The home straight

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With the Olympic closing ceremony yesterday and our event this afternoon being OSCOlympics, this seems an apt name for today’s post. This is also a pretty accurate representation of how I’ve been feeling about Hong Kong for the past few days. As much as I’ve kept myself busy<span><span> spending time<span>with some of the amazing people I have met here and there is still so much I’d love to do, I feel I have outstayed my welcome and am more than ready to fly out of here (probably won’t be saying this next weekend when I’m panicking in the airport) and back to stay with Jo, Nate and Kaylee (aka Kowii) in Tokyo.



Yesterday we moved accommodation and I’m now in the beautiful (I’m not really sure how to convey sarcasm on here) YesInn hostel, sharing a room and (perhaps more problematic) a bathroom with eight other girls. My first sleep here was actually ok, I may have got slightly annoyed about people skyping at 11.30 pm when others were clearly already trying to go to sleep and trying to stay quiet when I woke up early wasn’t even an issue as one of the other teams have to get up ridiculously early to get to their school which is over an hours drive away.<span> The only major issue I have (other than the allergy thing, but I feel people are probably sick of me mentioning that) is the aircon unit above my bed which seems to enjoy periodically spitting at me, I suppose this could save me queuing for the shower in the morning (joking) but as long as I don’t get Legionnaire’s disease I do genuinely find it quite funny. (she types whilst wiping the laptop screen.)



Today I started counting down our final teaching week, we are in a Kings’ College Old Boys Primary School which makes a nice change to the secondary schools we’ve been at for the previous three weeks. I’m not sure if it’s just because they’re more enthusiastic but from one day here and our week at Tadpoles, I get the impression that primary school kids actually speak better English than the secondary ones.



We started off by doing our play as we have every Monday and, even after being assured by the IT technician that it would be fine, the sound in the hall did not work which resulted in us having to nervously sing “The Time Warp”.<span> When it came to the next song we decided a better option was to unplug the speakers and just play it from my laptop at which point the technician rocked up and gestured that the reason it wasn’t working was that it wasn’t plugged into the speakers – I know I may be blonde but jeez I’m not that stupid!



The first lesson of the day involved the usual getting to know all the names; I think this is going to be easier than at the previous school as I only have fourteen adorable eight year olds to deal with as opposed to last week’s twenty-eight troublesome teens (try writing a play to includ twenty eight kids)! I teach a boy called Juno and a Hanson Lee, before he’d written his nametag I could have sworn that he’d said Handsome Lee. Once again we had a Candy and a Crystal but there were also some new names like Marissa, Melody (named after the rabbit in Hello Kitty), Holman, Burnaby and Poon (my sister is obsessed by this name for some reason) although I think my personal favourite was Audrey, not a particularly funny name but when the kids tried to repeat it they just kept saying orgy which I found really funny.



Lunch was spent wandering around the really nice area surrounding the school although, after going into two really posh coffee places and a café and deciding that they were too expensive for our liking, Francesca pointed out that we had been walking around wearing giant nametags and that she was sat smoking right next to a no smoking sign.



The afternoon was very repetitive, this is the fifth time that we're running through the same afternoon events so although the fashion show and bridge building will always be slightly different from week to week, the rest is very samey. Drama went well, they loved my freeze game (not so much as I game just making them walk around and freeze as a different character every now and then), we literally played this for half an hour! Then it came to thinking of ideas for Friday's play; one girl was pretty adament that it was Snow White or nothing else, having veetoed that, we settled for a version of 'The Gingerbread Man' but, in true OSCA style, instead of a pig, horse, cow and fox we have The Angry Birds (specifically the blue and the black one), Pink Panther and Purple Panther (they were arguing over who was going to take this role so again we had to reach a compromise), Ben 10 and Ben 6 (it was Ben 9 but he decided he prefered the number six). Ring of fire (sorry, circle of English) was just as popular as usual (not sure why, I essentially just trick them into practising English).



Anyway I've just had a nice mug of soup, skyped my family, cracked open the Savannah from the supermarket next door and I'm about to watch a film - if this doesn't cheer me up then nothing will! On second thoughts, maybe I'll just go to bed before the rabble get back...

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