did they find teachers? A group of people in my city have talked of starting a program up; would you have any advice for us? Thanks!!

The “Chinese Club” that M attends is an experimental program by a local university with a very well-respected Chinese department.  I believe their intention is to design and test an elementary school curriculum and then sell it to other schools.  The teachers are affiliated with the university’s curriculum development department, Chinese language department and/ or the foreign language education department in the school of education.  Most of the teachers are graduate students who get paid a modest amount of money to teach the class (I think).

Obviously, we feel really lucky that we found this program.  We only pay $130 a quarter (10 weeks) for two 1.5 hour classes a week, including snack.  I would imagine a similar program run privately would have to be significantly more expensive.  The best thing about this class is that it mostly a full immersion class.  The kids were very uncomfortable at first, but now (after about 20 weeks), they are all used to it.

The best advice I can offer is that it makes a HUGE difference to have trained teachers who understand the language-learning process.  Just picking random Chinese speakers would be much less effective (as demonstrated by our years of untrained Chinese tutors AND the teachers at Chinese school who have no experience with language education).

It is also helpful to have the teachers use American teaching techniques rather than Chinese techniques.  In a typical Chinese classroom, there isn’t much fun.  The kids seem to learn better and like learning Chinese better when there are games, songs and stories they can relate to in the curriculum.  Early on in the class, M’s teachers realized that the kids were not understanding a couple Chinese games they were playing, so they asked the parents to suggest some American games they could play in Chinese.

Sarah in Ottawa asks:

I love travel planning and I would LOVE to hear about your plans for your China trip (if you are willing to share). Are there any other trips that you have planned in the interim?

Right now, we don’t have any plans for any trips before our China trip, because all our travel savings is allocated to making the China trip as amazing (and long!) as possible.  We will be going to the beach with my parents this summer because they are paying for it and we can drive.  I think the only thing we will fund on that trip is groceries for the week and gas.

Our plans for out China trip are very vague right now, because the dates when we will travel are out of our control due to Mr. A’s job.  We will probably go either next January-February or in late spring (I hope NOT Jan Feb! Because I don’t want to be traveling during Chinese New Year).   We hope to be traveling for about eight weeks with two weeks in Taiwan and six weeks in China.   In Taiwan, we will probably spend a week or so in Taipei and a week in Mr. A’s family’s hometown (Nantou).

Right now, the plan is to fly to Taiwan first.   We may split the Taipei portion up and spend 2-3 days recovering from jetlag in Taipei,  go visit his family then go back to Taipei for a few more days before we go to China. (If we are traveling during CNY, I might consider spending those weeks in Taiwan with Mr. A’s family (and not in China where traveling is a flipping CNY nightmare).   I haven’t researched Taiwan yet, but if there is anything to see between Nantou and Taipei, maybe we will take a train or rent a car so we can stop along the way.  (Note to self, get the 2o10 Lonely Planet Taiwan book to see what is between Nantou and Taiwan.)  We also have some family business that we might need to attend to in Nantou, not to mention obligatory visits with extended family and probably visiting the graves of Mr. A’s grandparents.

I don’t have a strict agenda for China yet either. I don’t know if we will start in the south and work our way north or if we will go north-south.  It depends on the flights  and how difficult it is to get from Taiwan to China.  I haven’t ruled out flying through Bangkok and taking a few days off there if it ends up being cheaper (I love Thailand).

Once we are in China, we will spend a week or so in Beijing doing all the normal touristy stuff (acrobats, forbidden city, summer palace, great wall, etc.) and hopefully visiting our friends who are living there for a few years.  We will probably go to Xian for a few days because the train going south  goes right through there and I have heard good things about it.   We may also decide to swing through Shanghai. Mr. A’s uncle lives there and we could probably stay with him for a bit to recuperate from all the traveling.   We will spend probably about a week in the Guilin area trying to enjoy it more than I did during our adoption trip (which shouldn’t be hard because I hated it with a flaming hot passion then, which I blame on crippling jetlag and an all-night serenade of CNY firecrackers.) and maybe a day or two near Longsheng.

We are expecting to spend a week or so in L’ s Hometown. I don’t know if we will be able to visit the orphanage, but we will stay in a nearby city and make ourselves visible to the locals and do some research for ourselves and some friends whose kids are also from L’s orphanage.  Depending on the timing of our visit, we might try to visit a local school and some local sight-seeing locations. ( If we end up having family to visit there, we may have to make ourselves invisible and spend a shorter time in the area. We will have to see how that plays out.)  We will probably also visit L’s provincial capital because we had a lovely time there on our last visit.  And also because the food at the hotel there was the bomb.

We will definitely be spending a few days in Hong Kong and visiting Hong Kong Disneyland.  (I know! Me at Disney!  But this trip is all about the girls…see the next pargraph for more info.)  We might ask friends of ours who have family there to meet us (if they are available and want to go to HK), because HK would be more fun with them.  If we have enough time and money, we might also stop in Hawaii on the way home.  You know, to recover from the jet lag.  Not because we like Hawaii.

We are going to do our best to keep our plans very flexible.  If we get bored, we will move on.  If we love where we are, we will stay longer.  The key to this trip is to make sure the girls have a really amazing time.   We want them to love traveling and love China and Taiwan.  We want them to really get to see and touch and taste it.  I expect we will spend a lot of time hanging out in local parks and playgrounds (which were highlights of our adoption trip).  We are going to try to avoid dragging them to sight-seeing things that only adults would appreciate.  Mr. A and I have already seen a lot of China (and we expect to go back to visit again in the future!), so we don’t have to rush around trying to cram everything in.

It goes without saying that we would love any suggestions for kid-friendly places to see or go.  We will probably not go to Sichuan for the pandas this time.  Nor will we go to Tibet.  (I hope for that during  a trip I am imagining for when the girls are in Jr. High and High school during our big India, Nepal, Western/Southern China trip.)  We may be able to swing over to Kunming if we end up having a lot of spare time.

Ok, I spent about an hour more on this post than I intended. Can you tell I love to spend time talking about and imagining trips?