On with the show

---

…..the term “Head Cook” has a different connotation in the Chinese cafeteria to its usually accepted meaning. The Chinese practice mentioned earlier of chopping the meat up, bones & all, means not only getting the occasional chicken's foot. We had something that looked a bit like chicken recently but the meat was too dark. The bones were similar but Joel solved the problem - it was unmistakeably a duck's head.....

…..I went to the RT Mart, the big general purpose store in Yangzhou to get some things that have been on the list since last week & the obtaining of which have been hampered by teaching duties & what would be termed back at home “functional illiteracy”. Encouraged by a revelation that shampoo can be distinguished from conditioner by a number “1” in the midst of the Chinese characters under the main description on the bottle I went in brimming with confidence. I ended up getting something in the appropriate aisle that displayed “3 合 1” & a Chinese family with disturbingly glossy hair. At the time I was sure it was one of those combined shampoo/conditioner concoctions. Now I find I'm asking what the 3rd function is. Does “3 合 1” mean 3 in 1, if so what is the 3rd function?. I've been using it anyway.....

…..in the food section downstairs I was wandering around, looking for some large cartons of yoghurt but also just seeing what was available on the fresh meat & fish counters. I found a whole tray of duck's heads, ¥2.50 each.....

…..looking up the character 合 I find it means; Chinese musical note / fit / to join / counter for matches, battles etc. It hasn't helped to decipher the label on the shampoo.....

…..bike lights (no rear light available), keyring, 2 nice breakfast bowls (why do I need 2?) coat hangers, scissors, soap (Lux, in Roman letters. It HAS to be soap). Razor blades, a spoon, a chain for the bike (circular lock not enough?) plastic bowl, bleach & Mr Muscle cleaner (again at least the name in English). Reading is a basic function I learned & then proceeded to take for granted. Now I love to see the Bank of China & China Telecom signs because I CAN READ THEM.....

…..sometimes I am complimented on my Chinese, on other occasions I get a complete blank. In the latter cases they could be just poorly educated people who don't know their own language very well. Or just maybe I should pay a lot more attention to the tones which can drastically change the meanings of words!.....

…..Peter & I practice a Chinese tune I learned in Adelaide & Paul Kelly's “To Her Door”, a brief but very eclectic selection for the Chinese Teachers ….

…..there are a lot of houses up for demolition on the western side of the school in preparation for a new highway. They are marked with the character拆, (chāi), to tear open / to tear down / to tear apart / to open.....

…..fireworks can go off at any time here. Often there will be a half hour display somewhere in the evening, a couple of times clearly visible from the second & third floor landings of the dormitories. Even in the daytime it's not unusual to hear them going off.....

…..Angel, the Director of Foreign Affairs Department at the school & the person who interviewed me by phone for the job, is going into hospital in Shanghai today for an eye operation. She noticed problems with one of her eyes a few months ago but decided not to get it examined as she was “so busy at work” with recruitment & administration. From her description of the symptoms it appears she has a detached retina. From my time at the Ophthalmic Laser company I was able to recount an operation I had witnessed where exactly that problem had been quickly & efficiently fixed at a Sydney clinic. I was good enough to leave out a description of the endoprobe being plunged through the white of the eye to allow the laser access to the retina. Kelly's account of his laser eye correction also helped to put her mind at rest. Still, she has been told she will have to stay in bed for a month to recuperate. We'll miss her.....

…..8th of September. It's actually a bit cooler today & the humidity is almost bearable. It's possible to walk from the dormitories to the Elementary school without one's shirt being totally saturated in sweat. I check the weather for Yangzhou on the web & it's in the mid-20's C with over 80% humidity. Much better than the low to mid-30's we've been getting. The sky is also visible yesterday, after a fashion. Through the haze it is only a watery blue, a poor excuse for a blue sky by Aussie standards but just to see it is an event. By the time the sun falls into the west in the afternoon though it disappears behind the haze.....

…..this week is a little easier. I'm picking up a few tricks of the trade required to deal with people who are; a) small, incredibly noisy & blessed with vast amounts of energy, b) have to be stuck in a room with a strange foreign man for half an hour or 40 minutes at a time, whether they want to be or not.....

…..Kelly & Elizabeth are going to a new coffee bar in Yangzhou with Corey, Will & Lauren. I am making a Skype call when Kelly knocks on the door so I ask for directions & say I'll meet them there. Yangzhou, the centre at least, appears to be 2 wide, main streets, very long, that run east - west through the middle. If you can orientate yourself via these, the Pagoda in the middle of the roundabout as you head up a few kilometres past the “New Bridge” (as opposed to, yes, correct, the “Old Bridge” further to the South), then it's a good starting point. I follow on. I managed to find a front light for my bike but no rear light. I did enquire at the RT Mart on Saturday but, despite getting my request across, “...hong deng, hou mian” or “red light, at the back” & pointing at the rear of a conveniently placed bike the look I got said very clearly, “Why do you want to ride your bicycle backwards?”. I gave up.....

…..back to the coffee bar. I launch bravely into the pitch black road outside the school, one of the unilluminated minor roads off the main thoroughfare. There is still quite a lot of traffic at 6.30pm. Pedestrians, pedal-powered & electric bikes mostly without lights. Motorbikes, 3 wheelers, cars, buses & trucks on both sides of the road (not necessarily the correct one) but with lights at least, to see & be seen. I am glad to turn left onto the well-lit, wide highway with very wide bike lanes over the New Bridge & leave most of the dust & traffic fumes behind.....

…..I find my way to the second pagoda & turn left but overshoot the coffee shop. I see the biggest soft toy sale I have ever seen, on the steps of a large (or several large) buildings & stretching for the best part of 100m. Teddies, Pandas, various animals ranging from about twice my size to pocket size.....

…..as I have no SIM card for my mobile phone yet Kelly lent me his for the trip & a couple of quick conversations with Corey put me right. I wouldn't have spotted the coffee bar. It's upstairs, through a foyer staffed by 2 very smart girls in white uniforms which I wouldn't normally have enter in my shorts carrying a bike helmet. On payment of ¥25 (around Au$4.50) you order as many cups of coffee, milkshakes, jasmine tea, Wulong tea or ice-cream that you want, along with plates of “nibbles”, dried fruit, nuts etc. Definitely a Chinese interpretation of a coffee bar & a damn good one too. My colleagues are there indulging in what could only be described as a wanton frenzy of Chinese writing, with books of Chinese characters, a laptop with a Chinese dictionary & sheets of squared paper for practising the writing on, much to the amusement of the waiters.....

…..I follow Kelly, Elizabeth & Corey back, partly through some narrow sidestreets, full of tiny teahouses with card games in process, street hawkers, restaurants & even stop for a few minutes to watch work going ahead on a busy building site (at 9.30pm) with dozens of workers lifting & laying narrow, cinder-grey bricks around the interesting pole frame skeleton of a house. Through some very wide & frankly hair-raising junctions, over the bridge & up the dark road to the school. I make a note of some sights to photograph at night when I get my tripod.....

…..that reminds me, the unfortunate girl at the camera section of the Electronics Mart that tried so hard to decipher my hopelessly inadequate description of a flexible tripod phoned the school today to tell me it has arrived.....

…..road works going on day & a fair part of the night outside our dorms, just over the school wall. Houses being demolished, jackhammers hammering, excavators excavating & wrecker's balls just having a ball. I'm so glad it's not enough to keep me awake. It is exacerbating the film of coarse, grey dust which seems to be a feature of flat surfaces here.....

…..the lessons last week covered the topics of food & drink. There are a number of aids in the Resource room upstairs. A whole box full of very convincing papier mache fruit & vegetables. As usual a lot of the children know a lot of the vocabulary already, only mistaking garlic for onion & not knowing what a chili is. A FAR better result than Jamie Oliver got from UK schoolchildren in their own language. After correcting mispronunciations (notably “oranger” for “orange” I go on to see how much else they know. Kid's preferences (chips, ice cream). I avoid mentioning burgers, (which the Chinese transliterate as “hanbao”) & soft drinks. When I do a survey though it is clear what the 2 favourite foods are with all classes - chips & ice cream.....

…..class sizes are between 32 & 35. All up there must be over 300 in the year 3 group that Kelly & I are teaching. The kids appear to start quite early, first classes at 8.15am & finishing at 4.35pm. However there is an extended lunch break from 11.30am until 2pm &, instead of a morning & afternoon break they get 10 minutes or so between each class. As the classrooms are in 3 storey blocks with covered concrete walkways between classrooms & connecting the various blocks that's generally where they play. The sheer volume of several hundred children let loose at once (3 levels with around 300 students in each, with other, similar blocks nearby) has to be heard to be believed. I make a note to record the sound.....

…..the first myth that most of us, new teachers, absorbed & took as a self-evident truth was that Chinese children have an inbuilt respect for teachers bordering on reverence & behave in class like well programmed automatons, there for the purpose of soaking up our pearls of wisdom. If you have booked a TESOL course on the flimsy basis of this old wives' tale cancel it NOW! There are good kids, bad kids, smart kids, slow kids, most of all there are LOTS of them. They get out of their desks, pinch their neighbours, throw missiles, yell, read books under the desk, tell jokes in class. This is not an exhaustive list, just an exhausting one.....

…..Techniques to counter misbehaviour are; Games that involve teams getting points. Still noisy but focussed on the matter in hand at least. Counting down from 5 to 1 with the fingers. The Chinese teachers do it &, until they find out that the International teachers are not privy to what could be done to follow a full countdown to zero, it works for now. “The Book”, a sort of behaviour register the Chinese teachers get us to fill in after a class, also works for now. Although they must realise the spaces we write in are only big enough for “Paid attention”, “Good Response” or “Bunch of Ratbags” there is a mystique to levelling the evil eye at a miscreant while moving the pen behind the cover as though writing his or her (usually his!) name in “ The Book”. If a Chinese teacher just sits in on the class the behaviour improves several hundred percent. Bribery & corruption work well, little stickers as prizes for winning a vocabulary game usually focus the young minds, for a while.....

…..Don'ts: Never, ever, contemplate an activity that involves more than 2 kids out of their seats at any one time. Never turn your back for more than a few seconds. Never look angry unless you really have to, this is a final sanction not to be wasted. Never believe that because one boy wants to go to the toilet that this has a diuretic effect on every other boy in the class.....

…..Do's: Keep things rolling. Always have a few ideas up your sleeve in case your lesson plan runs out before the class is finished. Silly voices & gestures are universally popular. If they can help them remember words or phrases so much the better. Use a little Chinese now & again if it helps to keep the class moving along. Instead of repeatedly saying to a kid with a totally blank expression, “What is it in English?” while the rest of the class tears the room apart, “Yingwen zenme shuo?” will usually break the impasse. After a while I think they'll start to recognise the English when they hear it in conjunction with the Chinese. It's amazing they understand my rudimentary Mandarin anyway.....

…..The “Teacher's Day” on Thursday is the subject of a build up promising to be bigger than Ben Hur. Most of this is going on out of view of the Western teachers but the ebb & flow of black cars, people on campus, the sound of choirs from the auditorium & processions of kids in & out of that same building are all signs that something is afoot. Peter & I, who are representing the International teachers at the big auditorium show on Thursday night, go along with Rainy from administration today to work out what we need by way of leads to amplify our instruments. We managed, with help, to get across our requirements to the Chinese sound crew but I still don't know how to translate “3 metre cable, phono jack to RCA connector”.....

.....the Teacher's Day concert is a hoot. In an auditorium about the same size as Adelaide's Capri cinema (FILLED with teachers) there were speeches, skits, dances etc. all prepared by the teachers. Peter & I do our bit for Australia with a Chinese tune I picked up when I was involved with a Flamenco / Chinese world music project in Adelaide. Jackpot! it must be a popular tune as they all start clapping in time as soon as we start. I'm sure the lyrics to "To her door" go over their heads but maybe that is just as well. They enjoy that too.....

…..as much as we all cast aspersions on the catering here, particularly the Chinese Cafeteria, they must be doing something right. Despite oddities like the duck's head & chicken's feet usually you walk out feeling full but not bloated, satisfied with all except maybe the amount of salt in some of the unidentifiable vegetable combinations. It's not gourmet food but I think it has more to recommend it than a lot of Western processed fare.....

…..Friday afternoon after the Teacher's Meeting it's off to the city with a few of the other International Teachers to collect my tripod. The look of triumphant pleasure on the face of the girl who had deciphered my request & actually located the thing was worth every fen (Chinese cent). The assistants also point out a Canon SX1 camera like mine, on display. We work out the price in Australian dollars. It is quite a bit more than I paid in Adelaide.....

…..my second Saturday here & finally I have cleaned the bathroom. It's not any easy one to keep clean. The drain is directly under the showerhead, a logical place you might think & it would be but for the fact that this is the highest point of the floor. The water runs down to another drain point just outside the shower enclosure & the water eventually seeps through leaving a residue of soap etc. inside the enclosure.....

…..I went to the cafeteria by myself yesterday & was prepared for a solo meal but I spotted one of the year 3 teachers just starting. I don't know any of those teachers other than by sight but, where they had been tolerably friendly but reserved before, Thursday's concert seems to have broken the ice a bit. Amazingly, both of us being at around the same level in each other's language, we had a great conversation, ending in an invitation for me & Peter (my Aussie fellow musician) to visit her, her husband & kids. We provide the music & they provide the food. Another meal out of the cafeteria! I even let her know that I didn't eat pork (there was pork in the meal we were eating which made it easier ).Hopefully will help to avoid any embarrassment later.....

…..buying food from the School Store or shops in town in an education in packaging gone mad. I buy what I assume are tea bags. They turn out to be little individually packed sachets of a powder which appear to be tea, milk, some sugar & something that makes it taste a little like chai tea. The plastic they use is often much thicker than western packaging. Multiply this by nearly every item & the population (75 million in this province alone). By contrast the garbage bags into which this is all eventually consigned are so thin you could blow a hole in them & the thick plastic packaging often rips holes in the bag.....

…..the workers have been working day (from early morning) & a fair part of the night to demolish the houses next to the new road. It was cooler this morning than it has been for a long while, a beautiful day really. Even the smog was thinner & by late morning a pale shadow of a blue sky is visible. I decide to go for a bike ride to the park near the New Bridge where the locals go skateboarding & rollerblading (youngsters), walking & sitting with boy / girl friends (teenagers), practising Tai Chi (middle aged to older people) & flying kites or spinning tops (mostly older men). A boy of 11 on a skateboard yells out, “Hello” & he & his sister are happy to practice their English on me, frequently lapsing into Chinese when they can't find the words, which allows me to perfect the most useful phrase of all, “Wo ting bu dong” (lit.” I hear, not understand”).....

…..another girl walks up out of the blue & joins the conversation. She also speaks a small amount of English (but says she doesn't like to!). She turns out to be a trainee teacher, I think a music teacher, from another city. Generally the Chinese are very open & friendly. Apart from the International teachers there are very few “Lowai” (foreigners) in this city of 4.5 million so we certainly stand out. The additional oddity of wearing a bike helmet & stopping to take photos everywhere doesn't help.....

…..we all have our particular talents & skills. I believe my greatest ability lies in the area of sleep. I'm really good at it. It is a useful skill today, my second Sunday in Yangzhou as last night I felt a bit crook, (must stop using Australian terms, with all these Americans & Canadians here, replace "crook" with “under the weather”). Kelly & Elizabeth both have a high temperature & aches, in fact Kelly is taken to the hospital & given medication. I go to bed at 9pm (unheard of for me) & cancel my planned trip to the city to take some night photos. I get up at around 6.30am & go for a walk around the campus but not at my usual brisk pace. After a light breakfast I just lay down again & now, almost midday, I am starting to feel a bit better. I'm so glad I don't have to teach today. It would be a less than energetic performance.....

---