Greetings and general information

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Time is very short today, so let's get straight into the subject and see what happened last week at Web.

Wednesday June 25 - About Beauty

We looked at a classic hair style that is also very versatile: https://www.yahoo.com/beauty/ever-since-legendary-hairstylist-garren-gave-model-89010921143.html

Sleep is very important for beauty, as it is for other vital functions such as thinking and keeping our internal organs healthy: https://www.yahoo.com/beauty/the-5-rules-of-better-deeper-sleep-89158928181.html

I meant to talk to you about our natural bio-rhythm, but we didn’t have time for it. This is the website I would have used for it otherwise: https://www.yahoo.com/beauty/the-5- rules-of-better-deeper-sleep-89158928181.html

And finally, we looked at aging beautifully and we had a couple of examples – one in an article and some in a BBC documentary. Overall, the conclusion was that beauty comes from inside a person, it’s not just the looks. Beauty is also an expression of the positive feelings and a warm soul, which will endure time, even if the body doesn’t. That’s enough to know and, by nurturing the soul and the mind, we can accept the flaws that appear in our bodies over time. Knowing how to live a balanced and healthy life, we can keep our youthful attitude for longer.

Thursday June 26 – Befriending China

We discovered that we're not so different after all, in that both sides take time in getting to know each other before they can call a friendship 'a real friendship'.

Then we looked at the qualities of a good, real friendship and we ended our class by stating our mutual wish to keep in touch and continue to build our friendship in years to come, in spite of my leaving Web and China right now.

I shared with you the friendships I made in Donghai, during my first year in China and how they would welcome me back any time, either to teach or to just be their friends.

In fact, I have a little story to share with you here: During my last trip to Donghai this month, I met the teacher who replaced me in Aston School this year. I met him by pure chance, on the street, as a friend of mine I was visiting pointed him out to me. He (an American) said to me that he has heard many things about me in town - now, this is a town of about 1,200,000 people. When he went into a shop one day, he was asked what he was doing in Donghai and he said he was a teacher in Aston School, to which the shop owner open his eyes widely and smiled at him, saying loudly with his finger pointing at his face: 'Lucia!'

I was the only foreigner in that town, for a complete year and I made a few good friendships during that time. In fact, my Chinese family is over there and they are waiting for me to return - they even have a house prepared for me, to make me feel more comfortable! Well, it's the house they've bought for one of their two sons, my ex-student James, who's only 8 at the moment, he he... Tom, his father, was also a student of mine and he said he always missed having a sister, so that I should be his sister instead. His beautiful wife Jane feels the same, so we're all like a big family when we meet.

Shall we build more friendships like this in Suzhou?
Let's try and only time will tell.

Saturday June 28 – How Good Is Your Memory?

We had a paragraph of an article about "Why is sex good for your brain?" to re-write by memorising as many words as we could and run back to our paper to write it down. Students from two groups took it in turns to run to the paper to see where the article stopped, then run to the table with the article, to read the rest of it, memorise as much as they could and then run back to complete their own version of it before the other group would.

Now that was fun!

Another game was to correct 10 mistakes in another paragraph, as a warm-up for the memory game.

This is it, my friends!

Thank you all of you who left a thought in my Memories Book and I would like to invite some more students to leave a few lines in it during this week, although we're kind of running out of blank pages by now. I shall treasure this album for the rest of my life - thank you for it, as well as for all the good times we had together during this year.

Keep up the good work and enjoy being with your future teachers just the same. We shall have a class this week about how you can achieve just that, OK?

Have fun in the meanwhile!

Lucia da Vinci

Founder of My English Club