Goose foot, pig's head & an Aussie red

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…..having moved here, to this allegedly “sub tropical” area & experienced warm to hot & humid weather for the first two months or more I have to say it's been a long, cold, miserable winter. All the local people & foreign teachers who have been here longer than I have tell me this year is not typical. I sometimes think this year's weather has been imported from the UK.....

…..here's another language study milestone; I'm starting to get annoyed when shopkeepers, either indicating the bill for something being bought or offering a sale price, immediately punch it into a calculator & then shove it under my nose. As if I can't understand numbers! My Chinese might not be that good but I can (usually) understand that much at least. The game now is to say, “Mei wenti, ni keyi gaosu wo”, (“No problem, you can tell me”), before they've finished typing.....

…..Cathy, Peter, Paul & I have tickets for the Shanghai Expo. ¥400 (around Au$65) gets a ticket that is valid for three days. We are aiming to go the second weekend in May, avoiding the May Day public holiday of the first weekend of that month. If we leave on Friday morning, when we have a maximum of one class each (Paul has none on Fridays) we can go on Friday evening & all day Saturday plus a few hours on Sunday before the four & a half hour bus trip back. The school is also organising excursions, going for 2 days, which teachers are able to participate.....

…..I manage to chat with a bus conductor on the number 4 bus most of the way to the city centre, with a few pauses to find words here & there. Then I find Wang Quan Hui, the head teacher of class 3/10, on another bus & manage to talk to her, even though her English is even more basic than my Chinese. The arm waving has improved from French, Marcel Marceau impersonations miming almost every other word, to Italian, a slightly less theatrical method of getting the meaning across. I'm aiming for the Irish Dancing school next year ....

…..Tianyi (George), my Sunday morning student, has a cousin, Jerry, who often visits with his parents for Sunday lunch. He has been very reluctant to talk to me, probably because he's not confident with his English. I manage to coax a few words out of him now & his parents give me his QQ number. I daresay that's another thing that would be unthinkable in the west now. Still, when he does call it's with his parents, who in fact take over the conversation after he has exhausted his vocabulary.....

…..Kelly & I are teaching the continents this week. The third graders know them in Chinese so it's a matter of finding a way to get them to remember the names in English. We associate the continents with an animal each & they now (mostly) say Anteater for South America rather than an Eat-ant. I'm not laughing, I do exactly the same in Chinese much more often. I develop a sort of soccer chant which they like & that seems to work really well. There are too many words to remember all at once so I split them up; Asia - Europe - Africa, (one-two-three-four) - Australia - Antarctica, (one-two-three-four) - North America - South America, (one-two-three-four). They'll keep going for ages if I let them. I also discover that, although they don't look at all similar written down, “Europe” sounds, to them, remarkably similar to “Niu rou” the word for beef!

…..I mention getting some silk items to take back to Australia. Jeffson's mum & grandma take me to the touring fabric, clothing, jewellery & “other stuff” show from Wuxi at the Yangzhou Exhibition Centre. For someone who generally procrastinates over what to buy & often ends up not actually buying anything I am propelled around the impossibly crowded indoor market at high speed & assured that, yes, this is a good price or, definitely, this will be suitable for your daughter, despite the fact that neither of them have even seen a photograph..... In the end I go with the flow & it turns out to be ever so slightly exhilarating. I'll need to watch myself, I could become a shopaholic.....

…..Danny's Baba (dad) arrives at the west gate of the school to collect me & class 3/9's head teacher Liu Cui Ping. We head west in the new, black BMW & plough through the city centre traffic, picking up Fan Laoshi (Teacher Fan) on the way & Suzy from the west Da Run Fa. This is not a birthday, just another “thank you” dinners for the teachers. Danny's dad works for the government at Yangzhou Municipal level & is some sort of investment project manager for the city, enticing people & companies to spend money here. He is setting a good example. A private room in a very nicely appointed &, as usual, vast restaurant opposite the sports stadium.....

…..a few new innovations this time. There is Australian red wine. What a treat. Even Suzy has a glass but is not quite sure about it. Neither is Pan Laoshi, the maths teacher but he drinks it anyway & finishes in a better condition than last time, when he was into the baijiu, the firewater which is often the drink of choice for toasting. “Gan bei”, (“Do the cup”, or “cheers”) is followed by downing the contents rather than savouring the wine. Ah, well, when in China.....

…..Apart from goose (again) we have a special dish individually delivered (as opposed to put in the middle of the table to be revolved around. Beautifully presented, a small scoop of rice & another of green vegetables &, in a very fragrant orange , a foot that is too big to be a chicken's. It turns out to be a goose foot. I passed on the pig's head & find the jaw with the front teeth attached circulating round the table mildly disturbing but there is enough other tasty food to be sampled.....

…..the reason for the knife & fork at each place revealed.”How do you like your steak?” I assume it's a sort of general enquiry so I reply, through Suzy, something about not eating it all that often but if I do, I prefer it well done. I then have to explain “ well done” in more detail. Then a “steak” is delivered to everyone. It's not like any steak I've ever eaten. I'm certain it wasn't beef. The meat is very soft but not easy to cut. It's very chewy & not that palatable. When asked if it's like the steak in Australia I'm at a bit of a loss for an answer other than, “No”. The chopsticks are laid aside & the tables are turned in my favour. Pan Laoshi turns to me for instruction on how to use a knife & fork. I savour the moment if not the “steak”.....

…..apart from the steak I'm enjoying the meal. Each restaurant here seems to have a different selection of & approach to the food. This one is pretty good. There is a big dish of something resembling miniature lobsters. We are each given a pair of very thin, transparent plastic gloves to hold them while we crack them open & eat them, to keep our hands clean. For a while the meal resembles a Proctologists convention.....

…..parents & teachers are all happy as we are dropped off at the school, except Suzy, who is especially happy as there is still time for her date with - well, she won't tell us yet. I also discover that hitherto one of the worst students in my worst class aims to be an astronomer when he grows up, a far cry from my guess of manufacturing spearheads from pieces of flint & binding them to rough hewn wooden shafts.....

…..pictures from the Yangzhou half marathon will have to wait until next week but I think I have a small selection of new stuff to upload so I guess I'd better get on with it.....

Great photo, audio or video opportunities missed this week:

…..the dinner for the teachers on Saturday night. I forgot to take my camera, having rushed out after doing an editing job on a speech to do with psychiatric nursing, in English, for a friend of a friend. It was a good effort by whoever is to deliver the speech & the friend who asked me to look over it but also a lesson in how difficult it is in English to construct a sensible but concise sentence.....

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