I am also known as Captain Psychologist
Fun times on Saturday
Last week, word got around that there would be a music festival on Saturday, with a range of local Kunming bands. Our teachers decided to take their classes on a group outing there, so about 50 of us ‘waiguoren’ (foreigners) walked down to the bus stop together, our loud American accents echoing throughout the streets. When the bus came, over an hour late, there weren’t enough seats, but luckily a group of Chinese girls with clear sunglasses and trendy hats offered to lead the remainder of us to a different bus.
We were expecting a lot of cheesy Chinese pop music, maybe a bit of alternative stuff, but after changing buses and arriving three hours after we had set off, we found a stage with a load of not-too-serious-looking Chinese guys playing over-distorted guitar and swinging their hair around while a white guy shouted ten second bursts of “wwooaarrrrrrrggggghhghhhhhh” into the microphone. It was in fact a death metal concert.
Engish Teaching
Teaching English for two hours a week has been a serious challenge, it takes me more than twice, sometimes three times that long to plan the lessons, and then a couple of hours of procrastination on top of that. But whenever it goes well, it’s really rewarding.
Sometimes it seems like I’ve got 20 wonderful kids who want to travel the world, but between here and the airport there is an incredibly complicated assault course-maze, with all kinds of rolling boulders to jump over, dead ends to avoid and backwards travelators to scale. My job is a teacher is to use any method I can think of to make these things meaningful and relevant, and not just a load of stupid, difficult and pointless tasks! The ultimate, almost unattainable goal is to convince them that learning to formulate the present continuous tense is actually more fun than eating ice cream and playing ‘What’s the time Mr. Wolf?’ at the same time. I have some way to go yet.
Why I Like Chinese
So I removed this entry before and said I’d revise it, because I thought it came across as too anti-Western. Then I re-read it and decided it was fine, but unfortunately didn’t have an opportunity to put it back up until now! Well, here it is:
I was talking to a friend the other day, and they remarked that they want to travel to Japan and South East Asia this year because they’ve travelled in China a lot, and despite its size it’s not a very diverse country. This prompted me to consider whether I agreed or not, and if so, why do I still like it so much?
Kunming
So I started a shiny new blog. The last one was a bit hopeless, due to a combination of being too busy and having the site blocked all the time,
so I decided to start afresh, in the hope that I might start updating more than once a month. I may well also get round to writing about the end of my summer soon. Anyway, how is life here? Many of you have asked this question but my two-sentence answers have hardly cut the mustard, so this is an attempt to give a real answer for once.!
So I arrived here at the beginning of September with Alice, who’s in my class in Edinburgh, and we stayed in a hotel for a few days while registering at university, exploring the city and meeting some Baha’is who live here.
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