I think an update of sorts is in order. It’s Tuesday afternoon, and with any luck, this evening I will have DSL in my apartment. For all back in America who take internet of any kind for granted, don’t ever! You’d be surprised how cut-off from the world one becomes when he/she no longer has internet and only has two channels on TV that occasionally spout out English. My main source for news lately has been the ABC evening news with Charles Gibson that is aired at 7:30am my time; so Monday-Thursday when I do not teach class until 9:30 I can watch thirty minutes of news from the US. The Chinese evening news is also relatively helpful, but it takes me awhile to get the gist of it….so if I watch the 5pm, 6pm and 7:30pm updates in Chinese, by then end of the third showing I’ll have gotten about half of what they were talking about, gotta weigh the opportunity costs of watching the same news three times…..
Someone asked me the other day what I missed about America, and besides people, I couldn’t think of much else besides a bathtub, maybe. However, it turns out that a friend of mine has a bathtub…might have to borrow it sometime. But I just thought of something else I am going to start missing, and kinda already do. A dryer. I am sitting on a couch in my living room, looking out the windows to the balcony and I can see some of my laundry drying on hangers as well as my towels. I think the towels are the sad sight…. I had to really crunch them to get them hung thru the hangers – they’re just never going to be as soft as ones out of a dryer. However not-as-soft is still miles and miles better than non-absorbent, which is what they were before I washed them the first time. I tried to dry myself off with a new one last week and it was like toweling off with a rain slicker….the darn thing was completely waterproof!
Saturday evening three of my girl friends and I met up at my place (they’d traveled two hours across town to get to me) and then went out the beach to meet other teachers from the program who live out there. Four of them live in apartments in a hotel! I still like my apartment better; it feels more like home and my friends really seemed to think I have gotten one of the nicest set-ups and schools. Anyway, that is neither here nor there. It was an off-and-on rainy day so we didn’t feel bad about not making it out to actually sunbathe. There are these really cool bbq pits by Dameisha beach and for 50 kuai ($6.50) you can rent one and buy all kinds of uncooked meats and veggies on skewers and cook them over the pit. I think we’re going to try it this weekend. I was really surprised at how touristy the beach area is. There are many lovely-looking hotels (totally a China phenomenon really – 5 star lobby with 3 star rooms) and many peddlers selling tacky suits with the granny-style bottoms and inflatable rafts. The beach is only a 20 minute bus ride (a precarious one where the driver has a proclivity of overtaking vehicles in his lane by swerving into oncoming traffic while going up winding mountain passes) away from where I am. I had not realized that I lived on one side of a mountain tunnel and many of my friends live just on the other side. Lovely. As the sky opened up and it started raining while we were bargaining for cheap beer and ice creams, a situation shall we say, walked down the road and I had to just laugh. Here it seems that women are allergic to getting both wet by the rain and tanned by the sun – so rain or shine the umbrella is up. Well on this night, three ladies must have been caught away from home without the umbrella b/c they were walking down the street, the three of them together under one of those large, striped umbrellas that cover outdoor tables at restaurants that had "Heineken" plastered all over it. The umbrella had a diameter of about six feet and the women, no one which could have been over 5 feet tall and 100 pounds where hoisting the umbrella up and strolling down the road. Only in China.
Teaching has thus far been really good. I think I like my Junior 1 and Junior 2 classes the best (12 and 13 year olds). By the time they get to Junior 3, they’re less focused on impressing the teacher and more determined than ever to be smartasses. Also, apparently the competition to get into my school’s Junior 1 class (they’re the youngest middle schoolers) this year was incredibly stiff and as a result these kids are extremely smart. I was talking to a teacher who taught here last year and he said while he taught, the Junior 2s were really bad and full of ADD cases and that makes sense, because my now Junior 3s are the bad ones. The junior 1s and 2s always remember at the end of class to give me the clipboard where the teacher signs off and writes 1-10 in a square as a testament to how well behaved they were. The junior 3s however try to hide the clipboard from me. Barbara, the lady who will be splitting the classes in half with me is still not back, so I am teaching 50+ students at once – call me a policewoman, b/c crowd control is my new specialty. However, do not ever underestimate the power of toilet paper in this case. I have had a HUGE success with a game involving a roll of TP. I get 10 boys and 10 girls to stand up in front of the class and then, starting with the boys I ask them how much toilet paper they use when they go to the bathroom…..the boys really go to town on it. One boy even asked me for the whole roll today; I decided to be ‘nice’ and only let him take 15 sheets, b/c after all the students had taken their amount I told them they had to come up with one thing to tell me about themselves for every square of paper taken. The girls on the other hand are either smarter, or more economical wrt to toilet paper usage, b/c most of them only take 2-3 sheets. I think they’ve hear about the game from other female students in other classes.
In a completely China manner I have been asked to turn in a complete lesson scheme for the term by Friday and of course they don’t have a textbook for me. It’s a good thing I’ve got many many ideas, but I am going to head down to Shenzhen Book City tomorrow during my afternoon off to actually pick up a ‘textbook’ that I will loosely follow wrt to some new vocab and grammar.
Oh, almost forgot my latest tangle with bugs in China. After cleaning the apt. from top to bottom a couple weeks ago I hadn’t seen any bugs of a sizable magnitude meandering around the place. But….over the weekend I meet up with fellow teachers and hear about how their place is crawling with insects and I think to myself, ‘heh heh, not me.’ Then I come home and on Sunday I start to see a few of these tiny gnat/fruit fly looking bugs around – and there aren’t many, but they are annoying enough to do something about it. So yesterday during my lunch break I had to mail post cards at the post office (successful trip, I think – let me know if you all get post cards from me) and I decide to pop into the supermarket and buy some spray. I come home; spray all the door frames and floor boards and head back to class. Well upon arrival home late yesterday evening I find three dead cockroaches on their backs around my apartment. Apparently until then I was oblivious to the fact that apt. 503 doubles as mine and a roach motel. In this case ignorance is bliss and I wish I hadn’t found those dead suckers. Plus I don’t think Raid did that stellar of a job on my gnats.
Two hours later…..I’m back from last class and before I post.....Penny this is all for you in memory of last year…..there were two girls in my Junior 3 class today trying to ‘covertly’ straighten their already fried hair with a straightening iron at their desk while we were doing an activity! Ha, I spoke tooo tooo soon when I said my students were good. Plus there were two kids with names, “Hey Man” and “Onion” in the class. They might just be my worst yet.
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