A trip to Lamma Island and a brief stint as David Bowie, plus laughing at P1

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Hi everyone!
Sorry it’s been so long since my last update, it’s been a busy few weeks! The past two weekend have been good, the weekend before last we went to Lamma Island on the Sunday which was gorgeous. It’s only a half an hour ferry ride away from Hong Kong but it feels like a different country. No skyscrapers, just two small fishing villages, an hours walk away from each other with a beach in the middle. We got the ferry to the first village, and naturally my instinct was to immediately hunt out some food! We found a gorgeous place called the bookworm cafe, where they have shelves with loads of books you can just take off the shelf while you eat, so it has a lovely relaxed atmosphere. I had an amazing feta salad (salad has become the holy grail since I got here. It’s so hard to find!) and a proper strong filter coffee without condensed milk in it, another precious find! So I was very happy and well fed when we went to the beach, and just sat in the 30 degree sunshine, having the occasional swim and reading my book. In the evening we walked to the other side of the island where there is a strip of seafood restaurants and I had some huuuge prawns fried with garlic and onions. It was a great day, and North Point seemed even more crowded and polluted than usual on Monday morning!
Last weekend there were birthdays on Friday and Saturday night, so on Friday I headed to Mong Kok to some friends flat for a poker night/party. I love poker, but sadly the cards did not fall well for me so I lost my precious 20 dollars! We spent a lot of the night on the roof (a lot of the buildings here have roofs you can get on, don’t worry they have walls it’s not just a flat roof!) it was lovely just having a chilled out catch up with people. By about 1 there were only 6 of us left, so we went back into the flat for an epic Twister contest, which I brought to a halt by slipping on a drink I had split, flying in the air and landing with a smack next to the twister mat! Everyone seemed very concerned but after so many years of falling over I think I’ve basically turned to rubber so I was fine! Saturday night was someone else’s birthday, and it was 80’s vs 90’s night, I went slightly seventies and decided to go for David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, mainly because I wanted an excuse to wear facepaint and steal my friend Naz’s sparkly trousers. To be honest I didn’t really look anything like Ziggy Stardust, I looked like an idiot with a lightning bolt on my face wearing sparkly trousers – but I had a really good night so who cares! Tomorrow we have our school picnic which basically means a day messing around with the kids at an activity camp, and then we get the day off on Friday! So I have a long weekend before dad arrives on Tuesday!!
I’m nearly half way through my first term now, so I thought I should let you know how schools going! It’s good, but very busy, we’ve started running our English Ambassador team which is 20 P3/4’s who are (reasonably) good at English who help on the English funfair days (creeping up scarily soon!) Me and Maeve have a team each, and Rob helps with mine. I was really intimidated by it at first, but it’s been a bit better this week. I also started running my creative writing activity group, which went really well last week but this week I accidentally turned the computer off at the plug and then couldn’t get it to work again so it was a bit of a shambles! I’m starting to get to know the kids now as well, I definitely have some favourites! Most of them are in P1, there’s a little girl called Ivy who is about the size of my thumb, and she has these tiny pink glasses and is so well behaved she’s like a little doll. Then there’s Zurg, also in P1, who may be the most serious 5 year old I’ve ever met, he’s taken it upon himself to organise chuk chuk, who is autistic (I think, we don’t get any information other than that SEN students are ‘special’ so we have to make our own judgements and try and work out how to best help them from that) Anyway, when i’m lining them up to take them to the reading room I never have to worry because Zurg will march chuk chuk to the line, make sure he’s in the right place and has his badge on correctly and then gives a little nod of satisfaction. No smile, never a smile, no sign of weakness from Zurg. To be honest most of the P1’s are lovely, although a few haven’t grasped miss/mr yet, so every now and then I’ll hear ‘MR WALLACE’ and get ready to shout ‘IT’S MISS’ thinking it’s some smart arse P5, and look down and see a tiny person missing their 2 front teeth grinning at me. I don’t even have the heart to correct them! Rob (the NET who I teach P1 with) has a new favourite game while we’re reading sleepy zoo with them, the other day he was at the back telling someone off so I went through the animals and said ‘duck’ obviously in a northern accent because I got some confused looks from the kids as they tried to sound it out. Rob thought it was hilarious so now he gets me to show all the classes how to say duck in my accent and works that word into the lesson as much as possible, we’ve had 4 lessons of this now and it still makes us laugh every time!
This was a really long entry, sorry. I didn’t realise I had that much to say!
Hope everyone is well and it’s not getting to cold next week as me and Dad bask in the perfect, 28 degree sunshine! Lots of love x

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