Kindergarden Day at the Post Office

Today Zhao Laoshi took us to the post office to show us how to mail a letter. We were supposed to write letters to each other for homework and then bring them to class for the trip. If you walked in to that post office when we were there you would think 6 five year olds were making their first attempt to mail something. First we had to write the address in all Chinese. Of course, we all put the name of the receiver first which you're not supposed to do here. The address goes first and then the name so on my envelope the address was towards the top instead of being in the middle. Then we couldn't read the address that Zhao Laoshi had written down so we all guessed as to what characters they were. She came around to each of us during this process and told us we had wrong characters here and wrong characters there so then our envelope had scratches and lines all over it. Next came the stamps. They had a tub of glue with a paintbrush in it to put on the back of a 1 inch stamp. All of the boys put way too much glue on their stamp and preceded to get glue all over the front of their envelopes and then on the back to seal it. I couldn't stop laughing during this entire process. My stamp ended up covering part of the address because it was at the top of the envelope so you couldn't read the last 3 characters. If anyone actually receives their letter it will be a miracle.

Another interesting note, Selina and I have noticed recently that Ruby never, and I mean NEVER, has homework. Every night when we are slaving away on Chinese she watches TV or does stuff on her computer. We asked her about it last night and she said that in college they do almost no work outside the classroom but in high school their schedules were very demanding. She would go to school from 6am-10pm every day and wouldn't have any holidays. But at Fudan she could skip half of her classes each semester and the teachers wouldn't even notice. She also sleeps through most of her classes. She thinks it's very strange that we have so much work here and when we told her how much work we have in the states she looked shocked. She said she's starting to rethink going to grad school in the states :)

Not much else to report. Selina and I are going to look for small travel bags for our week long trip because we don't want to lug around our huge luggage. I don't know when we'll have time for a trip downtown but we'll figure it out!