23 St. Louis teachers visit Nanjing, China By Alice Song, Nanjing, China "So you have just come back from Saint Louis?" said Tammy in surprise. "What a small world it is!" This is interesting for me too. Talking about my experiences with friends and parents, asking about the interesting activities that I have missed and catching up in my studies have swept me into my daily life again. Memories of Saint Louis have become something well-kept in the photos full of six huge albums. So it is really something special to hear that 23 US teachers are visiting our school, that they want to have conversations with us and they are actually from Saint Louis! More than twenty students have arrived at the welcoming hall though summer vacation had actually started. Conversation has begun right after saying hello. The two ladies whom my friend Maria and me were talking to were Tammy and Virginia. They have already been in China for two weeks. They stayed a week in Beijing and gave lectures at Beijing University. They have also been to Xian, Qufu and the Tai Mountain! They are very surprised to hear that I had just come back from Saint Louis. So we have got more things to talk about, Cathedral, SLUH, Italian food. They have questions for us, too. Tammy is very interested in our attitudes on school. We shared ideas of different ways of arranging schedule and they were really surprised that we were taking two or three science subjects at the same time in same school year! My memories of Saint Louis would help a lot. I asked about the Cardinals, and then we started to talk about sports. Everyone in Nanjing was crazy about soccer FIFA world cup in last two weeks. It is not only because that it is the first time for the Chinese men's team to get into World Cup but because soccer has always been popular in China as well. But Tammy said many of them watched their first soccer game here in China and they got to know the US team did great for the first time. "It is getting popular with kids," said Tammy: "but I never knew what soccer was when I was a teenager!" Then we showed Virginia and Tammy around the campus. To tell the truth, the whole city of Nanjing is almost under construction, our school too. Some old teaching buildings have been pulled down and since summer has started, construction made the remaining campus a little untidy. But Virginia was very polite about all those. She kept saying nice things and taking photos. She took photos of classrooms, windows and cafeteria. But anyway we showed them one of our new buildings: the Japanese building. It is designed as a Japanese style garden for the Japanese teaching. Virginia found something she really liked here: a sign says "keep quiet and walk on the right side" on the wall. "We have told our students many times about that, hope the Chinese will work!" said Virginia, and another photo taken. We had a nice time around the campus. Some new 7th-grade kids were very impressed by our communication in English. Speaking of them, fifty seven thousand children graduated from elementary school this year, and about fifteen thousand kids applied for Nanjing Foreign Language School. Only three hundred people finally got into after several rounds of testing, but even the other kids who did OK but not well enough to get into NFLS have got better chances in applying at other schools. The NFLS acceptance exam has been an important thing of Nanjing people's social life these years. Time to say good-bye came. We exchanged email addresses. They gave us souvenirs of their schools and got on the bus. Their next stop is Guiling. I am sure they will have a good time in China and they will have some beautiful memories, just like me.