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Getting mobbed in Zhujiayu
Laowai!! Laowai!! (Foreigner!! Foreigner!!) So it's time for a long overdue update. We've now been away from home for two hundred days and I can't believe that we're still hardly missing it. The routine of teaching all weekend and three weekday evenings has meant that the time has zoomed by and now we have not much more than three months left in China. Having some visitors from home has helped of course.
Summer has come to Zibo with a vengeance and so we're glad that we packed in masses of travel and sight seeing in before it got too hot. Spring never really happened as we were plunged from freezing to boiling. The blossoms only lasted for about a week and the leaves positively burst onto the trees. Now it's about 28-30 degrees each day. It rains every now and again but the rest of the time is sun and blue skies (If you look straight up that is. If you look immediately above the skyline it's pretty grey).
We've been away almost every week on our days off; having visited Qufu (the birthplace of Confucius), Tai Shan again (much more hospitable in the warm weather), Beijing two
more times (to meet Tristan's family), every district of Zibo worth seeing, Qingdao (Olympic sailing host) and our favourite place, a village called Zhujaiyu. Zhujaiyu is 'one of Shandong's oldest intact hamlets' and is surrounded by beautiful hills. Being not far from Zibo, it's interesting that most of our Chinese friends had never heard of it, and those that had were not even slightly interested in visiting it ("it's very traditional"- as if that's an insult!). We saw a fantastic part of the Great Wall when Tristan's brother and his wife visited and went to the Summer Palace when his parents came (the highlight of that trip was our self-drive boat failing on us during a cruise around the lake- it was very hard to attract the attention of passers by who mistook our cries for help for the friendly waves and cheers of foreigners).
If Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) is the largest annual human migration (as workers travel back to their hometowns), then Labour Day (1st of May) is the second biggest as the whole of China goes on holiday. In true making-the-most-of-our-time-here fashion, we decided to travel half way across the country to Xi'an
during this period. We were very lucky that we were able to go because hard sleeper tickets are nigh on impossible to come by. One of my adult students (with the help of her guanxi- "relationship" (with the government)) sorted out some tickets for us so of we went on the nineteen hour train journey for a three day trip the ancient capital. The Terracotta Army was the main event. We wished that we hadn't wasted so many hours last Easter queuing up in the rain outside the British Museum to see twenty of the warriors; in Xi'an we saw hundreds. It was really special, especially for an archaeology fan like Tristan. And Xi'an's Muslim Quarter was great fun too.
School is going well. The middle levels are starting to get a bit boring but we still love teaching the very young kids, high levels and adults. PC (parent-child) lessons continue to be hilarious. But we do realise how serious our job is. We went for dinner with two of our student's parents yesterday. They were desperate for advice on how to help their children improve their English in addition to our classes. Their kids are
only five years old. Talk about putting the pressure on early!! But that's the way it goes here. There seems to be little consideration of natural variations in student's academic ability in the Chinese education system; poor students are just not studying hard enough.
In the advanced classes we're able to attempt to stimulate discussion about Chinese history and politics; we just have to be careful not to give our own views. It's always easy to get them going on how much they hate the Japanese. I have to mention our good friend Star again who is convinced that the more slang phrases he can use the more he'll sound like a native English speaker. This provides us with countless funny moments, for example, when he put forward 'the big house' during my C8 discussion of 'prison' vs. 'jail'.
Our students often enter local and regional English speaking competitions so we're sometimes asked to look over compositions that they've written to recite. These always seem to be on the most bizarre topics. I recent example was entitled "I want to protect chickens".
"Some may argue that there are so many “valuable” animals
to care for, like pandas, tigers, dolphins and so on, that such “food” animals as chickens, cows, sheep don’t deserve to be paid attention to. If this were the case, I believe that... the government should invest only in large eastern cities, leaving the western ones to develop on their own... "
Next week we're taking a weeks leave to visit Henan Province. We hope to see some of the Chinese countryside as we head for the mountains in the north of this relatively poor province immediately west of Shandong. We'll also stop in the 'ancient capital cities' of Luoyang and Kaifeng - (though our expectations aren't too high as just about every city we visit in China seems to have been an old capital during some dynasty or other).
Bye for now x x
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Beth
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so funny
I want to protect the chickens! you can't make this stuff up. It sounds like our having an amazing time xx