Joe and Anette - the Superstars!!

We were let loose on the students on Tuesday morning. Joe, Phil and I were assisting Mark in his EP3 class - a supposedly good class of English students, and I'm sure they were too, only they were very shy and it was difficult to get them to open their mouths and string 3 words together in English. But we had fun and on Wednesday Mark wanted us to prepare and teach the whole lesson. We had a lot of fun with them, and it gave Mark a chance to see what we are like as teachers, so it was a useful exercise for all of us! Afterwards he gave us all things to teach this coming week, and some of it is very difficult and challenging because it's preparing them for the IELTS exam, which is needed if any of the students want to continue studying overseas at a British, American or Australian university, because they will need to be fluent then, so… no pressure! Teaching, we've found already, is a lot of fun though, and the students are lovely and interesting to get to know. We were supervising a revision class on Thurday, and although they ended up not doing a lot of homework, they did a lot of talking to us, so that was kinda the point then, wasn't it?! We've found that the one-child-policy has caused the children to be rather spoiled and somewhat (read: very!) self-centred, not always showing much consideration for the other students if they are trying to say something, so that is probably something we have to be aware of in our own classrooms. The students we are getting in our classes arrived to HKU SPACE today and yesterday, so there has been a lot of festival-like activities going on in the M-Zone (a shopping square type thing opposite the school) and when Joe and I were out for a bit of a gander today, we saw a lot of new students and their parents getting registered and settling in. The students stay in dorms to the left of the square, and they are often sharing these smalls dorms with 3 - 7 other students, so it's a bit tight in there. Over in student-land they often play dance music in public mushroom-shaped loudspeakers outside the dorms, so you know when you enter the student zone! But back to the square and our little walk. We were walking on said square and saw lots of new students, and of course, as per usual, Joe and I were stared at a lot and unashamedly by all our Chinese bypassers. But today we saw a group of 5 girls who were gigling and staring an unusual amount when we walked by, so we stopped, walked over there and asked if they were new students by any chance. And yes, they were. We introduced ourselves as the English teachers that we are, and before we knew it our afternoon turned into a pop-star-like frenzy of photographs and "V"signs! We're getting used to students 'secretly' snatching pictures of us when they think we aren't noticing, but this was a full-blown photo-frenzy, and it was hilarious! Can't wait to see what the next couple of weeks are gonna be like, seeing that our new students will be settling in this week and starting their mili-training and then they will start to adjust to life at HKU SPACE! I also can't wait to get our own classes and see what that'll be like and meet our own students. I'm sure it's gonna be tough, because the level of English we see in these new students could have been a bit higher, but I love challenges and we're both convinced that we are going to have a lot of fun with them!

Yesterday we went shopping in down-town Suzhou with Mark and his fiancee Weiwei, who's my age and a really sweet girl. In China it is quite normal to a whole streets all selling the same items, so for example if you want to buy an iron pipe, then you will go to the street that sells just that. Joe needed to get his English phone unlocked, so we went to the area that deals with phones (two Nokia shops right next door to each other… Only in China!). It turned out that they weren't convinced that he hadn't stolen the phone, so he was unsuccesful in his unlocking-quest, and ended up having to buy a new phone... for RMB 288... But we can now call each other, so we're happy about that! - Not that we'll be apart for great periods at a time, but it's useful for when he goes to the DVD shop on a Sunday morning, while I'm still curled up in bed, and he can call and ask me which films I'd be interested in. Anyway, the shopping trip didn't end there, because Mark needed a special type of fish food for, well I think you probably guessed it, his fish. So, naturally, we went to the street with all the aquariums and pets. The street basically had tropical - and most likely rather illigally imported fish and choral, on the left side of the street and pet shops lining the right side of the street. The whole street stank of animal gunk. We went from one aquarium shop to the next, and I almost felt as if we'd entered a marine/water museum and forgotten to pay! The fish were spectacular and many of them were incredibly rare... Some of them had been deemed to not be pretty enough with their natural colours of bright yellow and white, so the shop owners had done them a favour of painting roses and flowers on their sides with permanent marker pens, and the fish were now much ... ehm ... prettier(?) We ended up not finding the special fish food for Mark's fish, so we then crossed the road and went into one of the domestic pet areas... and Joe and I were stunned! The poor dogs, cats, rabbits, birds and what have you were all incarcerated in these tiny cages where they had no room to move, and they all looked so sad and unhealthy. We just wanted to get out of there, because, although I am not a huge dog-lover, it really broke our hearts to see how these pets were treated. It has become rather trendy to own a pet here now, and you will find salons that will style your poodle in all the colours of the rainbow should you desire it. We quickly left the pet street after seeing how the pets-to-be were kept and treated pre-pet, and we went to a “western” supermarket, specifically targeted at the ex-pat market, where we found proper nice bread, Lurpak butter, baked beans and anything your western heart might desire out here in China... but these little luxuries were sold at an absolute premium! – We don’t think it will ever come to the point where we will be prepared to pay more than £3 for a generic (not even Kellogg’s!) pack of rice krispies, but it's good to know where it is in the future in case we get a serious dose of home-sickness and crave baked beans or breadrolls with proper butter!

Being shown around the city centre by an ex-pat who has been living here for two years and his local girlfriend has it’s advantages. We were shown an Indian restaurant and treated to a curry right up there with the best we have ever had – a really welcome break after 2 weeks of Chinese food 3 times a day! Not to say that we are not enjoying the local cuisine as well, but variety is the spice of life, if you’ll excuse the pun.

This week will see us three new teachers split up (gasp!) and sent off to separate classrooms by ourselves to teach. Sink or swim, and nobody to hide behind if it all goes wrong! We have been planning our own materials and we are excited to see if the students are at the level we hope/expect/need them to be at… but we will know very soon.

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