Time flies when you are having fun, and we realised that it's been 2 weeks since we last updated this blog, but fear not dear friends and family, we are still here and haven't forgotten about you! We have been rather busy the last two weeks with work. Now that the semester has properly started we are almost snowed under in marking, teaching, planning, organising and carrying out extra curricular activities for and with the students. We are involved in English Club as teachers for the students who are actually interested in improving their English through a variety of activities. Joe is running a school magazine, which the students will write for and Joe will act as an editor - so he will get a lot of practice in correcting grammar! Anette is running 2 reading circles where the students will learn to analyse literature and discover that reading books can be fun. Most of the students' ideas of books are that they are boring textbooks that must be read and re-read for optimal learning. They will be reading About A Boy to start with, and then they will watch the film at the end - a sweet little carrot for them! Other than that we are involved with the Drama Club on Wednesday evenings and Film Fridays, which just makes Friday afternoons all the more fun before our weekly English Dept. staff meeting over at the MBA Hotel bar! The English Club is all on top of our workload, which is 20-21 hours of teaching every week, so as you can probably imagine we are kept very busy. They also wanted us to take part in a new venture called “English Salon”, but we drew the line there, so instead we were given some evening shifts of supervising student tutors at nightly revision sessions for the students.
Last week our bosses came to see us teach in preparation for the annual Hong Kong Uni Quality Control Committee's arrival this week. Despite us being novice teachers we both received glowing recommendations, so we were just over the moon! This week we then had the class visit from the QC accompanied by our Űberboss. We were both quite nervous about it, despite the success from the week before, but we both think we did well and that we won't be out of a job anytime soon! This week we also gave our students their first test, and it became very clear that Joe has indeed been blessed with the best students! But Anette has never declined a challenge and she is determined that her students will beat Joe’s! It's healthy with a little bit of competition to keep things interesting!
We've moved closer to get all the things that we were promised in our contracts. We finally got our Residence Visa last week - just short of 2 months after arriving here in China on a 30 day tourist Visa. We were once again taken to the police station in a shack-like building, this time it had some brown marks on the walls...we did not want to think about what had been going on in there before. Then we were taken to the Visa centre where we waited for nearly 2 hours, smiled at a camera and then left. 5 days later we got our passports back with a pretty 10 month Visa - yay! So things do get done out here, you've just got to be patient. We sometimes we wonder how anything gets done in China. Every decision seems to require a committee meeting, umming and ahh-ing and then finally a red stamp for approval before anything happens. The other thing that we were missing was the 4 hours of Chinese lessons we had been promised. After many kind reminders to the HR dept. we finally got an email informing us that they would indeed start on Friday at 4 - 5.30 pm. No, thank you, we said. That did not work for us. Remember the English Dept. staff meeting we just mentioned... far more important. So we managed to rearrange the lessons for a Tuesday and Thursday afternoon when we and Mark are not teaching, and we can be good students and finally learn some Chinese. We've survived ok until now with Nihao and Xiexie, but it would make things a little bit easier if we could make ourselves understood in shops and taxies! - although we now know how to look for fresh milk instead of UHT milk and we now also know what wheat flour should look like, so Joe has promised to make pancakes for his wife tomorrow morning!
We are loving our new flat. We have hired a cleaner to come and clean once a week, and we were well chuffed when we saw that she’d also done the washing up from the night before. How many graduates can afford a cleaner 4 months after graduating - even if it does only cost 31RMB for a clean flat and fresh bedding!
It’s still very nice and warm, and we are enjoying the sunshine as much as we can before the weather turns in November.
Below are some pictures of our apartment. Until next time - take care!
Oooh, we found this little video of us playing in the bubbles as well - enjoy!
And the view from our balcony:
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