Bookstores and Lotus

This weekend, I got a lot of lesson planning done, including a nice polished one for tomorrow. The others are still rough because I still have no idea what my students’ level is. Tomorrow night will be a lot of planning for sure. Today, we went to the largest bookstore in Chengdu. I was hoping to pick up an English novel as a reward for a good first third of training, but all the English language books were very expensive, about 110 yuan. (For reference, lunch costs me 5-8 yuan.) I still had fun looking at the entire floor of GaoKao material and the language books. They have “Learn Chinese!” materials for native speakers of English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, and Russian. It was very impressive.

After a delicious lunch, we went to IKEA, which is exactly like the American ones, except they set the tables with chopsticks. They also had a good selection of woks, but they might have that in American IKEA, too. The rest of the kitchen items are geared for Western cooking. We had a good time exploring, and I told/mimed/described to my host family the functions of brownie pans, pizza cutters, egg slicers, muffin tins, apple corers, and the various types of pots and pans. In return, they told me how to pick out a good wok, something that might come in handy very soon.

Finally, we went to Flower Town, which consists of a giant pond/lake full of lotus and the area’s largest flower market. It was very pretty, and we got fresh veggies for dinner, but it was so very hot. We all came home and ate cold fruit, which is surprisingly refreshing!