500 People doing "The Lawnmower"....I know you're jealous

And so….after 6 weeks of jam-packed traveling and visiting, I return to Shenzhen for 2nd term (albeit a shorter term than last – MidJune will be upon us before we know it. There are stories to be told about every moment of my travels, from the beauteous Shanghai that Adam I and encountered, to the crazy travels of three ladies in Sichuan that landed us on top of a mountain where no tourist had tread for probably months, if not years where we huddled into a makeshift king-size bed (two twins pushed together for purposes of body head) and savored the incremental wafts of warm air from the heater on the wall, and finally to mum and I taking on some of the world’s finest real estate, New Zealand. Those stories and many more will be added in due time, but for now, I return to the present.

The new term started Monday, and as the first school bell rang I was sitting, and perhaps half dozing in a cramped airplane seat aboard a flight from Auckland to HK. I had informed my school in December that ‘gee, I didn’t book the tickets, they were a gift and I can’t help it if I miss the first day back.’ In actual fact, I booked the tickets myself, and I wanted an extra day in NZ, haha what can I say. I must admit, flying was much more glamorous when I was more of a pint-sized person (ie 10 years old), b/c man the airlines are scrimping space right, left and center and then before you know it someone like me who is 6 feet tall, begina to lose circulation in my legs as soon as 23B right in front of me decides it’s time to recline his chair. And when I was a kid, children’s meals were leaps and bounds better than the regular stuff served; oh how I wish I still fit into that ‘under 12’ category.

Arriving back in HK mum and I were greeted with…..the worst pollution in town since September. It was so bad that it sent 200 of the 40,000, yes 40,000 runners from the Standard Charter marathon in HK the day before to the hospital and one person actually died! It made me want to jump back on a plane and head back to NZ. The ONLY thing that was undesirable about NZ is that they only let you take 20kg of weight per suitcase on the airplane (JAL and China Airlines lets you take 32kg internationally). The 20kg severally hinders purchasing power.

I’ve got a great schedule this term….no teaching on Mondays or Friday afternoons. This means I have the potential to travel, but instead I think I’m going to take a job with a tutoring firm that finds tutors for CEOs and important people in Chinese companies who need to learn English for their jobs. It might be very different teaching people who really want to learn English, vs. some of my students who are just there to take up space in the classroom.

That said, I love most of my students this term. I’ve got all my junior 3s back and they’ve been wonderful this week and I’m teaching 8 classes of junior 1s. I love them; they’re still small and innocent and want to please the teacher.

Also upon arrival back at school I was greeted with the crew for the tv show that has been filming at our school for the last 4 months. (side note: Wouldn’t you think that if your school was the grounds for a tv show, that they are probably getting paid a lot for this use? I think so. So…..why do I have to move out of my apt. and into this closet type “apartment” (think big room with tv, bed, desk, outside kitchen, etc) b/c me living outside school is just ‘too expensive’ for the school. Haha, oh well). I walked out of class yesterday and the courtyard to the left of me was dry but as I peered straight ahead, I saw a deluge of water coming down. I was perplexed, thinking that a raincloud over a mere part of the school was unlikely. It turned out that they were filming a rainy scene for the tv show and the local fire truck was out there creating rain for all these people to stand around in with umbrellas for the show. Today there was a ‘track meet’ at school for the show and kids from the local primary school down the road, were recruited to be the opposing teams for the meet. There were even cheerleaders which are totally out of groove with what really happens in China. I would bet money that 90% of kids don’t even know what cheerleaders are (the other 10% are the basketball obsessed students named LeBron, Carter, MJ, McGrady etc. that watch NBA on TV). I mean the closest thing that any of my students do to cheerleading is something called ‘morning exercises.’ This is a routine that is done in formation in synch with some dude at the front shouting numbers out to the group. While the students usually utter some dopey half baked answer about morning exercises ‘making you healthy,’ it can be assumed that the corporate masters in Beijing are the masterminds behind such formational exercise. (Incidentally, these Corporate masters probably spend the rest of their time playing with their magic Yahtze dice, rolling them to decide when public holidays occur….i swear it’s that arbitrary……”doubly sixes…..ok no May Holiday until June 21”). Now what is morning exercise you say? Just picture 500 students in perfectly straight lines doing 70s dance moves like the shopping cart or the lawnmower…without music of course. If you can envision this, then you’ve got a fairly accurate grasp of the daily scene around my school. They do lots of spins; there’s a move where they rotate their fists really fast around one another like a spinning wheel, and they take the spinning wheel fist thing up high, and from side to side to down low… im surprised there’s no between the legs or behind the head either. Personally I think they would be better off doing the ‘Hustle’ set to nationalistic Chinese propaganda.

Good to be back. I missed my polluted-taking-years-off-my-life-air-and-hygeine-quality city. Oh yes I did.