I Enjoy Being A Girl

(*Post title comes from the musical The Flower Drum Song. You can watch it here.)

One thing I love about China: women often wear skirts and dresses, and generally dress more formally than in the U.S.  I love wearing dresses and skirts, so I fit in well here in this respect. Our Peace Corps packing list said to bring lots of pants (which is ridiculous advice for China, it's freaking hot here!), but luckily I packed a lot of skirts as well. (Overall our packing list pretty much sucked, but that is another story.) Women will even wear high heels when exercising, believe it or not. It floors me to see a woman on the track in dress shoes! Ouch! I don't know how they stand it.

People here are very humble and don't worry about matching their clothes to each other, or to their shoes. It's very liberating!  You can wear whatever you want and no one blinks an eye. I've put on some pretty awful outfits and I loved that I didn't feel self-conscious in them. I've learned that the rule here seems to be: wear your best shirt, best skirt/pants, best pair of shoes, and who cares if they match. As long as they are your best, you're good.

My students will often come to school in pretty dresses and/or fancy, fancy shoes. Here is how two of my students came to school today:

This is Lindsey. I love her, she is always smiling. She's from near Shanghai, so she tells me about life in her part of China. She struggles out here sometimes in the less-developed West. No matter how fancy her dress, she always wears tennis shoes. Smart girl!

This is Jenny. She is very shy, but a very sweet girl. She loves wearing dresses to school. You can't see her shoes well, but they are all silver sparkly. Btw, she took her glasses off before I took this picture; girls are the same all over the world!