Advertisement
Published: October 31st 2014
Edit Blog Post
Halloween at School
At the Haunted House, (courtesy of school photographer, Roger) New photos on:
http://s251.photobucket.com/albums/gg311/draftwrite/ …..because of the recent National Day public holiday week I wasn't able to get through to the exam centre in Shanghai for the usual check to see that I had been registered & everything would run smoothly on the day. Having been to the same exam centre for every exam since I started the degree I didn't double check the university website. Thus it is like suddenly being cast into one of those bad dreams when, after a 4 hour trip from Yangzhou, I rock up half an hour before the start to be blandly told, “There are no exams here”. A receptionist points to a phone number on a small notice in Chinese. The woman from the British Council, who organise the exam centre, answers. The new centre is not too far away & I manage to get a taxi that arrives 10 minutes before the start.....
…..not a good start, &, after assuming Spanish is easier for an English speaker than Chinese I find the tangle of tenses & irregular verbs too much. It's now late October & I still don't know whether I passed.....
…..just looked again, (as I've been doing
Dance Practice at School
for the Hallowe'en / Sports Day parade. I escape as I'm an MC that day. daily!) … a “D” in Spanish, (that's Distinction, between 75% & 84%). I've been aiming for 85%+ but it guess it'll get harder as we go on & after THAT exam, I'm not really disappointed. I didn't realise before you only need an overall score over 50% to pass! The Chinese course score isn't available yet.....
…..Email was inaccessible for a while & the internet is still even slower than usual, all due to bad people in HK making antisocial demands like choosing their own candidates for election, rather than let the people who know best in a city more than 2,000km away, choose candidates for them. Until that's resolved it probably won't improve much. Interestingly, sometimes the proxy software works for hours & FB & other antisocial sites are accessible, but even people with VPNs say that traffic is moving very slowly on the information superhighway.....
…..it's almost November but still mild during the day, cool enough at night for a light sweater & a beanie if I'm on the scooter, but not life-threatening cold. It will get worse but still, you an always wear more clothes when it's cold.....
…..the usual Hallowe'en shenanigans, a ghost
Sports Day
Various groups of students doing various things, plus a few of my Grade 7 students house haunted by foreign teachers in costumes in the darkened corridors as classes are led through by their teachers, who are often more frightened than the kids. It was a long session on Monday, for me about 2 hours jumping off a 1m high rail in an alcove into the corridor then running up & down in a crouched “hunchback” position, my knees bent at around 90 degrees. Try it for a few minutes. After doing it 30 times I could barely walk the next day. After 4 days I am fine!....
…..we now have a new grade 8 teacher, to replace Rishi, who did a runner before school actually started. She's a lady from New Mexico, apparently of Native American heritage, called Windsong. At least that will translate easily & literally into Chinese, Feng Ge, (the Feng from “Feng Shui”, which just means “Wind, Water”).....
…..she's taught in several countries, including Nepal, where she was contracted to teach “conversational English”. The kids normally only learn by rote there & never ask questions or actually talk to the teachers in class. She left after she finally got to the stage of asking individual kids to respond to questions.
Dave at the Haunted House
Be afraid, be very afraid... As soon as an individual student spoke a teacher would rush out of the office & beat the living daylights out of them for speaking out in class & she couldn't convince them it's necessary to practice speaking in order to become conversational. We used to think the cane was a bit harsh....
…..Steve & I have the luxury of being able to turn down paid gigs now if we get overloaded. We are currently doing an hour & a half at the Secrecy bar / restaurant in the new Hong Qiao Fang area, then a few minutes ride away to Zhen Yuan & a coffee bar turned restaurant / bar called Oxygen where, despite almost an absence of customers the last time we played there, they are amazingly keen to get us back. There's a coffee bar every other Saturday afternoon plus miscellaneous things like epic wedding gigs now & again. It's a Hallowe'en special at Secrecy tonight, costumes & some amazing light sabres, though I'm not sure where their connection to Hallowe'en originated.....
.....thou shalt not. From the English translation of an agreement relating to a new bank account:
XVI. Party A shall not vilify or damage the reputation of Party B or swindle money out of the bank through various knavish tricks..... although I believe banks have a few knavish tricks of their own.....
…..the independence referendum in Scotland has been a big talking point in China. George, my 14 year old weekend private student, starts talking about it, & apart from a few words he doesn't know in English, has the ability to hold a conversation about it There's so much knowledge in that kid's head! He happily writes down new words, referendum, autonomy, along with their Chinese equivalents, (no, I can't remember, my brain is still sorting out the previous trimester's vocabulary.....
…..the dark side of social harmony & “development”. I was told a story about a couple, in the east of this city who rejected compensation for their house, attacked by thugs in their house at night, the woman beaten to death with iron bars, husband takes broken skull parts in a plastic bag to local government offices to demand justice. After 2 days any mention of this story & photos taken by passers by at the time, are blocked on the internet, on We-chat & any other media available here. What happens in the city stays in the city, probably not just in this city. Of course now this story has been censored into hearsay, so who's to say it ever really happened?.....
Advertisement
Tot: 0.277s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 12; qc: 55; dbt: 0.1193s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb