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.
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