Archives for December 2009
If on the Mind
Repeating the same lesson 16 times a week comes dangerously close to driving you insane. When, inside that lesson, you use the same question format 50 times, it does drive you insane. As part of my review, I’ve been going over if/then sentences and have been asking for a lot of examples. This also ties into our review of animals, so my questions follow this kind of pattern:
If rabbits had wings, then…
If dogs had horns, then…
If a giraffe is hungry, then…
If a kangaroo is bored, then…
After class, I suddenly can’t help myself from starting every sentence with “if.” On the bus to the park, I kept trying to talk to my girlfriend, but everything came out, “If we have noodles for dinner… If I get out of class at 5:00 tomorrow… If my legs really hurt today… What am I doing? Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
Another Dirty Chinese Restroom
Courtesy of my father’s bravery, this picture comes from a hotel lobby restroom in Jiuzhaigou. Pretty scary stuff.
How to Check Your China Mobile Balance
China Mobile sends out a reminder when your account reaches a particularly low balance, but these messages tend to get lost amongst all the other junk mail. If you missed it, don’t worry. There’s still hope! Write a text message that says Hfcx (and nothing else) and send it to the number 10086. A few seconds later, you’ll get a return message.
This new message is, of course, all in Chinese, but if you scroll down, there will be two numbers followed by a yuan symbol (元). The first number tells you how much you spent last month, and the second number is your current balance. Keep in mind, though, that I’ve only tested this with phones bought in Jiangsu province. The rules may be different in other parts of the country. Feel free to share them if they exist.
Chinese Wedding Banquets
I haven’t attended enough weddings back home to draw fair parallels between the two cultures, but a Chinese wedding is definitely a different experience. It’s more like a banquet, and a couple just happens to be getting married up on stage while everyone chows down. And since this is China, everyone’s chowing down on cigarettes. Every table comes with a bottle of wine, a bottle of beer, a bottle of orange juice, and a tall stack of cigarette boxes. The only place smokier than a wedding is an Internet bar.
While I like the Chinese tradition of only giving the bride and groom money (presented in a red envelope), I don’t approve of the need to hire an MC. Well, okay, he’s like the officiator, even though the couple was already married in a government office, but he’s also relentless with the speeches and the singing and what are ultimately soliloquies. For the whole two hours, he never shuts up! And he’s so loud! The bride, groom, and involved parents do get to say a few words, but it really feels like it’s the MC’s show.
The MC also hosts a game or two and gives prizes away to those who participated. At this last wedding I went to, they pitted some of the girls against the boys in a scavenger hunt competition. Some of the items they were supposed to find included a child’s notebook and a bottle of wine that was still full (good luck with that). In the end, the girls won. Three of them got gigantic stuffed animals to take home. The fourth girl got… two packs of cigarettes. Woohoo.
One More Month of China
I don’t know if I ever officially announced when I was returning to the US (come on, did you really think I was going to stay in China?), but today starts the one-month countdown. Yep, on January 23, I’m outta here. After having been a teacher for 18 months, I’m ready to move on. Teaching was never what I wanted to do for a career, anyway, it was just my way of putting off responsibility for a little longer and having an adventure in the meantime.
My experience in China has been nice, though, despite the many things that irritate me. There is a lot you learn about yourself, about what’s important to you, about what you want to do, about how much your home actually means to you, that you never come to appreciate or understand until you buck up and go live in a foreign country for a few years.
Lesson learned.
I am open to the idea of coming back to China. In fact, coming back is very likely, but it wouldn’t be to teach. I have had my fill as an EFL teacher. Even though classes lately have actually been good, being taken advantage of by the Chinese school system, being an entertainer for the students, and simply repeating a lesson so many times is tiring and stagnating.
I’m tired, guys.
Beware of Giant Children
I’ve seen this sign enough times driving past it, I finally had to get off the bus early so I could take a picture. What are they trying to say? Giant babies shouldn’t pick up people’s cars?
Actually, I believe the small Chinese print underneath the sign is promoting (or trying to promote) a day where people don’t drive their cars in order to protect the environment, but… that’s hard to ascertain from a passing glance at this picture.
What?! Students Don’t Like Homework?!
Oral English class with Mr. Nielsen is pretty much seen as playtime with Mr. Laowai. I know the kids don’t take my class seriously and discard everything we’ve talked about as soon as the bell rings. Now that the semester is nearing the end (still one more month to go, but… I’ve been counting down for a while), I’ve gone back to my old lessons to review. Wow, it’s sad how much they’ve forgotten.
To force them to actually practice what we’ve gone over, I’ve started giving small homework assignments. I know the students are already swamped with homework, so the last five minutes of class is to give them a head start. The first time we did this, they didn’t think I was serious and showed up next week with nothing done. The students who didn’t do it got to stand in back of the class for 15 minutes. Ha! Mr. Nielsen is serious, after all.
The current homework assignment is about the differences between American and British words. It’s good to know, since most of their school books are based solely on the latter. I wanted them to write a conversation between two people (one American, one British) using at least eight of the words we discussed. During the five minutes of work time, I walked around the class and saw some amusing dialogues:
B: Hi.
A: Hi.
B: Nice to meet you.
A: Nice to meet you, too.
B: How are you?
A: I’m fine, thank you. And you?
B: I’m good.
Stop, stop, stop! Let’s not waste time on greetings when all you have to do is use the vocabulary words! And that’s exactly what the next student was trying to do, however lazily:
A: Where is the elevator?
B: Pardon?
A: The elevator. Where is it?
B: Elevator?
A: Yes.
B: Pardon?
A: The elevator.
B: What is an elevator?
Nice try, but you can’t just use the word “elevator” eight times.
I Dream of Butt Massages
Back in my hometown, a poisonous cloud had started spreading across the city. Everyone started to evacuate, but the resulting traffic jams meant I wasn’t able to get out of town fast enough. The poison got to me. It didn’t make me sick, though. It just made my butt itch. Like, really, really bad. The local clinic said my condition was too serious for them to treat. They suggested going to Japan for the cure.
The hospital in Japan was also a restaurant, and one of my friends was dining there with his girlfriend. The doctor took me to a side room, had me lie face down on a table, and proceeded to massage my butt. Yeah, I wasn’t very comfortable with this arrangement. Worse, the table had wheels and kept rolling into the dining hall. I was so embarrassed every time my friend looked up and saw me.
Before the “treatment” was complete, though, a stone golem came to the restaurant, looking for my friend. Apparently, my friend had helped the golem book a flight out of the country and was supposed to escort him to the US. Today. Right now. Naturally, my friend no longer wanted to go, because he was on a date. He asked me to take his place. The golem and I returned to the US.
Home again, I found that my sister had been murdered by an assassin (who was also a friend of mine). My family was worried the assassin would come back to kill the rest of us. We boarded up our house and looked extensively for any secret entrances we didn’t know about. Then the doorbell rang. It was the assassin’s sister, saying she wanted to have a sleep over.
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