2 in the afternoon on a cool(ish), rainy Tuesday. I have an open class to teach tonight, aka they videotape it and the parents watch it at the parent-teacher meetings coming up this month without actually understanding a word you're saying. It begs the question, will the blunt unfeeling nature of the Chinese be a good thing in such a case so as to ward off criticism, or will it mean they are worse than North American parents and will say outright - "You suck." I'm thinking probably the latter because if I can get called "fat foreigner" by some random girl as I'm walking down the street then I'm pretty sure they'll tell me what they think of my teaching outright. I'm fairly nervous but I spent the morning planning out tonight's three lessons so I think I should be okay, as long as the kids don't decide to randomly turn on me.
My place was looking pretty scuzzy up until today, well scuzzy for me which is still fairly clean by anybody else's standards. Even so I'm noticing these little red bumps here and there on my body, one on my arm and four or five on my lower legs right by my ankle, plus three on my right foot. I'm praying it's not fleas and is just bed mites or something that will be solved by washing my sheets, but they definitely weren't there last night. Also the cockroach situation is goin goin outta control, I found another one in my bathroom, called Richard in a panic and he told me to swat it out with newspaper then pour bleach down the drain, which I did. I have to buy cockroach traps this week to put under the sink and in the bathroom. There was a third little present on my welcome mat yesterday as I found a roach lying dead on it's back. Now this I could take care of with just a simple shriek and a newspaper shovel.
Sunday night was a bit of a debacle at the Paradise bar down by West Lake, which I visited for a good seven hours with two other teachers. I knocked back about 5 of those super-sized Siwo beers plus a shot of jack that got mostly sputtered out, by the end of the evening (before the puking began) I just remember ending up in a very involved conversation about politics between our table (one republican American, one liberal Australian, one somewhere in-between aka I had no idea what I was talking about Canadian) and the table near ours which was filled with Brits and a couple of English-speaking Chinese guys. Very, very bizarre. At some point I ended up lying on the bathroom floor, throwing up most of my innards and then some! The guys were great though, they waited for me and told me it was fine, Richard even sat on the floor beside me and tried to tell me funny stories from what I can recall. The next morning, yesterday, was pretty terrible and I had to take motion sickness pills and eat plain tea biscuits. I was still feeling while teaching my class last night, blahh, never again.
Tomorrow is my day off so I think I'm going to try to catch the Y bus downtown, which is only 3 kuai and takes you to all the tourist destinations ie. Mr Guo's villa, Wuhan gardens, Leifang Pagoda, etc. I'll save Lonjiang tea village for when Mom is here next week. I also need to pick up some things at Carrefour and see if the cheese has gotten any cheaper. I got a smallish block of Swiss for about 7 dollars (and oh, it was the sweetest seven dollars I have ever spent) and have been slowly but surely trying to savour it right down to the last crumb.
Teaching English has turned me into a bit of a neanderthal when I speak English to anybody here now, constantly over-pronouncing the words and saying "Where...are...you...from?" "what....is...your...name?" even if I'm talking to someone with like a Masters in English. Even worse than this is I'm realizing how bad I am at my own mothertongue: last week I was trying to talk about 'a' and 'an' with another teacher and I couldn't remember what they were called before I finally blurted out, "oh, you know, particles!" (Correct answer: articles.)
Song of the week: Red Flags & Long Nights by She Wants Revenge
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Monday, June 4, 2007
I'm on an indie electronica kick this week.
If this ever stops being worth it, like, one day I wake up and think - "Wow, I don't want to teach today," - I am going to try to remember tonight's class of nine-year olds. I'm teaching a few of my classes the concept of "What do you like?" and "What don't you like?" The typical answers are "I like dog", "I like pizza", "I don't like insect", etc. I was pretty tired from the rigorous workout of all-day weekend classes so even my solitary Monday night class seemed like some huge feat, and on top of that, it was raining like crazy so I was wet, tired, hungry, teaching a class I'd already done about fifty times the week before, and didn't really feel like pouring all my energy into 30 minutes with these twenty-seven children who did not want to be there. At the end of the class, I'm heading towards the door and the kids are all shrieking "Bye-bye, teacher!" and one little girl who had been sitting at the back - I don't even remember her name - leans in as I'm walking by, gets this big huge smile on her face and says, "I like teacher." It was probably one of the best feelings in the world for me; teaching is incredibly difficult but it's rewarding beyond belief. I have so much respect for all the teachers I've had in my life, from pre-school to college.
I wish I'd taken the time to update this over the past three weeks but everytime I tried, I'd just get stuck and the one time I did have a fairly length update, I lost it because Flickr crashed. Needless to say I love China from the bottom of my heart. Hangzhou is one of the most incredible places I've ever been to let alone lived in and I've hardly scraped the surface. I'm trying to slowly but surely cover the tourist traps but it's getting increasingly hot (except for this past week - I've actually taken to sleeping under two sheets instead of the usual one) and thus increasingly harder to drag myself out into the humidity and sun for several hours at a time. I've done parts of West Lake and some of the downtown, especially the area I live in, and today I went to one of the biggies: Hefang Road. I guess it's supposed to be an "old fashioned" style street with little booths and vendors, and numerous shops touting everything from fans and calligraphy to noodles to giant ginger roots suspended in liquid inside equally massive jars. There was this one shop in particular that was filled with Thai, Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, and Indonesian things... like jewellry, wall-hangings, carvings, clothing, man I wanted to stay there forever, everything was so gorgeous and colourful. My apartment is so drab right now and I need something to liven it up so I might go back when my mom's here in two weeks and just raid the store for anything that will look even remotely good in my place.
Before I hit up the shopping portion of Hefang, I followed some people off the main drag and headed up some big stone steps that were leading up a mountain I later identified as Mt. Wu. It was a pretty tiring climb but after tackling 8 sets of stairs several times a day to get to my apartment and an additional six particularly huge flights to get to Victory English School's main floor, it wasn't as big as an ordeal as it could've been. The result of the hike wasn't much except sore feet and pretty trees. I guess the mountain actually just has some hotels and spas and whatnot, nothing of real interest. Following my trek was the shopping and then I hopped in a cab and crossed over to the other side of downtown to get to Hangzhou's new Subway. Now, I heard a lot of bad things about this Subway from the Hangzhou expat sites but it was perfectly fine, tasted exactly like a Subway sub from back home, all the ingredients were about as fresh adn they toasted the bread. The beauty of this place is that it's only about a fifteen minute walk from my apartment complex so I foresee plenty of Subway in my future. Either that or the restaurant I've nicknamed the Dusty Lantern due to it's...well, dusty lanterns hanging out front. It's pretty sketchy looking when you're inside and I really question the cleanliness of anything there but the food is fantastic - I'm in love with their stir-fried eggplant/tofu/chilis/mushrooms plate with a bowl of rice, all for 13 kuai. You can't beat that. They also have big bowls of noodles with veggies and hot broth for 5 kuai. Better still, this place is like...literally a two minute walk from my apartment.
Looking back on the last three weeks is like looking through somebody's digital camera really quickly; I have these snapshots in my head of just these moments that stuck. A three-hour hotpot lunch with a few of my co-workers, drinking gigantic beers in the rain with my dad by West Lake, chatting with the Korean fashion designer from Brooklyn in Starbucks, peeling pipas in the kitchen with Miss Linn, watching six straight hours of Taken over cups of instant coffee, watching the elderly do tai chi at 6am by the lake, getting lost in a network of hutongs while looking for Trust-Mart and subsequently getting yelled at in Chinese by a man with no teeth, chatting through the Mandarin-English phrasebook with a smiling family on the bullet train, teaching kids in classrooms so hot I could feel the perspiration dripping down my back, passing tanks of live frogs, turtles, eels, and numerous other fauna in the CenturyMart grocery store, humid mornings spent strolling around my neighbourhood, hacking up both my lungs from the pollution, making instant cappuccino in dusty old jello containers at school with one of the Australian ESL teachers, and a multitude of other little memories that are insignificant at the time but come back to me days later. These are the moments that make living here worth it. When I get frustrated from the language barrier and the lack of understanding, when I want to just sit down and cry because I miss the comfort of security and safety and cleanliness and familiarity, when I just get so tired of the constant stares - that's when I remember why I love this city, this country, why I love this job and why I chose to do it to begin with.
I wish I'd taken the time to update this over the past three weeks but everytime I tried, I'd just get stuck and the one time I did have a fairly length update, I lost it because Flickr crashed. Needless to say I love China from the bottom of my heart. Hangzhou is one of the most incredible places I've ever been to let alone lived in and I've hardly scraped the surface. I'm trying to slowly but surely cover the tourist traps but it's getting increasingly hot (except for this past week - I've actually taken to sleeping under two sheets instead of the usual one) and thus increasingly harder to drag myself out into the humidity and sun for several hours at a time. I've done parts of West Lake and some of the downtown, especially the area I live in, and today I went to one of the biggies: Hefang Road. I guess it's supposed to be an "old fashioned" style street with little booths and vendors, and numerous shops touting everything from fans and calligraphy to noodles to giant ginger roots suspended in liquid inside equally massive jars. There was this one shop in particular that was filled with Thai, Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, and Indonesian things... like jewellry, wall-hangings, carvings, clothing, man I wanted to stay there forever, everything was so gorgeous and colourful. My apartment is so drab right now and I need something to liven it up so I might go back when my mom's here in two weeks and just raid the store for anything that will look even remotely good in my place.
Before I hit up the shopping portion of Hefang, I followed some people off the main drag and headed up some big stone steps that were leading up a mountain I later identified as Mt. Wu. It was a pretty tiring climb but after tackling 8 sets of stairs several times a day to get to my apartment and an additional six particularly huge flights to get to Victory English School's main floor, it wasn't as big as an ordeal as it could've been. The result of the hike wasn't much except sore feet and pretty trees. I guess the mountain actually just has some hotels and spas and whatnot, nothing of real interest. Following my trek was the shopping and then I hopped in a cab and crossed over to the other side of downtown to get to Hangzhou's new Subway. Now, I heard a lot of bad things about this Subway from the Hangzhou expat sites but it was perfectly fine, tasted exactly like a Subway sub from back home, all the ingredients were about as fresh adn they toasted the bread. The beauty of this place is that it's only about a fifteen minute walk from my apartment complex so I foresee plenty of Subway in my future. Either that or the restaurant I've nicknamed the Dusty Lantern due to it's...well, dusty lanterns hanging out front. It's pretty sketchy looking when you're inside and I really question the cleanliness of anything there but the food is fantastic - I'm in love with their stir-fried eggplant/tofu/chilis/mushrooms plate with a bowl of rice, all for 13 kuai. You can't beat that. They also have big bowls of noodles with veggies and hot broth for 5 kuai. Better still, this place is like...literally a two minute walk from my apartment.
Looking back on the last three weeks is like looking through somebody's digital camera really quickly; I have these snapshots in my head of just these moments that stuck. A three-hour hotpot lunch with a few of my co-workers, drinking gigantic beers in the rain with my dad by West Lake, chatting with the Korean fashion designer from Brooklyn in Starbucks, peeling pipas in the kitchen with Miss Linn, watching six straight hours of Taken over cups of instant coffee, watching the elderly do tai chi at 6am by the lake, getting lost in a network of hutongs while looking for Trust-Mart and subsequently getting yelled at in Chinese by a man with no teeth, chatting through the Mandarin-English phrasebook with a smiling family on the bullet train, teaching kids in classrooms so hot I could feel the perspiration dripping down my back, passing tanks of live frogs, turtles, eels, and numerous other fauna in the CenturyMart grocery store, humid mornings spent strolling around my neighbourhood, hacking up both my lungs from the pollution, making instant cappuccino in dusty old jello containers at school with one of the Australian ESL teachers, and a multitude of other little memories that are insignificant at the time but come back to me days later. These are the moments that make living here worth it. When I get frustrated from the language barrier and the lack of understanding, when I want to just sit down and cry because I miss the comfort of security and safety and cleanliness and familiarity, when I just get so tired of the constant stares - that's when I remember why I love this city, this country, why I love this job and why I chose to do it to begin with.
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