Is it just me or am I getting worse at updating this thing?
Oh well, I suppose that delaying the eventual post can only make it bigger, longer, and more exciting. To be honest, I have been writing a lot more in my book lately. For those of you who may not know, I am working on a book about my experiences over here. I plan on incorporating a lot of my blog posts into the story, but instead of just copying and pasting I have been writing about events twice in order to try and improve my creative writing skills.
Also I think I gave myself food poisoning on Sunday.
But I maintain that excuses are like copies of the Star Wars prequels: everyone has some, and they're all really bad, and it's all George Lucas' fault.
So I say screw GL, and let's get on with this post!
This week was the beginning of another summer camp at Bosskids. Some things were different, and yet some things remained the same. James, having moved to Foshan to start another job, was no longer a part of our team of intrepid foreign teachers. Instead of James, we now have Arby.
Arby is an interesting character. He has worked for Bosskids before, but has been traveling and visiting relatives for the last few months, which is one of the reasons Bosskids needed extra help for the month of August. Arby was born in Tunisia, but was raised in Nebraska. For some reason the language he is most comfortable with using and speaking is neither English or Tunisian, but Spanish. He also apparently has a bunch of relatives in the middle-east, which is where he's been for the last few months. He looks exactly like a 6 foot tall Jack Davia.
Another slight change in the line-up is the children themselves. It is a new camp and so we have (almost) all new children. There are some repeats from last time, mostly children of the other employees of the camp, but with the exception of one, all of the kids that I found to be annoying have left! The repeats are all cute kids, and the new ones are pretty cute too. My favorite kids of the new ones are a pair of twin boys named Robot and Kevin. The English names that these kids pick for themselves are so awesome. If my first kids happen to be twins they are definitely going to be named Robot and Kevin.
Even better news: Arby is doing the turnip book this time! I have been freed from the shackles that bind me! The final, biggest difference this time around is that I actually don't have any classes to teach. I have a single 3 hour one-on-one in the morning and another 3 hour one-on-one in the afternoon. Both of my students are teenagers, and I have a different sort of curriculum with which to work. The week was interesting to say the least.
My morning kid is 15, does not have an English name, and mumbles way too much to ascertain what his actual name is. He looks like a Steve to me so that's what I've been thinking of him as. Steve is a nice kid, and very good, but let me tell you he is kind of kooky. He's obsessed with this Swiss reality show about airplanes. Every time we take a ten minute break he whips out his phone and loads up an episode. I've watched it with him and it's literally just footage of commercial airliners in the air and the pilots flying the plane (i.e. not doing anything or saying anything because it's on autopilot). Each episode is roughly 2 hours long. I don't get it. He also has terrible taste in music, but I'll get to that in a minute.
Every morning I am given a powerpoint file that I am told to "teach" to him. I am given the powerpoints the moment I sit down in class and not a moment earlier. I have no say in what goes into the powerpoints, and they were definitely written by someone who has a tenuous grasp of the English language at best. I also have good reason to believe that the presentations were created in 2004.
So far the topics I have been asked to teach are as follows:
-Table Manners
-American Television
-Music
-Holidays
-Travel
The table manners one is the one that made the most sense so far, although there were several important rules in there that I had not heard before. Is it really considered basic table manners to place your napkin on the back of your chair? Or to never butter your bread under any circumstances? Who knows, apparently those are important manners of western dinner situations.
The Television one was just 12 slides that featured posters and quotes from different American TV shows. All of these shows were from 2004, including Lost, Prison Break, and Grey's Anatomy. The only other one featured in the presentation was Friends, which ended around that time. Oh! The first slide of the presentation was a diagram titled "How to make perfect American television" and there was an arrow with different points on it. It went like this:
TOPIC ----> PUN ----> HYPERBOLE = CLASSIC
How was I supposed to teach that? Who knows, but I made it last 3 hours.
The music class also had a presentation with about 8 slides. The first one said "All of the types of music" and listed the following genres: Orchestra, Choral, Classic, Country, Rock, Rap, and Jazz. Each slide elucidated on the genre by having a photograph of an album cover and that was it. Well, except for the Jazz slide. The jazz slide had a quote that said, and I am not joking, "Negro music is for most romantic". This quote was accompanied by a picture of an (all white!) jazz trio, and there was an arrow pointing to the saxophone which was labeled "Trumpet".
I just so happened to have brought my hard drive with all my music on it that day to work, so I padded out the class by playing him songs in each genre, and by teaching about other genres as well. He hated all of the music I played, and kept wanting to show me music he liked. I humored him. His favorite artists of all time are a tie between Yanni, Kenny G, and this piano player I had never heard of. He insisted that I had heard of the piano player because he was "the most famous piano player of all time". I looked him up and he's a westerner who moved to China and is quite famous there. He's also quite good, but Steve just couldn't wrap his head around the idea that I had not heard of him.
Holidays day was pretty straightforward. The PPT listed all of America's major holidays, including Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Chinese New Year, and George Washington's Birthday...
At one point during the discussion of Christmas, and the origins of the holiday, Steve stopped me talking, looked me in the eye and said, "Jon, is Jesus the God or a man?. This is a question I am not sure I'm qualified to answer to anyone, let alone someone who doesn't speak English natively and had never heard of Christianity before this week.
The travel one was a bit weird. It wasn't about traveling in America or the west, or even about China really. It was all about how the best way to travel is to go to a travel agent and go on a pre-planned tour. To go traveling by yourself is dangerous and you'll die, basically. The presentation also had a quote that said "The only reason to travel is to take pictures".
My other student is a girl named Vera. I have no idea why she chose this English name for herself, as it is full of sounds that are very hard for her and for most Chinese people to pronounce. Most of the people who try to say her name sound like they are saying "wah-weh". She started out extremely shy, quiet, and was very hard to work with. Her vocabulary was very poor, so we spent all week on a list of adjectives that are good to sprinkle into conversations. It took me all week, but I think I finally cracked her shell, made her more comfortable, and she is now talking more. Come to find out, her vocabulary isn't as awful as I thought. I look forward to spending more time with her this week.
Outside of work, Laura and I continued to explore around town and to try a few new stores. Our new favorite restaurant is a Japanese ramen place inside one of the malls. The food is good, cheap, and very spicy. At this point we have done almost all of the obvious tourist things to do in Zhaoqing, so our weekend and our after-work time has been rather quiet.
On the language front, I am getting very comfortable ordering food and drinks in Chinese. I enjoy trying out new vocabulary words on waiters and waitresses because I am already pointing to the menu item I want. This way there is no pressure and I'm guaranteed to get the right food. I am the best at ordering bubble tea (Or pearl milk tea), which is something we get way more often than we probably should, but it's GD delicious. It also, ironically, reminds us of home. Even though it is a very Asian and very Chinese drink, we both discovered it at U of M and drank it a lot in college.
At the end of the week we had to say goodbye to our now good friends Hercules and Maria. They have two weeks vacation saved up and are using it to go home to Greece for the first time in over a year. By the time they come home we will be in Foshan. They have both been so nice to us and also helpful. I am not sure if I mentioned it yet but we have been doing our laundry at their place because the hotel that we were set up in does not have a laundry service. I hope that we can stay in touch with them and also that they might come visit us in Foshan since it is only an hour or so away.
Our other friend Cynthia has also finished up her internship at the school, and has been traveling around with other friends all week. China is still nice and a lot of fun, but this week has been the most lonely so far. Good thing I like Laura, eh?
Something I haven't spent a lot of time talking about is our encounters with wildlife. I really love animals of all shapes and kinds, and one of the most exciting things about coming to China for me was seeing all kinds of new animals, or maybe spotting animals I've only ever seen in the zoo before. The city is such an urban area that wildlife is not too common, but I have kept my eyes and ears out and have made some pretty good finds.
First and most obviously are the cats and dogs. Just like anywhere in the world, Chinese people love their pets. Less like the west, though, is that Chinese people think of cats as outdoor pets too. Most of the shop owners, especially the ones with the tiny convenience stores, have pet cats that they keep on a leash near the entrance to their shops. These range from adorable to kind of mangy looking, but the cats are probably the most common animal that we see out here.
Something interesting about the dogs, and something that I had never thought of before, is that the breeds are different here. Like, there are breeds in America that are popular, and many that a less popular, but China is on the other side of the world! Their dogs don't interbreed with Western dogs, so over the last several decades they've begun to look different. This, of course, is in addition to different fashion fads. I have seen a number of Chow Chow's, but the most common dog breed I've seen is one that I don't know the name of. It looks a little like a poodle, but its fur looks much softer. It's generally small to medium, definitely less than 50 pounds, and it has a very friendly face and a short snout. They are kind of strange looking but they are cute nonetheless.
Bugs are shockingly rare around here, and don't really know why. There are a TON of bats around at night, so I am sure that that has something to do with it. The bats are fun to watch flit around, but they never sit still long enough to get a good look at them. It's strange living in an area with few to no bugs, though. You don't realize how used to cricket noises you are, or how used to swatting mosquitoes and flies, until suddenly there aren't any. There are butterflies though, every once in a while. They are much bigger than the ones I am used to seeing outside of the Detroit Zoo.
There are cicadas though, or something very similar. I hear them in the trees during the daytime sometimes. I also found a bug that reminded me of a cicada or a bee. It had brilliant purple wings. I took a photo, it'll be in the next picture post. I also found a GORGEOUS praying mantis on Sunday while we were walking around the lake. This guy was enormous, and really friendly. Pictures of him to follow as well.
We found a cool park the other day hidden between several tall apartment complexes. We took a stroll through it and found that it is popular with people in their 50s and up. There seems to be the remains of an amusement park inside of this park, with many rundown roller coasters and bumper car tracks and such. I'll have to go back this week and take some pictures when it is lighter outside. It was a nice park though, and inside the park we found a family of 4 or 5 frogs. They may have been toads, but it was way too dark.
Another someone common critter are these very small lizards. They look a lot like geckos. Funnily enough, we often see them inside. I have spotted a few inside of our hotel. They remind me of house centipedes, actually, because of their minuscule size and their incredible speed. Come to think of it, they probably are fulfilling the same niche of a house centipede back home, which would explain them being indoors, and also the lack of bugs in buildings.
During our first weekend when we were up in the mountains, we saw a few big lizards, a huge spider, and a leech that fell on Laura. She didn't like that. We also found a dead (run-over) snake on our walk around the lake two weekends ago, so I know there are snakes around here somewhere.
Conspicuously missing are larger mammals and birds. I have only seen one or two birds flying since I got here, and also a single duck in the lake once. There's nothing like squirrels or possums or raccoons in this city at all, which is another thing you don't think of until you don't see them anymore.
Overall, it's cool to see some new and interesting animals around here. I want to find some more, though! Hopefully Foshan will have some more wildlife opportunities, although since it is a larger city, I kind of doubt it.
This week is our last week in Zhaoqing, so we hope to make it a good one! Next time I update this I will be sitting in my brand new apartment! Until next time, friends.
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