In your mouth!

*Re:Disclaimer... Okay, so I have been abnormally lazy about getting pictures, but I've also had some software trouble on my end which I am fixing. Middle of October at the latest and I will also send everything out in an email*

This week has passed rather quickly compared to the others but this is mostly because I have settled into the groove of teaching rather well. This week saw the first week when I actually needed to prepare warm up exercises instead of having a mostly scripted introduction act for the students because this week I only had classes which I had previously taught.

My schedule is actually two weeks of classes which then repeat, so I essentially have 2 classes Tuesday-Thursday and 4-5 classes on Sat and Sun with different classes every night for two weeks and then I repeat. More than that I have been widely accepted by the other teachers at work and so I have no awkwardness around them from what language barrier exists or from being unfamiliar with them.

I know now that Maggie, Sandy, Hebbe, and Vickey all are the trouble makers at work because they are simply more outgoing and playful than the other teachers. I also know which of them have boyfriends, husbands, or are single with the exception of Hebbe and the secretaries.

Nicco, my flatmate, is a pretty relaxed person and had definitely been a great help while I get set up. Along with introducing me to good places to eat and dishes in the area he has been sharing his personal interest in Economic theory with me. While I find myself agreeing with many of the assertions he makes, our conversations are laced with the almost legalese of our combined majors of Philosophy and Literature and so much of the conversation is either purely theoretical or in non committal. As such I am in no danger of becoming a Libertarian, in fact the suggestions he makes seems to be so completely grounded in an paradigm of market dynamics that I find the very basis for the beliefs flawed when they move beyond the narrow foci of supply and demand.


On a completely different note, I have a bike now. As investments go with my expected stay in LouYang it really won't benefit me enough to by one of the electric bikes or scooters. Buses are everywhere and if I truly want to go somewhere which is out of comfortable biking I can hope a bus for very cheap or take a Taxi without feeling the punch too much. The biggest feeling of elation from owning my transportation comes from not being restricted to Bus schedules anymore. From the bottom floor of my apartment to the curb of work by bicycle is about the same amount of time that the bus took me to get to the bus stop near work. In all I actually save an average of 5-10min using my Bicycle not to mention the fact that I am getting exercise if I ride for 30min to work and back.

I bought my bicycle on Friday for ~530 RMB (Yuan or Kuai). 7.5RMB=$1.00
RMB is the international designation for the People's Republic Money Bill.
Yuan is the normal Chinese word for 1 RMB, the equivalent of Dollar in English.
Kuai is the Chinese colloquial term for Yuan, it is more equivalent to Buck in English.


I bought the bike on Friday and it is a decently large framed normal city bike in a silvery gray tone. It came with two locks built into the bike itself, one locks the back wheel so that it can't turn and the other locks the handlebars at an angle so that they can't turn. The frame is pretty light and has a cargo area behind the main seat in case I buy milk or something else which is bulky and need to carry it home. The bike also came with a thumb bell and a basket on front because "In China real men have baskets on their bikes." Which Mike told me as he handled the speaking part of the purchase for me. He followed this up with, "You know, if we get you pink streamers from the handlebars you would officially that would officially be a pimp bike." He of course said this with a wide impish smile, an expression he practices frequently.

That night I rode home with some of the girls who had their electric bikes and raced them for a bit on the more open stretch of the path home easily keeping pace and occasionally outstretching them which impressed them a good deal since both of them had electric motors and pedals to get extra speed from. Still it felt good to be out an active, even if my legs ache a bit now. Between the biking an a gym membership which I had set up and now need to work into my schedule I should have no trouble getting in shape while here... well apart from how many tasty foods there are here.

Chinese roads are interesting places, they feel like some strange combination of college campus paths and the I-5. On the open straights everyone is weaving through everyone else and going as fast as they feel like (well for the bikes anyways, the cars keep pretty slow by our standards). Then randomly there will be five people in a row, taking up the either passage while they talk, all moving so slow that is is amazing they stay on the bikes at all. Overall I can normally make pretty good time on the straights, but traffic can add as much as 10 minutes to my trips (so far they have ranged from 25-40min by bike).


Now I appreciate that most of you don't read this page because the world of Chinese pedestrian traffic is all that interesting. It is mildly chaotic and likely a field day for a social scientist or anthropologist, but to your normal person there is nothing about Chinese roads that can compete with stories about the class room. This brings me to my Kid stories of the week.

Now my teaching doesn't involve weaving through oncoming traffic, something getting to work occasionally does involve, but I find it far more exciting. This week was more of week 1 of my schedule (week 2 of my blog) and as such my classes were more with the Y and R kids with several S classes but I didn't actually have class with my cute K kiddies this week. I had plenty of fun teasing my Y and R classes by getting them to use grammar in ways that they both understood and were amused by. Today I had the class which had one my cutest kids of the week two weeks ago with "Annie, I'm so cold," and they came in a close second.

I had decided to be one of them while remaining a teacher and I considered the end result a complete success because they demonstrated a very high level of understanding. I asked one of the students "Did you go to your boyfriends house yesterday?" Mostly because I knew that they find such questions very funny. From the other side of the class I heard one of my students yell out, "Teacher! We're just students we don't have boyfriends yet." But several of the students laughed and asked each other similar questions so I waited until the seemed like they were getting bored and asked one of the boys, "Did you kiss Annie last week?" at which point the same girl from before yelled out, "Ahh, Teacher so dirty." Despite this, she was laughing along with all the others.

In some of my others classes I had tried out funny sentence contests to see what they could think of using the grammar that they knew. For the most part the result was something like the insult contest in the movie hook with everyone trying to use disgusting things for humor. One of the students show himself very clever however and while motioning to his Chinese teacher, Maggie, he asked with the air of a salesman, "Do you want a girlfriend?" I myself found this not only funny because it was well presented, but it because it displayed an excellent command of his vocabulary and grammar.

But this week my cute kid winners were the "No Goodbye" kids again. I passed their class after one of theirs while both they and myself were on break and they ran out to hang on my arms or otherwise play with me. One of the little girls who is completely enamored with me came up and offered me a piece of pomegranates. After offering it to me she became impatient waiting for
me to eat it which I had intended to do after I got into my break room, she picked it out of my hand and put it in my mouth and then started rubbing my cheeks to tell me to chew it. When I told her thank you and told her that it tastes good, she ran back for another. From that point on every time I saw her she was putting a small piece in my hand a running back for more. One of the other girls saw this and thought it was funny so she kept taking them from my hand and putting them in my mouth.

Now the problem with Pomegranate is that the pieces are small and surround a sizable seed. So here I am with cheeks that are beginning to feel like chipmunks and unable to get rid of the seeds because I am surrounded by 4-5 year olds. Instead of letting them continue to feed me I stood up well out of reach of the little girl feeding me but still amassing a collection of Pomegranate in my hand from the smaller one. Then, realizing she couldn't reach my mouth even while holding the little piece between her fingers and stretching she pouted up at me and in a strong, authoritarian voice told me, "In your mouth!"