Child Mob

The picture upload isn't working, so I can't show the evidence, but yesterday I experienced what it may be like to be annoyingly famous. The night before last our program director was scrambling around searching for 12 students to go to a nearby Middle/High School to participate in the school's research project. And since I'm telling this story I obviously opted to go.

The school is for children from ages 14-18, though most of them were near the younger side, and they were doing some sort of function that involved bringing foreigners in to ask them questions. This school is out of control nice. It was in a gated compound with buildings that one of the guys from California said were directly out of Beverly Hills. I had no idea that this place existed in the middle of Hangzhou. Our teacher explained to us that these kids had to be among the smartest in Hangzhou to get to this nice school, but that it was also a private school with no government help, that is they had lots of money to spend on courtyards.

Only 7 of us could go, so we had to split up on our own and each of us went to a different classroom. There were other foreign students our age from other study abroad programs, mainly students from Italy and Spain, but none of them spoke Chinese. To be honest, I think for some of them their English was barely better than the students they were meeting with. Thus when I walked in and introduced myself in Chinese I became an instant celebrity and overshadowed the British guy and 3 Italian girls already in my class room. That's right, America wins again.

After a bunch of games and some question answer time, the teachers gave the students free time to take pictures. As soon as she declared this the students formed a line to take pictures with me, and after about 5 minutes of pictures they scrambled to get pens and paper. They tore the paper into squares and had my autograph them in English and Chinese. It was ridiculous. The best part of it was the shirt they gave me. I got a shirt with the name of their camp. The other foreigners put it on, but I opted to lay mine on the table and have the kids sign it. They swarmed all over it and left all these fun English/Chinese mix messages and pictures.

Tonight is Karaoke night with the whole program. WOOO