Eric came to pick up Saffron and myself at about nine in the morning. From there we went to the Jin Du School to pick up Maya, a Chinese teacher for Jin Yuan and Sara's school. After that it was about a 30 minute car ride to get to the north part of inside the walls.
On the way, we were finally told that we would be singing for the awards ceremony to some "Oral English" contest. When we arrived it was freezing cold out, so we ran inside the auditorium... Where the heating was turned off... We stood around for a couple minutes and were then told that we would only be singing Tian Mi Mi, because they weren't able to find something they needed for us to sing Country Roads. I know it wasn't the music they couldn't get because we were practicing it on the car ride over.
In the middle of my pacing to keep warm, Maya got Saffron and I and took us on stage so we could practice Tian Mi Mi. It didn't go that well. At the time I still needed to look at the lyrics every other line. which I still do for the most part.) Saffron sang this song at the Christmas production for Sara's school so she already knew the words. The sound system kept giving us bad feedback, and they ended up cutting us off half way through. I guess they knew what they needed and didn't want to listen to the noise anymore. As far as the singing went, I'd say it was decent.
Once we were done, Eric had disappeared and Maya told us that he had given her money for us to go out to eat lunch. For the reason that it was close by, and that Eric had given her plenty of money, we went to Pizza Hut.
Pizza Hut here is nothing like in the US. It's actually considered a fancy restaurant. And in weird way it is. It's nothing like the ones back home. In the US Pizza Hut is considered to be fast food. Higher quality fast food, but fast food all the same. Here, it's a full blown restaurant. Nice jazz music playing, menus with more than just pizza, real cheese on the pizza, and a large bill. Did I mention that I didn't have to pay for any of it?
We ate our lunch and sat around at the table for a while because we didn't want to go back out in the cold. When we were all finished with all the food we could pretend to finish eating, we decided to go for a walk around the Parkson. This could just be my country folk upbringing, but I've never seen a Parkson before, much less heard of it. Whether it's an expensive Chinese store with an English name, or a foreign store that has high prices in China, it's a fancy place that normally requires a membership card to enter. (Which Maya had.) We walked around and stared at the clothes with the expensive price tags. I'll never understand why you buy a more expensive brand when you can get the same quality for less than half the price somewhere else.
That was when Maya got a call from Eric. It turned out that the actual awards presentation would take to long, that we wouldn't have time to sing. Oh well. I didn't know the words that well anyway. Maya had to go back to the auditorium to return some things, so Saffron went home, and I went to walk around the Muslim Quarter before I returned home.
It was a nice day. I didn't have to teach any classes, and I got free pizza. Always nice.
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