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Published: March 25th 2012
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Beijing Xin Dong Fang
Our school in Yangzhou New photos on:
http://s251.photobucket.com/albums/gg311/draftwrite/ …..it's a beautiful, really clear, blue sky day for a second trip to Nanjing in as many weeks. New highways radiating out even from our little town. Bedding airing from every south facing balcony or window, soaking up the spring sunshine, people unloading trees from trucks & planting them along the endless network of canals & dykes that criss-cross Jiangsu while others tend small allotment gardens. People are still wearing winter jackets & the girls are sticking to their astounding collections of boots for the time being but I think spring is finally here.....
.....there are seat belts for the rear seat of the ubiquitous VW Santana taxis but the seat covers preclude being able to clip them in place. The driver expectorates out of the window as we make our way through heavy traffic through the tunnel beneath Xuanwu lake toward the long, jagged, skyscraper skyline of Nanjing's CBD.....
…..a second attempt to register for the Chinese exam in Nanjing. Don't give up! This time to a private institution, (Confucius Institute), which has allowed Patrick, Alex & I to register on the 'Net for the Chinese HSK exam but not to pay
online! One of us has to go to pay in person. I volunteer. It's an uneventful one & a quarter hour trip to Jiangsu's provincial capital. This time all goes (reasonably) smoothly, the fee is paid, I briefly catch up with my old colleague from this school, Evi, who tells me about her recent trip to her childhood home, South Africa, memories of places I visited when I lived in Botswana in the 1970's, well before she was born!.....
…..the trip is revolutionised by the tablet I bought a couple of weeks ago. I now have a collection of books from various sources & have started reading again. An eclectic selection. In the last week I have read Michael Crighton's “Jurassic Park” & J.M.Coetzee's “Disgrace”, both of which I've been aiming to read for years. Being able to take dozens of books on a bus trip in something the size of one paperback is a liberating experience, especially if the passenger next to me isn't especially talkative.....
….Wenyi has decided not to come to Yangzhou this weekend, she's aiming to come the week after next, y'know, Qing Ming Jie, or Tomb Sweeping Festival, when we are given three
Pineapples, Nanjing
Note the setting of the truck, on a pedestrian crossing days holiday during the week but have to pay for the privilege by working Saturday & Sunday the preceding weekend. Actually, not quite, Mike & I will go to Changzhou on Saturday with our students to a new amusement park for the Middle School excursion.....
…..teaching material from the most unlikely sources, for instance, the great archives of funny videos, pictures & slideshows that used to do the rounds of office inboxes, punctuating the tedium of a 9-5 desk job with a few seconds of welcome humour or a new view of the world. A lot of the images are by no means high definition but a 30 second story is a welcome break for the class & a chance for them to explain, in English, what they've just seen. Just ensure you check them first for suitability to be shown to a school audience....
…..another hour long lesson with my 4 year old student, Eric, on a Sunday afternoon. I say lesson. We really just play, hitting things with a ping-pong ball, making stuff out of playdough, drawing, the only proviso being he needs to tell me what he's doing, or give me requests, (“Throw the ball
Beijing Xin Dong Fang
Middle school, where I'm teaching this year to me”, “Can you draw a …..”, etc) in English. To my surprise the hour is going pretty quickly without awkward gaps to get him interested in things. He already speaks better English than many of our 11 & 12 year olds &, sadly, some of my 13 & 14 year old students.....
…..even in this small city it would be possible to have a “restaurant of the week” competition & not run out of competitors for a very long time. Sunshine takes a group of us to a place we've never seen before right in the city centre, through a little maze of back streets. A typical mid-range Chinese eating place, no stunning young women lined up at the door with the sole function of greeting customers with, “Huanying guanglin”, (“Welcome”), no plush seating, uniformed staff or overly elaborate lighting. It's more like a family gathering on steroids.....
…..people might be customers except for the fact they are carrying armfuls of dishes around customers crowding in or out. In a popular restaurant you wait for a place & the detritus of the previous meal is cleaned away as you secure your seat. It's chaotic, messy, communal &
Spring, Yangzhou
Dunno what they are but they look gorgeous often, as in this case, delicious. Specialising in local Yangzhou cuisine we have a whole range of dishes unlike any we have tasted before. The Chinese attendees, (Sunny, Kevin & Sunshine), & the foreigners, (Klass, Jenna, Paul & myself), all agree we'd come back to this place, a resounding thumbs up in a city with literally hundreds, if not thousands, of places to choose from.....
previous issues of the YYW are on:
http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Laotou/
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