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I can’t really sleep (I think I drank too much tea) so here’s one post for you. Teaching a foreign language has been an interesting challenge for me, since I’m the kind of arsehole who has trouble keeping my syllables down. A friend once affectionately (euphemistically, I thought) said “you talk just like you write!” [...] I usually see the same guards every time I return home, usually because it’s later at night and only a few of them must have those shifts. By that time they are often not in the guard house attached to the gate, but have pulled a school desk and chair into the courtyard further away [...] “Of course I think it is very important for young people to know about history,” said Wang Laoshi. The four of us from the English Department were clustered together again at the lunch bench in the teacher’s canteen, and after somehow getting on the subject of family trees (”Family tree is jiapu! Say [...] My post titles are getting intentionally stranger and stranger as I think about what would most poetically capture what I want to say. I disclaimed a long time ago that this blog would be an “experimental prose testing ground,” though so far I’ve kept that largely at bay (both for coherency and intellectual property!) But [...] Even from the very beginning of our trip in Beijing over a month ago, I’ve had a distinctly different experience as an expat than the other Americans in the CTLC program. Obviously the glaring difference was that among all of us, I’m the only one who shares the skin color of the native Chinese [...] Most days of the week I only have two classes to teach (with the exception being that dreadful Thursday). However, the schedule makes it so that one day they’ll be in the morning and the next they’ll be the last two classes of the day, making it kind of hard to get into a [...] Even though today was the first day of real teaching, I didn’t start till 3:25, so without any serious obligation to wake up early I slept in. This did not work so well when the loudspeakers started blaring. An announcer’s strong voice boomed throughout the school, followed shortly by martial music. I reluctantly got [...] There have been two meetings for teachers at Yucai Third Middle this weekend. The first, yesterday’s, was for new teachers and I was included along with six others (most of them graduates from Shenzhen University). It was nice to be included, but I didn’t really understand anything that was being said, so I [...] The shop clerks at Walmart are starting to catch on to me. The guy who’s been trying to sell me an iron for the past week was among the six or seven people who mobbed me in the kitchenware section, and the mattress and bedding fuwuyuan totally called me out on having been there [...] My love affair with taxi cabs has ended, because I think I left my wallet in one last night. Coming back from Ikea, Kami, Hunter and I jammed into a taxi cab with all our Ikea stuff (mostly Hunter’s). While juggling everything in the backseat and getting out my wallet to pay, I must have [...] |
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