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Last weekend was lovely. Not everyone who was coming from Beijing managed to make it to Shenyang. They were practicing for "Golden Week" and the whole city was shut down. Some of our friends got trapped in Beijing because there were no buses, no underground and the taxi's were only allowed to go to the 4th ring road (honestly - we thought London was bad!)
Luckily Jamie and Matthias still made it. They were given the time off by their school so that they could make it on time.
On the Friday night myself and Serena were meant to be going to Kung Fu, but after a bit of a mess up on the buses we completely missed it. Hopefully we will be able to make it this week.
On Saturday we went to the Imperial Palace in Shenyang. It's very beautiful and because there aren't many tourists that come here it was very quiet.
In the evening we were going to go to Oktoberfest at one of the bars, but once we got there decided that it was too expensive for us. But it was fun just to be there for a while to watch chinese people skipping about to German music and drinking giant glasses of beer.
We ended up going out for a Japanese meal and going to a few bars. Sorry Mum and Dad for the next bit!! We ended up getting back to Oley's at about 6am and while Adam was saying the loooonnnnngggggeeeesssttt goodbye to Matthias I fell asleep behind a plant pot (It was 6 in the morning!). Anyway - this was a good thing because I was not suppose to be on their campus because of swine flu, so when the guard came out to check everything was OK Oley panicked thinking that I would get thrown out of the school. Luckily I was completely concealed by the huge plant pot and quite safe (except from the mosquito's who had a bit of a feeding frenzy).
At school this week I have been teaching them about Britain. My God I hadn't realised that we were just a country of social misfits before now - and I didn't even cover Morris dancing!
At the start of the first lesson I asked what they knew about Britain and one class said "they drink a lot of beer". When point at the Queen and asking who it was they said "Queen Elizabeth number 2", and some got very confused because they wanted to know who the number 1 queen was. I had a quiz for them today (only one class out of 4 has done it so far) and may fav answer so far was when asking what instrument they played in Scotland one girl said the Big Pipes - which was pretty good even though it wasn't quite right.
This week I also made a room full of 18 year old understand the offside rule. It was the first time I have explained it (and will probably be the only time) with out a man inturrupting me. I was pretty proud of my self. Who knew that the classroom in China would be the only place in the world where a woman would have the last word on football.
My seniors are driving me a little bit insane at the moment. They're not doing their homework for me, and I am not 100% sure what to do now. I have set them extra work as punishment, but they didn't do that either. I want to have a lunch time detention, but that's not normal in China, and it's pretty evil considering that it's their only big break during the day and they work 6am-9.30pm. I am sure I will think of something.
Serena had a bit of a drama yesterday. All of us have mercury thermometers to take our temperatures just in case we had swine flu (don't ask/don't get me started!). 2 of her children dropped and broke their thermometers at the start of a lesson and were on the floor on their hands and knees trying to clear it up. She stopped them, but carried on with the lesson. At the end of the lesson one boy ran out of the room to throw up and the other children said that he had eaten mercury and that he was going to die (Ok - they didn't say mercury, but from the hand actions and what they said that's what Serena understood). She panicked and went to find a teacher, but couldn't find any, so she came to get me. Together we went to get the French teacher who lives on our corridor. We explained what happened and he came with us to explain to the nurse what happened. We got to the nurses room and the French teacher explained the situation in Chinese and they went to get the boy. The boy got taken out of class and shouted at for drinking a bottle of iodine. Lesson for today. Never try and translate an important issue across 3 different languages. It is definitely going to get lost in translation.
Anyway - the boy is fine. He apparently didn't eat the mercury, he only put it in his mouth (because that's obviously a lot better!?!?!).
the 1st to the 8th of October is Golden week and I will be going to Inner Mongolia with a huge group of friends, which I am pretty excited about. However, to make up for the lost days we have to work this Sunday and next Saturday. Oh well.
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