We went to the Dragon Boat Festival. It was very hot, and to me, one race looked a lot like the next. We found a shady spot to stand, but we could only see the start line, not the finish line, which was around a bend. Still, I got a few photos. I walked around to find that traditional Chinese food, and it was nowhere to be found! Not even a stand selling Chinese food! They had tacos, but no Chinese? Crazy! This is a Chinese festival! And whatever stuff was supposed to happen at noon didn't seem to happen, or at least it was unnoticeable. The kids soon got bored and wanted to go to the adjacent playground, so we did that for about an hour, and then we left. I think the kids had more fun running around in the heat at the playground than watching the boats.
It turned out that the original family I tutored asked if I could include the grandmother and littlest boy, who is about 4 and doesn't speak English. OK. So then we went to the house where the new boys live, and they took their car, because the additions made it impossible to get everyone into mine. The new mom and her 2 sons followed me. I thought they were new to the area, but she said they had lived here for 3 years. So the boys were in China without their parents. This seems to be the custom: leave them with relatives in China when they are small so the parents can both work here. I really think it's a bad idea to separate the children from their parents, but the new boys seem to have turned out very well. They are extremely polite. They work hard at their lessons.
The new mom asked me if I wanted to go back to their house and she'd feed me some traditional Chinese food (though it wasn't those triangular things wrapped in leaves that I read about), and while she cooked, I tutored the older boy. He said last time that he likes NASCAR, so I got info on Watkins Glen International, the famous race course in Watkins Glen, home of the famous waterfalls, too. He seemed very interested. I said the racetrack was only about a 45-minute drive from Ithaca, so maybe his parents could take him there. "No," he said. "I think that racetrack is one I can select in my computer game." I like to think I'm progressive, but I really do wonder when a person would rather see a track on the computer than in real life. Do you think the world is doing away with real life?
The older boy wanted to learn to write cursive, so we worked on that some. We did a fill-in-the-blanks.
After lunch, I worked with the younger brother. He asked to sort out vowel sounds! So we stopped and did that. He really is eager to learn English and doesn't even mind the grammatical stuff! I'm amazed! Will some of this wear off when they get familiar with me? That was the case with the first kids, but even at first, they weren't the hard workers these boys seem to be.
Oh, yes, pictures! Here.
At the front of the boat sat a person with a big drum. He/she beat the drum so everyone would row in sync.
At the rear of each boat was someone with a rudder.
Just one last photo of them racing.
It's nice to meet you too. 
