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So I have finally started a blog! It almost seems a little late because I feel like I have done so much, but I am sure that most of the adventure is still to come. Unfortunately this does mean that you have a lot to catch up on!!!
As most of you know my first week was spent in "quarantine" because of swine flu. Quarantine sounds a little more dramatic considering we were in a hotel for a week, but it was pretty annoying to be in Beijing and to not be able to go out anywhere.
I was in the hotel with 42 other "high risk" swine flu quarantiners. There was a second hotel of "low rise" people from countries such as Denmark, Germany and Finland. In the first week we had an amazing time. drinking a lot of Pi jiu (Beer), playing drinking games and even breaking our KTV (karaoke) virginity (Where Kieran butchered I will always love you).
I also discovered that I was pretty good at the drinking game flunkey ball, and rubbish at opening beer without a bottle opener (a German trick that I must learn before I leave China).
I now have a Chinese name too. We had to choose 2 adjectives to describe ourselves. Luckily Alex and Adam choose Serene and Graceful for me. I ended up with the name Ya Jing. Mandarin is a pretty complicated language, and if I get the tones wrong when I say it I could be introducing myself as Graceful Whale.
When we finally got out of quarantine (none of us had swine flu) we moved to UIBE (The University of Business and Economics) in the North West of Beijing. It was pretty intense meeting the 60 other people from the second hotel, but really exciting to all be together at last.
Beijing is an amazing city (although the smog did get to me after a while). I was only there for 3 weeks and had very little free time because of the course, but I managed to do so much. I have been to the great wall of China, seen the Ming Tombs, been to the Birds Nest and Watercube (After seeing them I have realised that the London Olympics are going to be s***!) Spent a lot of time on bar street, I have been to the art district twice (and I've still only seen about 10% of it), had a water fight, been to the Lama temple, the temple of heaven, saw Arsenal v Everton in a random sports ball where you could play basketball, darts, snooker and loads of other random things, I have eaten scorpions, starfish, crickets, lamb penis, squid, been to a confucius temple, written rap songs, had a chinese massage, watched chinese opera, set up a quidditch team, Rocked out to music at D22 with some random 50's punk band, I have been to the summer palace, ridden in a rickshaw around Hoi lake, discovered the incredible Manchester bar and spend many a night there playing drinking games (there's now a photo of us on the wall), I have also been to tian'anmen square, seen Chinese acrobatics, been to a swedish crayfish party, and qualified in my TEFL course.
I hadn't realised how much I had done in the last month!!
For the last week I have been living in Shenyang. Shenyang is the capital of Liaoning province, and of northeast China. Before I found out I was going to be living here for 5 months I had no idea that there was a part of China wedged between North Korea, Mongolia and Russia, nor that those 3 countries were so close together.
It seems like a pretty awesome city. I am about 20 mins out, but I am going to go and buy a bike tomorrow, so the distance shouldn't be too annoying in the future.
My school is a boarding school and is dedicated to teaching foreign languages. I live on campus and share a corridor with another english teacher (Serena), a french teacher and 3 japanese teachers.
This is my school
http://www.ycwgy.com/Article/xygk/xxgy/200804/14.html
It's pretty modern, and it is a good place to work. The students are relatively well behaved, but it's only the first week, so I can't really tell how it's going to go. My room is like a hotel room, so it's pretty comfy, and I now have a computer in my room. We're pretty lucky that we live on campus, because we are able to come back to our rooms in between classes.
I have 5 different classes at the moment. 4 junior two classes (year 8 or second form) and one senior level 3 (year 12 or upper 6th form). They are really good students (at the moment). For my first lesson I made my younger classes write out their own rules and forfeits, so they know what's going to happen to them if they misbehave.
My senior students are my favourite class. They are planning to go to university abroad, and I am there to improve their english and teach the the culture. They are a little bit quiet, but we have already covered their ambitions, slang and idioms. I already have a lot of their work to mark, which is frustrating because they all have varying forms of english and some of them make very simple mistakes that I am not 100% sure how to explain why they are wrong.
Unfortunately everyone's spelling is better than mine, so I have to be really careful what I write on the board because they will correct me!
I have my year 8 classes 3 times a week, and there's an average of 50 to a class, so it can be a bit of a nightmare! In the first lessons I made them all make name tags and some of them have some brilliant names. I have a Mandy in one class and a Bruce in the other (my parents names) There are a lot of students called Monkey and Candy, I also have a bamboo, Ocean, Barton, Alien (E.T.). No Name and 250 - and they're just the ones that I can remember.
I have only had one moment when I didn't know how to manage the class. Basically I was getting them to play a game where they wrote one sentence about themselves, they put it into a hat, take another one out and find who's sentence they had (they were only meant to speak in english, but that went slightly astray). I then asked people to tell me what they had found out about the other student. One student stood up and said "I had John's sentence. He likes porn!" Everyone laughed and I quickly moved on, but was still not sure what to say.
I am sure there are going to be a lot more random comments in the fture....it should be a lot of fun!!
There's more info of what I've been doing, about China and some photo's on http://www.iesglobal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=54&Itemid=211, but I think you've read enough already!!
Sorry that it's such a long entry, but there was a lot of catching up to do!!!
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