8:11 am
Slight tickle in my throat. I know it's unreasonable to expect that, in a strange land of strange microbes, with a minimum of soap or hand sanitizer spread about public spaces (well, zero in the public spaces so far), that I could go my whole stay here without getting sick. I'll keep you posted on that.
Yesterday looked hazier than it's ever been outside the window- but then my brain made the connection: it was snowing. Guess I forgot about snow. Honestly, I kept expecting it to rain, and leave me without an umbrella - an umbrella which I didn't bring because, it being January, I was expecting snow. At some point between coming and living here my thought processes got disconnected.
Underneath my jacket I just had a t-shirt on, which was fine for me, but was commented on later on in the day by a student who pointed to his sweater and then my shirt: "You aren't cold?"
"What?.. oh, the t-shirt, no, it's fine."
Have I mentioned that the sales people in the Mykal store (think the Bay, but with a grocery store in the basement) all have rather puffy winter jackets on inside. You know what, if I had to choose between turning up the heat inside of a shopping mall or getting the employees to wear a jacket, I could see choosing the exponentially less expensive option. It's actually better for the environment too. You weren't expecting that one, eh?
I arrived just past the 9 am mark (as early as possible with the entrance blocked by security until 9, though I left the apartment later than usual, let's say because I didn't want to wait out in the cold, and not because I was being lazy) and had trouble connecting to the internet, which left me to examine my classes for the day. Then there was Tom, who arrived nearly at 10 (when classes start) and who apparently grabbed all his class lists at once from the front desk. I was told specifically not to take more than one (often only the one is prepared), so I don't, but it is self defeating- we run our classes right until the hour mark, which is when our NEXT class is scheduled to begin. If at THAT moment is the first time we see how many people are in our class, my issue is that I don't know how many photocopies to make, so I'm forced to copy for a minute or two (or three) into the next class.
At least a short briefing of what numbers we could expect for the classes in the day would alleviate this problem. On the other hand, that's just me wanting things to be exact- I should just start estimating at the start of the day, make my copies, and then run from there. That would be a huge time saver.
Anyways, the front desk girl comes over to Tom's desk, grabs a class sheet, and adds a student to the list saying angrily "last time, only one!" Could you imagine having to be angry at someone, in the workplace, in a foreign language?? And the front desk girls don't actually have the best English, so that makes it worse- okay, they seem to have almost zero English skills, but that's my point exactly. That left us foreign teachers with a REALLY tense 8 minutes until our first class. Chee-ee!
One student, Rain, was ready for class at 10. Sherry was late due to snow traffic (perfectly fine by me) and whoever the third student was didn't show up. We role played shopkeeper selling a product and the customer, I got to explain the logic behind the word "bio-metric security" (it's... possible I through out too much vocabulary), and, because Sherry didn't do her homework (which is fine by me) I gave an example of selling something on the spot- I sold a robot Monkey King (I was thinking a sort of Mecha Godzilla rival sort of thing) for an almost obscenely low price compared to the future price point after the TV show takes off. I had to show me retailers licence and inventory paperwork to prove I wasn't pushing stolen merchandise, and after explaining exploiting the collectors market with electronic sales (I didn't mention collectors market exactly, don't worry it was reasonable to explain) I got Rain to buy two units- aw yeah! Sucker, it was just a drawing on a white board! My paperwork? Nothing but the class list and my lesson plan! The greatest swindle of all time.
It seems this was Sherry's last class, so she asked for a selfie, and I was happy to oblige. Well, I mean, I was happy to take a photo with her, I still bristle at the word "selfie". She had to re-take the picture to adjust for the fact that I'm a giant here- at least compared to something like 95% of the women, a decent portion of men are as tell as me. Just another example of this trip being nothing but an exercise in ego stroking.
I had a two hour break between my first class and my second class/English Corner block which I spent trying to find a script for the Simpson's clip I had prepared- the best I found was a site that said it had all these scripts, but it only had the dialogue and certain sound effects, with zero breaks to indicate which character said what. So I spent my time adding that in myself and making it presentable- after Adeel showed me how to stop word from changing everything I typed into chinese characters.
I found another clip, this time from the episode Bart gets a new, perfect, father figure because of Homer forgetting to pick him up after soccer practice. I've got the beginning of the episode right up until Bart in a cold fury envisions Homer's face melting away like an ice cream sundae. I'll tell you now I stopped playing the clip just before the face melting part, it is rather disturbing.
With about 20 minutes to spare I went to hit the soapless bathroom, sanitize (I'm seriously almost out of sanitizer, help me) and grabbed a quick lunch of sausage on a stick, some, uh, less refined pork on a stick, and some flat, um, rice crispy covered something oval on a stick. Basically, I grabbed three things on a stick, because I didn't have time to mess around with no chop sticks.
I realized I wanted a poster image for my presentation, a picture of the Simpson's together over the words "The Simpson's"- you know what I'm talking about. Fortunately, so did sketchy accessed google search, because what I wanted popped right up.
I opened up my English Corner asking about how they learned about history in China? ("School- history class") Okay, how long have they been making movies in China? ("Hmm, it takes about 6 months" "No, how long have they ever HAD movies" "Oh, a hundred years" "Yeah, sounds about right") And how do you learn about popular movies that were around before you were born? ("Internet" "Fair enough- but what if you grew up just BEFORE the internet was a thing?") And that's when I tell them about the cultural touchstone that taught me or prompted me to learn so much about history, pop cultural and otherwise: cue the image of the Simpson's on the screen, cue disbelieving laughter from audience, cue student taking a picture to show friends later as though a cartoon in English class was unpossible.
Man, I have to do some ego stroking here, I set that up perfectly. And of the two clips, among other pop cultural references, the first had a historical reference to the origins of April Fool's Day, and the second had a pop cultural reference to a movie that, until I looked it up for the sake of understanding the clip, I'd never heard of before: the Cohen brothers film "Barton Fink". The clips perfectly underscored my stated aims.
From there, I showed the clip, then played it again, this time switching to the script I had prepared and asking students to tell me what happened? Did the boy succeed in getting his father to go get a beer? He was? (re-watches clip) No, the boy failed, it was the announcement that beer causes liver problems and cancer of the rectum that got the father to get up and get a drink.
Basically, I got paid to do two of my favourite things: talk about classic Simpsons, and explain all the jokes. How great is that?!!
And even the sternest person in the room laughed at the giant explosion from the shaken beer can. :) It's such a great visual- they even laughed when I showed it the second time.
I told everyone that the second clip had a scary ending visual, so if anyone wanted to see it they could see me after the presentation at the computers at the back.
I let everyone go at 2 minutes to the hour, which I was so pleased with- I think the clips themselves were only about 3-4 minutes each, but the talking of which lasted just shy of an hour- imagine of I used an entire episode!! Stella said disapprovingly "you still have 2 minutes left" which is insane, but whatever, I was still riding high. I think she just felt like she had to start right away, and so I was making her presentation 2 minutes longer. Just wait two minutes! Let them stretch their legs!
Surprisingly, Bradley told me he wasn't interested in it at all. He's always the best for participating, so this was hugely surprising to hear AFTER the presentation, after, again, he participated so much. And he said Chinese people won't tell you when they don't like something. So that's concerning. On the other hand, immediately after that I was approached by, okay, I'm pretty sure it was Daisy, Nicole and Sunny who all wanted to see the scary ending. They were maybe a little shocked, but said it was okay, and that they liked the show. Well, Nicole didn't say that, the other two did. I had the feeling during the presentation that Nicole didn't care about it, but she may just suffer from "resting bitch face". Who doesn't, amirite?
I immediately messaged my brothers about uploading episodes of the Simpsons from the dvd collection back home for me to download here. Mwahahaha.
From there I had a class where we drew a map of a fake city as a group giving directions to me, something which took way too long, and then I sped things up a bit, only to see that that was the only real thing taking time for this lesson, so I was semi-screwed with extra time at the end.
After that was a class I had done some photocopying in advance for, I thought I was doing really well, but then realized I'd completely forgotten to search out dice for the game.
Also there was a dude that named himself "Mars" which is obviously awesome.
While searching for dice I found naught but two coins. I'll figure something out.
So what I figured out was that I'd flip the two coins, and of the four possible flips outcomes it would correspond to jumping either 2, 4, 6 or 8 squares. There were two game boards, but the two teams just moved at the same time, landing on the same square, and having to construct the same sentence before we moved on to the next player. It essentially became a class devoted to repitition of the essential idea we wanted to cover- and that was okay. By the end of the class even Mars got what we were doing (Mars, uh, took a while). So that was a big change of pace for me, doing the more repetitive exercises, but it worked out really well, and, instead of getting bored everyone seemed to be into it.
Then again, chinese people don't tell you when they aren't enjoying it... ah, who're we kidding, most people are like that. They liked my explanation of what a tattoo was: I took the marker and drew a heart on my left arm with a line (for an arrow, he said, explainingly) poking in and out.
We went a few minutes late, but someone finally crossed the finish line, and I passed out some scrambled sentences they could look over on their own to reinforce the structure we'd been using the entire class.
Leaving Web, I went for a bowl of soup with three pieces of um, probably beef, but I don't know, as well as carrots and some white vegetable that was likely turnip or something. As well as that cup of watermelon pieces, and a water bottle. Trying to tear the bones out of the meat resulted in some embarrassing splashback.
There's a candy store, "Candy+" across from the Food Bazzar, and I thought I'd check it out in the hopes of something jelly bean or jujube-esque. A sales person immediately joined me in the close quarters- there seemed to be three people working here, plus a girl outside the front door inviting people in (like all the stores). There were some very cool candy roses- I pointed and said "nice" and my sales companion said thank you. I'm pretty sure I said nice.
Most of the store seemed to be just this one kind of candy. I pointed and asked whether it was hard or soft candy? She didn't understand, so I attempted some juxtaposition to get my point across: I made the breaking in half motion with my hands while making a hard bite and saying the onomatapeidic (there's no WAY that one was spelled right) "crunch" and then I, more softly, said "smooth" while making a going-over-waves motion with my hand.
She passed me a new package that I felt- and it was soft! Success!
I figured their translating efforts deserved to be rewarded, so I decided to buy the small bag- how much? "60 yuan". Woof, this better be the best soft candy in the world. (I've been waiting until this moment before I tried the candy, let me see..)
They got lucky.
(nah, I'm kidding, they're okay, but they're just fruit gummies, not worth it except for the experience- that said, excuse me while I sit here listening to my music and eating gummies- they're actually almost a cross between gummies and marshmallows. And the yellow one has a strange kick going on. This is why George R.R. Martin takes so long with his books. Candy and music. True fact. Ooh, some kind of aqua-marine one. Hmm, vick's vapo-rub after taste. I seem to have hit a vein that has partially liquified under the weight of itself... I hope you realize I take artistic licence with my descriptions.)
Okay, well, was it a mistake to eat that entire bag just now? My stomach says yes, but, famously, my stomach is a big cry baby. "Feed me nutritious food at regularly scheduled intervalswaah waah" - that's how you sound right now.
On the bag which specifically held the gummies just now there are several pictures of a cute mascot panda apparently named "RuRu" who informs me, while alternating between playing cymbals and the maracas, that she is a performer! There's another picture of RuRu just trying to stare into my soul, but I think that's separate to her musical abilities.
The Candy+ people also gave me two packets of some of the hard candy to thank me for my patronage. For 60 yuan, yeah, good. A co-worker who has studied in Canada suggested some quick math for the purposes of comparing is to divide everything by 5. So by that math I spent about $12 on a package of gummies. Yeesh. Er, anyways, these hard candies are in a package that has a clear plastic front and a foil backing. It looks like candy you'd give (or get from) an astronaut. The candy itself is made of short cylinders, on the face of which you see pictures of, let's see, the yellow one has a pineapple, orange has half an orange, the purple one has grapes, and the pink one has.. Santa Claus. Well, sure.
You'll excuse me if I wait to try these candies. Maybe I'll live blog eating them tomorrow. You know, if that's how you get your kicks, there are websites where you can watch people eat.
I picked up some bananas in the Mykal store (I know it's wasteful, but these plastic wrapped bananas have been perfectly read for consumption, that's something I'm not used to) and waved a bunch to this cute little girl who must have been only 4? 5? But knew "hello!"
And that's it for that day, signing off at 10:38 am
Wish me luck, have a good day
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