Monday and Tuesday were the last days of our week-long holiday. This was cut extra short for me, as I was asked to come in and work on Tuesday night. After returning from the day-trip to Zhuhai, and with a workday looming, we spent Monday and Tuesday morning cleaning the apartment, doing chores and shopping, and getting ready for the work week.
The reason that I had to work on Tuesday was that, true to form, Tuesday was Sunday. What do I mean by that? Let me explain. In addition to having classes Monday through Friday from 9am to 9pm every single week, the 6th graders at this school also have a Sunday night class from 6-7:30pm every week. Whenever I get frustrated about having to work as much as I do, I remind myself that I get to take frequent breaks. Also, as long as I am prepared for my 3-4 classes per day, I mostly just listen to music and play Chip's Challenge all day. These kids, on the other hand, are studying and working and doing homework nonstop. I cannot imagine how frustrating that must be. This is also a good thing to remind myself whenever my kids are misbehaving or acting up. I think back to when I was in school for 8 hours a day and how it made me crazy, and then try to imagine LIVING at school and having at least four more hours of classes per day. When I am in this state of mind it becomes amazing to me that the kids don't act out more often!
So anyway, since there is one Sunday class per week and 6 foreign teachers (Laura is exempt from this pool for some reason), we take turns with the Sunday night responsibilities. Being that this Tuesday was the last day of the break, it was decided by the people that run this school that it "symbolically" was actually a Sunday and not a Tuesday after all. Their reasoning was that if the next day was the first day of classes for the week, the day before it MUST be a Sunday! It was my turn to do a Sunday lesson, so I got stuck with the short straw, so to speak.
This was my first interaction with the 6th graders, and I really did not know what to expect. Based on what I had heard some of the other teachers say, I had begun to create this image in my mind of extremely advanced and intelligent young adults. I assumed, erroneously as I eventually found out, that I would be able to waltz in and just have a regular conversation with these people at a tempo similar to what I am used to using when talking to friends or family. Because it is a "Sunday" class, and because the Chinese teachers also don't want to be there, the expectations for the class are extremely low. They are even more relaxed than the rest of our lessons, and that is saying something. Most of the other foreign teachers usually just put a movie on and then come up with some form of work sheet to give the kids, thus justifying the "educational content" of Iron Man 2 or whatever it is they put on. I decided to more or less follow suit from the precedent, and procured two episodes of popular American sitcoms. I knew that Modern Family and The Big Bang theory were both very popular in China, and I assumed that the kids would love watching these shows.
How wrong I was!
I am not sure if I picked particularly challenging episodes, picked too-difficult vocabulary words, explained the exercises improperly, or if maybe if the kids were just still on "National Week Vacation Mode", but the class was a disaster. The children were nearly as poorly behaved as some of my youngest classes, and they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. The vocabulary I picked for the episodes SEEMED pretty straightforward, but I have since discovered that words like "Anniversary" and "Sculpture" were way too advanced for them.
I was able to communicate the ideas with some difficulty, though, and I actually learned something myself during that class. Apparently wedding anniversaries are not observed in China. Either that or all 20 kids in my 6th grade class come from broken families and unhappy marriages. I guess it would be wrong of me to assume either way...
Wednesday through Friday were business as usual. We went back to work and taught our classes. It was nice to re-connect with all of the other foreign teachers and to hear about their trips around China. Nathan and Shebaum went to a place called Guilin, which I had not heard of before. After looking through their pictures, though, it is definitely high on my list. It looks gorgeous! The others went up to Beijing, which is a place I had planned on visiting anyway. I learned that the night markets around Beijing sell a lot of the more exotic foods that I had come to China looking for. Zac and Chris both tried scorpion, for example, which is something I specifically have been hunting for over the last few months. Armed with this knowledge, Beijing is absolutely a high priority for the near future.
Since we were given a whole week off of work, we were expected to come in and work all day on Saturday this week. I mentioned this a few weeks ago and it still irks me. Our "holiday" was 7 days long, and of those 7 days, two of them were weekends that we would normally not be working anyway. After being made to come in and work two Sundays ago, this past Tuesday, and also this past Saturday to "make up for lost time", we really haven't been given any time off at all. Just to add one final dash of confusion into the pot, the bosses informed us that Friday of this week was going to be taught as if it were a Monday, and then that Saturday was going to be taught as if it were a Friday. I am not sure why Friday couldn't be Friday, since it's Friday, and why Saturday couldn't have just been the Monday. I asked the boss about it and she just stared at me like I was the one not making any sense. At this point I don't even know what days of the week are what anymore!
Since it is now October here, my thoughts are turning toward the holidays. I am really starting to miss home a lot, especially whenever I hear about my friends and family experiencing the fall weather. Over here there are few signs of a changing season, if any. Palm trees don't change colors, I've come to find out, and there are very few decorations anywhere. For a country that grows and sells pumpkins year round, there is a surprising dearth of pumpkin flavored anything in the stores and restaurants. It's funny, because I was always one to lightly make fun of the "pumpkin spice everything" trend, getting sick of the flavor every year long before the specials disappeared. Now that I can't have any, though, I could really go for a PSL from Starbucks or one of those caramel apple flavored lollipops!
It is still offensively hot here most of the time, but there are at least some signs of that oppressive heat abating. In the early mornings and in the late evenings, there is actually a bit of a chill in the air, and even during the days themselves now there is a little bit of a breeze. It is still way way way too hot to even consider wearing pants or long sleeved shirts, but I am sweating a lot less than I used to be, and I consider that to be a huge improvement! But there's a heat wave coming, apparently, and it's supposed to be in the mid to high 90s through Halloween.
Speaking of Halloween, one of the more delightful turn of events at school is that not only are we allowed to dedicate class time to Halloween activities, we are actually expected to. Since Halloween is such a big part of the western/English speaking world, they have been deemed "Culture lessons" and we have been given free reign to use as many class periods as we want to play Halloween games and teach Halloween English words. This has been a lot of fun for me this week, and has been an outlet for me to pour my festive feelings into, since as I said above there really isn't any sort of fall feelings anywhere else in this country. Not surprisingly, for example, Halloween and autumn decorations like we use at home are virtually impossible to find here. It pains me to say it, but this may be the first year of my entire life that I won't be carving a single pumpkin.
After somehow working five days in a row, even though we were "on break" until Wednesday, our one day off finally arrived. On Saturday night we went out to a local bar that is a somewhat popular hang out for foreigners like ourselves. We had been to this bar before, but on Saturday was the first time I noticed the "special baijiu". Baijiu is a Chinese liquor made from sorghum or white rice. It translates literally to "white liquor". It basically tastes like bad vodka.
This "special baijiu" was sitting out on the counter at the bar. What made it special, you ask? Well, one of them was made with wasps and the other was made with snakes. I knew this because the jars were full of dead wasps and snakes, respectively. I was curious and asked how much the drinks cost. The bartender was so curious that a foreigner would be willing to try something so exotic that she said I could try them both for free.
Laura had the snake, I had the bees. Let me tell you what, they were both extremely nasty. I've eaten bugs before, and it wasn't the fact that they were distilled in insects that made it taste bad. It was sweet, and sour, and bitter, and essentially tasted like even worse bad vodka. It made me feel sick immediately, but I was able to keep it down. Laura reports that the snake tasted like drinking the solution that you soak your contact lenses in at night. But also like bad vodka. I'm glad we tried them, though, I guess. I'm definitely glad they were free!
We spent Sunday resting up for another full week of work, and thus ended our ultimately uneventful week.
There is definitely a sort of drive that I feel to do something big, huge, and exciting every week. Even though we are here for a full year, and still have a lot of time left, the weekends are starting pass by at an alarming week. Assuming we come home at the end of the year, I may never get a chance to visit China again, and I really want to make every single second count.
It is difficult though. Things are cheaper here, but we also make a lot less money. Trips out and around absolutely add up, and any long bus trip is even more expensive. Aside from money is the reality that working so many hours every week gets exhausting. By the time we get home every night we basically go right to sleep. This means that the weekends end up getting spent doing the important-yet-less-fun things like going grocery shopping, and on weekends where we really only get one day off, we really do not get the opportunity to do any exploring or sightseeing.
Oh, and we still don't have our passports or visas back. That's another problem, obviously. The good news is that we have been promised that no matter what, at the absolute latest, we would get them back this week.
Once we have our visas, I intend to make up for lost time. I think next weekend will be a good one to head to Macao for the weekend, and maybe to do Hong Kong the weekend after that. Both cities are big, exciting, full of sights to see, and are also close enough to do in a weekend. There's also still some things in Guangzhou that we have not gone and done yet. We aren't supposed to have any truncated weekends for at least a month or two now, so we will have ample opportunity to go and check out Guangzhou.
Looking further down the road, I think we are going to spend our 4 day Christmas weekend in Shanghai or maybe make the trip to Guilin. For the extended 2-3 week Chinese New Year vacation, we will most likely be going to Thailand and South Korea. Next May also has a vacation period, and I think this may be the best time to go up to Beijing. Once school gets out next year we will try and knock off any big things we missed before our visas expire in China. From there we are thinking of checking out Japan "on our way home".
Of course this is all extremely tentative, and I am sure our plans will change 100 times before we actually do anything. At any rate, after "wasting" a vacation period because we didn't have visas, I am determined to make the absolute most of every other travelling opportunity we are presented with here.
Back to the topic of Halloween, it has been an interesting exercise trying to impart the essence of "what is Halloween" onto children who have no idea what it is, and who also have very little English speaking abilities. How would you explain Halloween to someone with little to no reference point about it? Chinese people nationwide have a pretty decent grasp of what Christmas is, and a large number of the them celebrate it, not as a religious holiday but just as a nice day. Halloween though, is something that has only really been introduced in the last few years, and only to schoolchildren.
I have been using a lot of pictures, but things like Jack o Lanterns and trick or treating are pretty difficult to explain. Similarly, classic Halloween monsters are difficult to explain beyond just showing pictures of them. Is a mummy still scary if it's just a picture and there's no context behind it? Who knows.
What I do know is that the children have had pretty interesting reactions to many of my presentations. They all seem to understand what candy is pretty easily, and get extremely excited whenever I show pictures or even say the word. Some of the children have been afraid of the pictures I show of the monsters, even though I have only showed benign cartoon monsters. It is never predictable beforehand, though, which kids will be scared and of what they will be most scared. Shockingly the glowing Jack o Lanterns seem to be the most universally feared thing out of all the images I have shown.
I have also enjoyed showing videos to the children. I have shown some youtube clips of American kids trick or treating, or American adults carving pumpkins. The Chinese kids enjoy these videos although a lot of it seems to go over their heads. Something that has been a huge hit, though is Looney Tunes. I have been showing some of the classic Bugs Bunny shorts where he runs into Gossamer, the big orange monster. These cartoons are great because they capture a lot of the feelings and light-hearted spookiness of Halloween. They are also funny on a very basic level that does not need explanation, and the dialog is so emotively delivered that it does not require the children to understand what Bugs is saying.
This coming week we are doing more Halloween projects with the kids. If they are all very good I may buy some candy and give it to them. But in the end I'll probably just eat it all myself. Speaking of eating, I am really sick of the food here. Chinese food is good, but there is very little variety involved at all. After nearly 3 months here, I have had about all that I can take. Every meal is the same, especially when we eat at the school. They only have about 6 meals that they rotate over the course of a week (with 5 meals for lunch and 5 for dinner each week). This is where it is the worst, since it makes up the majority of the meals we eat here, but the restaurants are not that much better. Even though there is at least one restaurant on every street corner, they all serve virtually the exact same thing.
A meal in China consists of the following: rice or noodles, a meat (usually chicken or duck), a vegetable (99% of the time it will be lotus root or this Chinese lettuce stuff). The meat is always prepared the same way: haphazardly chopped in a rough manner with a butchers knife, bones still in it, and then dropped into a wok for about 10 minutes. Seasonings are sparsely used, if at all, and most of the time the seasoning used is just ginger. Salt and pepper are basically unheard of here, and garlic is used quite sparingly.
I have been made to understand that Chinese food varies incredibly across the country. Each of the 34 provinces in China apparently have a completely unique cuisine, so maybe my beef is just with Guangdong cuisine. I am sure a large part of it is just that I've eaten so much of it over the last few months, but I am just so sick of the lack of variety! Western food is more expensive, and at best is just a decent facsimile of the food that I actually am in the mood for. Ultimately I'm just going to have to make do, though, because it's not like Chinese food is going to change drastically any time soon!
One final note: my speaking abilities have no improved noticeably from the first several weeks that we lived here. This is disappointing, but is ultimately all my fault. I have gotten really good at the few essential phrases I need to get around, and have gotten even better at miming the things I need. Beyond that, I have not really practiced speaking at all with anyone since I have gotten here. This is something I hope to rectify in the near future, but I have yet to find a person who would make an ideal speaking partner.
It is truly amazing how well I can get by without speaking though. It's such a neat thing that humans are capable and willing to communicate using so many alternative methods that I am able to get whatever I need and want whenever I need and want here. If I ever heit my head and forget how to speak someday, I think I'll be okay.
More positively, though, I have vastly improved my listening, reading, and writing abilities. I can read and write over 160 Chinese characters now! I have read from a number of sources that if you can learn the "big 300" that you can read about 60% of modern printed Chinese. If you can master 1,000 characters, I have also read, you can read about 95% of all modern printed Chinese. I hope to achieve the 300 by Christmas. I am forcing myself to learn two characters a day, while also practicing my ever-growing library of characters I already know. This is something I am actually very proud of. Ic an read a good number of the street signs and even a few billboards now and it is really cool!
Ah well. Next week promises to have more excitement in it. I think it is high time to conquer Canton Tower! Stay tuned..
Ps. I only took two pictures this week so I am not going to make a separate post for them.
Found a weird picture of Michelle Obama on the side of a building. This is a spa, so I guess she is a known representative of health world wide...
The night after I drank the bee liquor I found some people making some on the street! Those mesh bags are filled with bees/wasps/whatever and the jar is full of the liquor and also dead bees soaking in them. Delicious?
No comments:
Post a Comment