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Published: April 28th 2011
Last time I talked to my mom on the phone, she pointed out that I never posted here, to which I pointed out that lately I’ve just been going about a daily routine for the most part. It’s all great fun, but after nearly three years here, I’m at the point where Wuhan just seems like the place where I live. Not terribly exotic. Anyway, I told my mother I’d post something about a typical day here, and so I’ll do that.
I’m a huge morning person, so usually I get up at five or six AM. At that time I get dressed, and take a yogurt out of my fridge. I mix in some cereal (it’s possible to buy cereal in Wuhan, but I can’t get used to the milk here. It’s disgusting. Hence using yogurt instead), and eat it. Then I make a cup of instant coffee. Depending on the previous day’s workload, I either do some lesson planning, mark student work, or do useless things on the internet until seven forty. I’ve also been trying to work in either Chinese study or jumping rope on the roof of my building at this time, but I’m horribly inconsistent, useful as those things would be.
At seven forty the van comes to take me to school. My school has three branches. One branch works at the same place where we live, and they can roll out of bed and walk over to teach their classes. Another is about fifty minutes away from the residence, and the teachers there have apartments near their school, though they used to live with us. My branch, if there is no traffic, is just a quick twenty minute van ride away from where I live. That said, there’s always traffic, and it takes anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour to reach school most mornings. A lot of people watching goes on in that van. The driver seems to take a different route every day, and he’s endlessly creative in finding ways to avoid the worst of the traffic jams.
Depending on the day of the week, my first class starts at either 8:40 or 9:30 in the morning. I usually make a quick run to KFC to buy a second cup of coffee before going to class, because the coffee there is slightly nicer than instant.
I teach five classes, but most teachers only have four. My students are grade three and four, and I’ve been teaching them all for two to three years. We use a very fun set of English books, called Chatterboz, which is especially designed with kids in mind. It tells the story of a time traveling magician, and his evil arch nemesis Spider Smith. Along the way, there are plenty of pages that go over grammar points, and give the children some good, functional vocabulary. As long as we make sure to go over everything in the book, we’re given a lot of freedom in our lesson planning, and there’s a lot of room to be creative. It’s a fun curriculum, and I’m not tired of it yet. The most recent topic of discussion in my grade four classes is world travel (with a focus on Australia, Japan, Egypt, and Europe), and my grade threes have recently learned how to use “because” and also how to make sentences in the future tense (using “be going to”). When I first started working in Wuhan, I rarely did grammary lessons, and mostly left that sort of thing up to my co-teacher, but I’ve been finding doing them weirdly enjoyable as of late.
I usually have two or three classes in the morning, a two hour break for lunch, and then either one or two classes in the afternoon. My typical lunch break is to go and buy four Yuan bowl of egg fried noodles from a little shack that about a five minute walk from the school, then get an apple from the fruit stand. I’m in the habit of eating at my desk, and getting as much marking done as possible. Sometimes I go over the material we learned in class with some of the slower students. This is because I want to, though. There are a lot of nice restaurants and shops and things within walking distance of the school, and I used to spend a lot of my lunch breaks going to them, but somehow I don’t anymore.
School is over a little before four o’clock. I teach kindergarten after school twice a week for some extra money, and on those days I get home around six, and go for dinner. There is a street of little family owned restaurants near the residence, most of which are cheap and good. They all serve the same food, but they all have different cooks, so the flavor is a bit different depending on where you go. My restaurant of choice is known as the “Cauliflower Place” by the foreigners at my school. Nobody knows the restaurant’s real name, but the cauliflower there is pretty much the most delicious thing ever.
In the past, the area where I lived was very low on Western influence. It was still great fun (plenty of places to eat, a good grocery store, a good semi-outdoor food market, a gym, lots of little shops, massage place, hair salon, nail salons, etc), but it was rare that I ever ran into a foreigner that wasn’t one of my co-workers. Three weeks ago, an upscale mall suddenly appeared, complete with a Starbucks and a Walmart. It’s a good half hour / forty minute walk away, so it’s easy to ignore it (not that I‘d ever ignore a coffee shop…). It is a big change though, and for the first time I’ve started to run into people from other countries more around the area where I live.
Other than kindergarten two nights a week, I also take Chinese lessons two nights a week. I do them over at the Rainbow Reading on Xudong. Each lesson is two hours. I used to take them in a group, but the people I started out taking them with has slowly moved away, and my level moves at a weird place due to the lessons I take on my holidays in Kunming. So right now it’s just me and one other guy in my Chinese class, and I’m pretty certain next year I’ll be on my own. The lessons are good, and I look forward to them. My plan right now is to work one more school year in Wuhan after this semester ends, then run off to Kunming and study Chinese full time for six months, before returning to the States or moving to another country to work.
On the weekends I do a lot of things. Most of them I think would be pretty boring to read about, because they aren’t much different than things I’d do in the States. Going to Hankou (another district in Wuhan) is fun -- there are some good nightmarkets (cheap outdoor shopping after dark!), and a street of teahouses and bars by the Yangtze river. Hankou also his Tiandi, which is a tiny area of various international and Chinese restaurants, which is very pleasant. I’m trying to go to the parks more, because Wuhan has some lovely parks, and we’re currently experiencing that short month or so of nice weather between winter cold and the ridiculous summer heat. Last weekend I hung with some friends from the third branch of the school, and we baked cookies in one girl’s apartment.
…. And that’s my life in Wuhan. And yes, I am coming home this summer.
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Bruce Jones
non-member comment
We have been wondering.....
Yes we had been wondering what you were doing........Thanks for the update