It's all Latin to me...

Our students have now descended upon the 高等教育镇 (gāoděngjiàoyù zhèn) - or ‘Higher Education Town’ to us westerners – and they are well underway with their grueling mili-training. We saw them go through the various exercises and learning the essential songs and how to run in a variety of formations on Sunday evening, and needless to say we were more than happy that we were never expected to take part. They get real army instructors in, and we wonder if they have been naughty and in need of being punished – a bit like traffic-cops - or if it is indeed an honour for them to be teaching our wonderfully motivated students how to hold a fighting pose for several minutes. The students have one more week left of their training, and then they will go home for the mid-autumn festival break, which lasts for 10 days, and THEN they will enter our classrooms, where they will wish that they were back in mili-training!! By then we will have had several weeks of preparation for each class, and we can assure you that the students are going to be busy!

We’re not just spending time prepping however. We are also receiving on-the-job training, mainly from Mark, and we are just loving it. The students are lovely, if a little shy or self-absorbed, and they just seem to love the fact thatwe’ve come so far to teach them good English! The girls are falling over themselves to impress Joe, if, of course, they can speak at all for the big butterflies in their tummies when they see him, and the boys flush bright red when Anette asks them questions in class and turn they into Dopey/Bashful, or they might really want to give it a go to impress her! Anette was asked to teach a full 2 hour lesson on Tuesday on something that was pretty complicated and extremely dry, yet it is something the students must master if they are to stand a chance at getting into an overseas university to complete their degrees, which is something many of them dream of… or their parents dream of – it seems that a lack of motivation in our students, due to studying for something their parents have chosen for them, is going to be a constant obstacle for us throughout our time here. Anette had prepared the whole lesson herself, and although it was tough getting through the material in class, she was practically jumping for joy at the end of the class when she saw that at least SOME of what the lesson had taught them had actually sunk in. She was even happier yesterday when she got their homework back, and they had all made a pretty good attempt at getting it right! Oh the joys of teaching. We can tell already that we’re going to love this job.

However, when it does get tough, we’ll just try to remember a bloke we saw the other day whose job it was to scoop water off the basketball court with a dustpan. The poor bloke was nearly breaking his back doing this rather (to us, at least) demoralising job, and as soon as he’d finished with the very large puddle of water the heavens opened and it rained for 24hours straight. But the cloud always has a silver lining – he’ll never be out of a job.

Tolerance and patience and a great deal of flexibility are three virtues one must possess if one is to cope in the Chinese labour market (Exhibit A: the poor bloke with the dustpan). When you want anything done here or indeed need to get stuff done, then one must always go through the appropriate channels, bang your head against a wall, fill in the correct paperwork, bang your head against another wall, sign here please, get the red stamp, take a headache pill, hope that you were able to make yourself understood, and then maybe – just maybe – you might get a result! We had been here (at work) for 2 and a half weeks when HR all of a sudden realised that our degree certificates that we’d given them on our first day was actually in – gasp – LATIN! Oh joy… the HR assistant tracked Anette down and looked at her rather suspiciously as if this was a kind of fake degree from some Mickey Mouse University written in a made-up language. Anette calmly pointed out to her that there was in fact an English translation in smaller text at the bottom of the certificate, but she had been so completely thrown by the Latin, that she’d never even dared to look for anything remotely readable! We needed our degree certificates to get the jobs here, but now more importantly we need to get our ‘Foreign Expert Certificate’, so that we can get our work- and residence-permits and sorted out… very, very soon!! Our American flat-mate Phil’s certificate was also in Latin, but his did not have an English translation at the bottom, so he and Anette set out to translate it ourselves without any dictionaries, and ended up with something that was probably – more or less – correct.

We were supposed to have gone for interviews with the local police today, but we can’t yet, because we still don’t have our Foreign Expert Certificates! All of this is essential for us to get our Z-visas (employment-visas) so that we can actually work here legally! Our tourist visas will expire before this time next week – something we told them when we first arrived... See what we mean? - Tolerance and patience…

Over the weekend we went shopping again with Jon, Mark and Weiwei at a new shopping district called Times Square (i.e. New York). It’s really nice and has all sorts of Western and Japanese shops – as well as a Subway and Starbucks!! – Oh yes, we enjoyed that very, very much indeed! . Apparently every city in China has a Times Square in it – a western concept that the Chinese seem to like. Something that they don’t seem to like so much – western prices! Oh yes, you can buy western stuff, but you have to pay for it! Still cheaper than home, but well out of the price range of the average Chinese – something that comes with a great bonus – this vast shopping area is virtually empty! We were there, all day Saturday, in a purpose built shopping district, in a large city within one of the most heavily and densely populated metropolises in the world… and there’s hardly anyone there! Check out the picture, it really was that empty – it was really rather nice that it wasn’t as crowded as Guan Qin Street or the streets near there (in downtown Suzhou).

We found a wonderful Japanese supermarket that had several amazing-looking Japanese restaurants as neighbours, and Joe was over the moon when he found his favourite Japanese food – Okonomiaki, Kansai style! He was very happy, with seafood Kansai okonomiaki and a Starbucks iced matcha (Japanese green tea) latte in his belly - we truly felt as if we’d been transported over to Japan for the afternoon, and we really loved it. – It was a welcome break from Chinese food, and a wonderful reminder to the tastebuds of our time in the land of the rising sun two years ago, the experience that inspired us to come and teach in Asia.

Anyway, this is getting rather long, so we'd better return to our textbooks and look forward to whatever the rest of this week will bring. We’ve only got a 1 day weekend this coming weekend, so the next blog entry might be a bit late again. We are going to be working on Sunday, so that we can get 10 consecutive days off for Mid-Autumn Festival, which starts a week tomorrow (Wednesday). We’re planning on going to visit Jeremy, Lynn and Isla (brother & sister-in-law, and our beautiful little niece) in Ningbo, and we are hoping that we’ll be able to visit Huangshan for a couple of days as well. Huangshan (or Mount Huang, literally “Yellow Mountain”) is supposed to be one of the top sights in China, so we’re looking forward to that.