3rd day in Shunde, Daliang

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Seeing as we only have another 3 days before our first ever English class (seriously we must be insane), we decide we should have a look at what we’re actually going to be teaching. It’s a nerve wracking prospect, especially when they have none or very little english. Building a rapport with young people is hard enough without the added pressure of trying to communicate in sign language and hand gestures. We head down to koala school to take a look at the teaching text books and are slightly disheartened when the teachers instructions pack is all in chinese language! There’s no English version to follow, so it looks like we’ll be winging it by trying to decipher the topics based on the pictures and words in the kids’ exercise books. Now we’re even more worried! Still, we have to remind ourselves the main thing is they should have fun, so when in doubt, have some gap filler games and songs prepared, or do pair work!! Preparation is my strong point and between us we manage to come up with a pretty watertight first lesson plan for the kindergarten kids. We’ll worry about the older kids later on!

When we’ve finished we decide to head out for a coffee and use the internet in our favourite new café. You can see as soon as we enter that they’re like ‘here come these two numpties again’ although everyone welcomes us warmly. We order two coffees (this time the guy gets his iphone out as soon as we walk through the door) and are pleasantly surprised at how nice the coffee actually is when it arrives. At the same time, they keep bringing us cups of green tea, and we feel obliged to drink them to be polite so they then keep topping it back up again! After a while, we realise we’re getting hungry so this time ask for a rice and chicken dish (with the aid of google translate of course). The waitress shakes her head no. We type in rice and she says yes. We type in chicken she says yes. We put them both together and she says no. After a bit more too-ing and fro-ing, she pulls us over to the kitchen counter and asks us to point to what we want. This consists of a choice between 2 cooked chickens that are hanging up by a hook, or what looks like cooked duck. We point to the chicken (or at least what we assume is chicken) and she seems satisfied. 5 minutes later, she brings us out a plate of rice with a delicious garlic and lemon dip, and then the entire carcass of the chopped up chicken sitting pride of place on top. And I mean everything- the bones, giblets, etc- the only thing missing is the head. We look at it with surprise as we were expecting they would carve it up like you would a roast but no, they just chopped it into 10 pieces from start to finish. I look at Greg who looks at me, and all the while we have an audience of 6 waiters and waitresses all standing at the side of the table watching to see what we do. We tentively pick up our chopsticks and skirt round the chicken to eat some of the rice and smile at the waiters. They seem satisfied enough and disappear. I mutter to greg- ‘I really can’t eat this’ and he agrees- as much as he’ll eat anything, it’s a step too far for him too. The bones and ribcage sticking out kind of puts you off. Still, we eat the huge plate of rice with sauce which is truly delicious. We really need to get a hang of this ordering malarkey! Problem is, every time I try to find the icons for chinese food symbols online, I can’t get them anywhere.

A little while later, once we’ve hidden our whole chicken at the side of the table, we pay and head off to use the gym in our complex. Once we get there, we try to walk in and are stopped by the lady at reception is waving at us like crazy. Turns out we need to pay to use it which is a bit off a rip off in our eyes as we live here! But we calm down a bit when we realise it is about 2 quid for the two of us to use. There’s absolutely no air conditioning, so after 5 minutes the sweat is cascading down both our faces. I can’t believe it when I turn around and see a chinese woman on the treadmill in jeans! She’s not even breaking a sweat. We manage to last 45 minutes and then head back to the apartment for a well deserved tsing tao cold beer and some TV.

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