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4th May
Monday was a fairly quite day, my first class was cancelled. I ate with Rich in the afternoon and saw some of my students.
On Tuesday I had a good early class with my Chinese 3rd years and then caught up with some marking before meeting Darcy for lunch. I did some lesson planning in the afternoon then John came to campus for tea. It was a fairly productive day.
On Wednesday I had 6 classes instead of my usual 2. In the final 2 classes I watched a film with my English second years. They were a good class, about 12 girls and all quite clever and enthusiastic. I thought it might be nice to show them a movie that had some culture behind it. Dickens was British, they'll know him because he's old, the modern version of "Great Expectations" is a good movie, but I thought I should just add a disclaimer that there might be a slight amount of nudity… OH MY GOD. Nakedness?! Well that wasn't allowed! So we watched "A Little Princess instead", another old British novel, except this one was aimed at children.
In hindsight, I should've known better.
After my class I was invited by some of my Chinese second years to have tea in their dormitory. They weren't really allowed to cook so I had to sneak in. They were really nice though and it was good to talk to a small group of them outside of class. I got to know them a lot better and learnt a bit more about their life and Chinese culture. I found most of them had not wanted to study Chinese as their major, but bad high school grades or no money to get them to a better university meant they didn't have any other choice. One girl wanted to be a business woman like her aunt, but she was not allowed to study business because her parents didn't think it was important for a girl, so she went to the local university to study Chinese. She was still quite determined though and worked hard, her English was one of the best in the class.
Thursday morning, as usual, was mostly spent lounging around! My afternoon classes went well, and after class me, Richard and Kevin got together to go and grab some tea. We decided to go out to the North gate and found a crate of snakes outside of one of the nice restaurants! Typically Rich was intrigued by the idea of eating something strange and expensive, so we went in and ordered. Kevin did some translating and the boys went outside to choose the snake, I took photos from inside behind the glass! The snakes weren't poisonous but they could still bite. The guy who worked at the restaurant first attempted to pick up the live snakes with chopsticks, but they were a bit heavy and he ended up getting some pincers. Rich chose his snake, it's head was unceremoniously lopped into a bin outside the restaurant, and when the food arrived we enjoyed a very nice meal.
Friday was an easy teaching day with a movie in the afternoon. After I finished classes me and John decided to try to go to Changsha for the evening, it's only 45 minutes away, should've been easy right?
So we were ready to go at 6, but the taxi didn't move until 8 because we were waiting for 1 extra person. We arrived about 9 and met Sam and Aggy and went to Papa Johns for pizza yummy! We went to 4698 bar and saw and band and had a few beers before people got tired and we tried to get back to Yiyang. It turns out at 12:30am there are no taxis, so we ended up buying a train ticket for 2:30am. We wasted some time in McDonalds then went to wait in the train station, but it was delayed an hour!
We rolled back into campus about 5am, just as the sun was coming up…
I slept a lot of Saturday and met Rich about 5pm to go to John's house for tea. Afterwards we went to Xiufeng Park and had beer and BBQ next to the other college. We hadn't been sitting there long before a girl came and started talking to us. "Hi! You are the foreign teachers at Hunan City University! I know Amy from Changsha!" And she took this as an invite to sit down and join us. It was actually nice to hear a little about Amy, she's been to a training course with her and only had good things to say, which isn't surprising since Amy is pretty ace!
Sunday was spent a little hung over, me and Rich went shopping in Wal-Mart in the afternoon. It was very exciting, we had decided to cook Sunday dinner! We bought some plates and knifes and forks, Rich bought a roast chicken and we bought the closest things to English vegetables and gravy that we could find.
We invited Lisa and John over when we were ready so they could try some traditional English food. Me and Rich were really excited, it was sooooo good to eat Sunday dinner after about 9 months, but Lisa and John were less impressed. I personally think we did a great job and they weren't open minded enough! I can still taste it now…..
The following week was very hot, but I'm missing notes, so I can't remember what happened!
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