Bruce Teaching English In China: July 2012

Saturday, July 28, 2012

First Week As A Teacher=Too much fun

So we were told that we were going to teach the best kids that Lincang had to offer and so I thought that these students of mine would end up teaching me English grammar by the end of the day

- Turns out that educational inequality gap is indeed alive and well in China
None of my kids had English names either

Most of them had been learning English since 3rd or 4th grade so on the first day I just assumed every kid would have one and so I I had them write “John Doe” or “Jane Doe” on their paper if they didn’t have English names along with their assignment to write out the alphabet

Out of my 42 students, only 2 had English names so that meant I had 40 papers that I had to give back to them at some point that had “John Doe” or “Jane Doe” written on them

And I’ve learned that I will never let kids choose their own English names

They all wanted names that were 3 or 4 letters long and all the girls wanted Lily

At first I was pretty generous and offered them suggestions and advice but then by girl #23 I said, “You’re name is Shelby” with a tone that said, “and you will like it” but I did say it with a smile and she was still super excited
So when I get to my placement school in Guangdong, I’m just going to choose names of Greek Gods and Goddesses for them so I can say, “Zeus, can you say the following dialogue”

The entire process took me an hour and a half before class which yes, that means that some kids arrive to class an hour and a half before class starts

I’m excited that kids want to learn and luckily these kids are really adamant about studying English because they constantly ask me questions (I just wish I could understand more than 10% of them)

I’ve developed a system where I have to have kids write out their questions and then translate it using my iPad which I think my kids abuse but at least their placated

Diagnostic test didn’t go so well

With 42 students we had a 10% passing rate with a class average of 33% with a goal of 80% class average on the final exam in 2 weeks

And dag nabbit, we’re going to achieve it

Plus the answers that these kids give to questions they don't know are so funny

The choices were A, B, C, D, and E but the kid wrote down 5

The answer was board or teacher but if my student wrote "Lakeisha" I would have given the points to them

They were supposed to translate the sentences and apparently "I have a red skirt" written in Chinese translates to "0" in English

Classroom Management Issues

So at TFC we aim for 100% compliance with our classroom rules and on Wednesday I had about 20% compliance

Luckily there was only one kid who was sitting on a windowsill overlooking our view of Lincang 2 floors above the ground, but I got through to him pretty good when I pulled him off the windowsill, point to the ground outside, and put my hands around my neck sticking out my tongue with my eyes closed to symbolize death

Plus, this is our view outside our window which I'm sure no kid wants to fall into

My classroom management problem is just background chatter

I just had kids who would constantly talk as soon as I stopped talking and have a kid answer one of my questions, so Thursday I decided to take the entire class to teach classroom management

That backfired horribly

All of the kids were bored out of their minds except for the part where I played the “Track the Speaker” game where I had all my kids look at me as I crawled under tables, stood on desks, etc.

I think my problem was that I used too much Chinese (which they didn’t understand) and whenever they had a question I couldn’t answer it
Plus what happened was that I threatened that if the class got 3 x’s then they’d have to copy a dialogue 30 times but it was just the Canadian group (we’re doing an Olympic theme) that got 2 x’s for the class and I realized that was unfair so I erased all the x’s which really didn’t help my credibility at all

As soon as that was over I actually had more and more chatter and nothing got learned that day

I felt absolutely horrible so (with the help of a Chinese fellow) I sent a text message to the father of the ringleader of the troublemakers saying “Your son’s behavior was unacceptable today and because of it I wasn’t able to teach class. I really want your child to learn English so I will be at the school an hour early to tutor him. I hope the behavior of your child improves.”
Just to balance the karma, I sent a text message to the parents of the top student of my class saying how wonderful she was, how she always helps me out, and that they should be very proud of her

Friday was my best day teaching so far

The dad of the ringleader of troublemakers came in with the troublemaker an hour early to class and I couldn’t understand what he said but I know he said something about last night and he made a shaking motion like a whip towards his son and his son was 85% calmer than he was yesterday for the entire class

Everyone learned that day and I was just happy to teach\

The kids still made fun of my horrible Chinese calligraphy (because it’s really hard to write Chinese characters with chalk when the chalk breaks in half as soon as it touches the board and you’re not used to it) but it was a good kind of laughing at me.

I made the right decision coming to Teach for China

Even on the days that I felt like a horrible teacher I still felt awesome when at least one child got what I was saying and that is by far the best feeling in the world (especially when the kid can barely understand you to begin with)

I just need to get used to teaching Chinese kids

I heard a story about a 5th grade teacher who tried to play bingo with her students and the kids, whenever they would hear the letter they were supposed to be listening for, would take out their ruler to draw a perfect x in the box
I do love the scholar position that kids get in

It’s customary for Chinese kids to expect that their teacher wants them to have both elbows on the desk with arms folded each other with a straight back at all times which is awesome

And the way Chinese children ask questions is priceless too

Whenever you call on a student, they get out of their chair and stand up so everyone can see them answer

When you go to a new place in China, just drink tea

We had community engagement training today and they say that the three things you can talk about with people in China to make them your friends are tea, food, and the NBA (to Chinese guys)

They separated all of the people who weren’t good at Chinese into a separate group for this training and they told it like it was, “Hey guys, we know you’re not going to have an intellectual conversation about Kantian philosophy in some dialect of Chinese when you get to your placement site so if you need something from somebody, drink tea with them for two hours, just nod your head and bring a dictionary and a notebook with you so that if you don’t know what they say you can look it up later, and right when you’re about to leave ask them for what you want.”

It was actually really valuable to hear that

Now I know because otherwise I would have just went into a guy’s office with no context and asked for something but now I know that in China, things take time

Saturday and Sunday were lesson planning days

Basically I was sick of feeling rushed all of the time with going to teach, going to class to learn how to teach, and not getting back to the dorm room until after dinner at 6:30 pm to spend 3 or more hours making a lesson plan for 3 days in advance and revising the one I’m going to do for the next day, so this weekend I decided to write every single lesson plan left for SI (10 of them) and it felt good
The lesson plan for the last day was the best part because that’s our final exam/celebration day and so I wrote for knowledge and skills that my 5th graders need to know

Students will know that if I catch them cheating I will call their parents, rip up their exams in front of them, and they will not get any cake during the celebration
This party is BYOB in bring your own bottle of water
Students will know that smoking or getting irresponsibly drunk as 5th graders is looked down upon in society
No mosh pits allowed
If I hear anyone suggest I play Insane Clown Posse or Limp Bizkit during the celebration, I will give them a 0 for the course

Sunday, July 22, 2012

The day before my first day as a teacher

Before my first day of teaching at Summer Institute

I love our Chinese teacher at SI

His English name is Billy and he puts just the right amount of humor in every lesson he teaches.

One lesson involved us BLAST fellows (those TFC members who aren’t that good at Chinese yet) trying to correct Billy (who was playing the role of a naughty student) with Chinese commands

We got to walk up to the front of the blackboard in order to simulate the role of the teacher and one fellow was instantly flabbergasted when Billy misbehaved and while he was flipping through his notebook trying to find the right phrase to use he muttered under his breath just loud enough so everyone could hear “Oh sh**”

So note to self, get those Chinese correcting children phrases memorized

Then one of the BLAST fellows who was at better at Chinese was graded a lot harder by Billy so if she pronounced the Chinese phrase just a little bit wrong Billy would laugh and say, “听不懂 HA HA” (I don’t understand HA HA) and continue misbehaving which was absolutely hilarious

Fun assignments in SI

So for our 3-hour reflection time on Friday afternoon we actually had a really cool assignment

Our 12 person reflection group was split up into teams of 6 and we had an hour to train 100 people in Lincang, Yunnan, China the English phrase, “Learning English Is Fun!”

I was really excited because I was still in my American mind-set that this won’t be so bad because people are friendly and willing to comply with strangers’ wishes
It took me 20 seconds into the activity when I (willingly and unprovoked) yelled at the top of my voice in a crowded restaurant “请问一下！” (Let me please ask you a question!) that Chinese people are really shy

We found out that in order to get people to say it we had to basically pry it out of them just to get started and then we had to teach them this phrase

We found that kids had the easiest time saying it but were the most recalcitrant to talk even though attracting their attention was really easy

Luckily 4 out of 6 of us spoke pretty good Chinese but I’m still at that level of Chinese where I might be able to say but it’s really slow and mechanical sounding

It was basically me going up to someone and saying really slowly in Chinese “We…are…playing…a…game” which if a stranger came up to you on the sidewalk and said that, that would be extremely creepy

Then a Chinese fellow or an American fellow would swoop in just in time to save the situation

And what made it more creepy was the fact that we were yelling this at a bunch of naked children in a park

We were able to get one 4^th grade child to say the phrase at this park and then he told one of the Chinese fellows that he could get his friends to say it but we had to run there

We all thought, “GREAT! Let’s Go”

So we’re running and running and all of a sudden we come to this fountain that’s pretty big that had about 12 butt-naked children in it

So here we are at the top of our voices leading a bunch of butt-naked children in a chant of “Learning English is Fun!” which somehow in China doesn’t result in the cops being called on you

And what sucks is the fact that we were so close to getting 12 people closer to our goal

Us: “Learning”
Naked Children: “Learning”
Us: “English”
Naked Children: “English”
Us: “Is”
Naked Children: “Is”
Us: “Fun”
Naked Children: “Fun”
Us: “Learning English”
Naked Children “Learning English”
Us: “Is Fun”
Naked Children: “Is Fun”
Us: “Learning English Is Fun!”
Naked Children: “rabba…rabba”

Oh, the joy of teaching little children

In the end we got 83 people to say the phrase

I’m glad we had it though because toward the end it really did become less about the goal and more about just teaching people English which was rewarding in it of itself

Plus we beat the other team which also helped

It was a rewarding experience to go to just random people who would normally never even talk to and just interact with them whether it was a mother of 5 or just a construction worker

Got assigned my Summer Institute Class

So each fellow is assigned a class to teach while we’re learning to be a teacher so after one week of training the training wheels aren’t completely off but they’re just about to be torn off
I will be teaching 42 rising 5^th grade students English and I’m sure each one of them will be a darling angel who will never misbehave

I’ve spent about 10 hours doing 3 lesson plans so they better not foil my plans but if I do I won’t get mad, it happens

Hopefully they like our theme

My co-teacher and I came up with the theme, “Go for the Gold” because it’s the summer Olympics and our 42 students will be split up into 7 countries to get medals based on good behavior, test scores, etc.

I have a feeling that the gold medal for basketball will be a lot more desired than the gold medal for handball

I’m going to have them sign a pledge with the Notre Dame slogan, “Play like a champion today!” and I’m going to post it outside so that every time they walk into the classroom they see this sign to remind themselves that they will play like a champion

Making those posters for class was fun

Thank goodness my co-teacher could draw too

I love my Chinese roommate’s idea for showing kids boiling water

He took a paper cup and tried to put it over a candle in order to show kids how to boil water with results you probably could already expect

Classroom Decorating

It may look like Ebay threw up in it, but I’m sure proud of it

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Notification of Placement Region

So yesterday (7/17/2012) I found out that my placement region is Guangdong province in either Chaonan or Chaoyan County

I'll be in the pink region to the lower right of Guangdong province by the sea

- This of course was after we learned that the Chinese fellows were going to be told that they would be known their placement region on the first day of SI which got revised to being told we would all be notified on Saturday July, 21 but still I’m happy I know at least what province I’ll be in
- I still don’t know the exact school I’ll be at and I won’t know that until the last week of Summer Institute (about Mid-August) and I’m willing to be flexible for that
- I fell in love with Guangdong the minute they said that they had a Wal-Mart in Shantou (a major city that’s near all of the placement schools)
- The thing is that I preferred Yunnan over Guangdong in my placement survey too
- The decisions for provinces are final but no one seems to be mad because everyone is really on board with eradicating educational inequality wherever it is, no matter if they do it with real or fake deodorant from a Wal-Mart
Summer Institute forces you to reflect more than a mirror

I don’t think I’ve done this much introspection before in my entire life over these first three days of SI

I’ve introspected about my past experiences, my feelings, my ideas for my students, etc.
Plus SI gives you a good creative outlet because I’ve also drawn more on posters about “visions”, “goals”, “values”, etc.

I am learning A LOT about being a teacher

Thank goodness I had good teachers in my life (shout out to Mrs. Ferrarro-3rd and 8th grade social studies teacher) who practiced basically every best practice TFC covers

It’s simple, “I do, we do, you do” and all of a sudden you’re an awesome teacher

Also thank goodness for some college professors who now when I look back I can say, “Now I know why everyone in my class fell asleep”

I’m hoping that by the time I’m done with SI, I’ll be transforming so many lives they’ll call me Mr. Megatron

You get a lot of acronyms thrown at you too

TAL (Teaching as Leadership), FWBAT (Fellows will be able to),….
My favorite is PMs for Program Managers but one girl didn’t know how to spell out the acronym right so one time the teacher wanted us to read something that was up on a powerpoint and this girl read, “I should expect ongoing support from my P-M-S” instead of “my P-Ms” and everyone busted out laughing

And the ice breaker games we play are so fun

Prom Queen

You basically go up to someone, say your name and 3 facts about you, and the person you tell that to steals your identity and you steal the identity of the person you were talking to.
So you’re playing for 5 minutes and so identities are being constantly exchanged and the 3 facts definitely get mixed up with hilarious results

I said for one of my facts that, “I hate butterflies” and for some reason at the end they said that I said, “I’m afraid of butterflies” and I interrupted her with, “Alright…hold on here…”
My favorite was the person who started with, “I’m Josephine and I have 12 cats…” and this guy busted out laughing and he said, “Sorry I made that up because I forgot who I talked to”

8 Paperclip Game

This was designed to immerse ourselves in a community with the object of the game being that 2 Chinese fellows and 2 American fellows go into the community with 8 paper clips and see what they can barter for from those 8 paper clips in an hour

We ended up getting a little sweet, 3 cigarettes, 4 chopsticks, a mango, and a bowl of noodles with 2 paper clips left over

The strategy was that I would go in, speaking what little Chinese I know as icebreaker, and then the Chinese fellows would come in and actually barter

One team got probably about 200 RMB worth of stuff including: a comic book, a bottle of baijiu (strong Chinese liqueur), a pot of flowers, and expensive Yunnan tea.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Summer Institute Orientation

Community Engagement

So our first task for orientation was to practice engaging the community by ourselves (we 130 or so fellows split off into groups of 10) and from our reflection groups we had to go out one-by-one with whatever Chinese skills we had and try to connect with people

Some people talked about “Where did you come from?”, “Why are you here in Lincang?” and they had really deep meaningful conversations where I just asked where the nearest post office was so I could buy some stamps but at least I tried to do it as nicely as possible
I like the story of our Program Manager (the people from TFC who leads our reflection group) who said that she just took out her laptop and talked to the guy using google translate

Best Orientation Ever

So after we got back and had a really good free lunch compliments of TFC working out an agreement with the University, we sat down in the auditorium and heard past teachers from TFC and students who were taught by TFC teachers speak

I learned that the best way to have bilingual meetings is to have the speaker talk in their native tongue and then on a powerpoint slide in the background have the translation in another language because that’s the way TFC did it and it added a lot more impact and the story was more fluid
The kids were the best because they told stories about how their class started with like 40 kids and by the end of the year it whittled down to 23

The kids say that some of the kids dropping out actually had to do with teachers taking the kids aside and telling the kids that, “Hey listen, you’re not going to do very well if you keep going on so you might as well drop out and go home”

It was kind of hard to believe the story from one of the past Chinese fellow teachers about how this happened to her friend who dropped out and became a mushroom farmer like his dad because she said she kept up with him over QQ and I just thought that if he’s a poor mushroom farmer who can’t afford a house how can he afford a laptop and the time to go talk to old pals on QQ?

All the stories were awesome

You started to get the feeling that, “Man I made the right decision after college to try and eradicate educational inequality” because all the stories were so personal
There was a story from one of the recruiters about how her grandpa who lived in rural China decades ago decided to take the place of the recruiter’s great-uncle to move to Vietnam (and eventually to the US) and that meant that the recruiter’s family now has so much opportunity and all of her close relatives have high school or college degrees whereas the part of the family that stayed back in rural China only has about 1 out of 9 members with a high school diploma and most of them have to work jobs that they don’t want to work at to make ends meet because those are the only jobs available.

Learned a cool new phrase

Now if someone wants to ask if there’s a simple answer to something I can use the TFC response and say, “There’s no silver bullet but there is a silver buckshot”

Learned more about when I’ll be placed

They said that I’ll know what region I’ll be placed in by next weekend and that by the end of Summer Institute I’ll know where I will be placed with a definite address

The reason they say that it takes so long is that that’s just the Chinese way of handling things where last minute changes seemed to pop up
TFC wants it to be where you get to your placement site as early as possible but in the past there have been problems where all of a sudden a school won’t need a TFC teacher which really puts people in a bind

But at least they give us a little bit of time before we land in our placement region to relax a little bit after Summer Institute so that’s nice

I’m really excited to start practice teaching

So Teach for China worked out a summer camp (because summer schools where kids fail and take remedial classes over the summer are illegal in China) and all of us fellows get to teach for 40 minutes a day

May the Lord have mercy on my poor students’ souls
Hopefully I’ll have a cool English class because basically I want to do more games and moving around then anything and I think that’s what TFC is after based on how they made the Chinese way of having to recite large amounts of information as bad

Fun activity

So in our reflection groups we had this activity where we had to tell our life story and why we joined TFC in 6 minutes

I spent 3 minutes telling my story and I did a pretty bad job but I got the point across that I was here to help and not find a wife or anything bad like that

Then we had to do an activity where we all put a word or phrase on a piece of paper that described what we wanted our group to be like in discussion, throw it in the middle of the circle, and then we had to pick a piece of paper that we didn’t write

I wrote “Brevity”

A poor Chinese fellow picked it up and started with, “Yeah I picked this word bret…brep…brevity and I didn’t know what it meant so I looked it up and…”
My favorite was when someone pointed out the fact that my word and some of the other responses like, “talk freely” and “listen patiently to others” contradicted my response (no one knew that I wrote “brevity”)

Our PM said, “Well…it depends on the context you know”

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Off to Summer Institute/Estrogen Room

Final exam

Instead of a typical written exam we went on a scavenger hunt through Kunming to accomplish some tasks and we couldn’t use any English at all

It was a lot of fun and especially helpful that our teacher repeatedly told our class "You guys should REALLY know how to say, 'Where is the Provincial Library in Chinese"

The easy one was trying to find the Yunnan Provincial Library which I could have sworn was a place that I had been to before so I convinced my group that we could walk there

We had our teacher with us as our supervisor to make sure we didn’t cheat (she took my map of Kunming away from me but it was in Chinese so it really wasn’t that much of a help anyway) and we got to what I thought was the library so our teacher took our picture in front of the wrong building
We eventually found it and I deleted the photo of us in front of the wrong building just for pride but we got a lot of other good pictures out of it too

The most fun tasks were those which didn’t involve trying to find something

Singing a song

It took us forever to find a Chinese person to sing a song with us because Chinese people are just so reserved

We finally pried a song out of a 10-year old boy (whose mother had to chase him down after he ran away in terror) and luckily he picked a Chinese kids song that has the same tune as "frere Jacques" and "Are you sleeping?

Playing the game

Then we had to find one person to play this Chinese game called "The Eagle and the Chicks" where the chicks hide in a line behind the mother duck and the Eagle tries to grab one of the chicks

It's a great linebacker drill: http://chineseculture.about.com/library/weekly/aa112498.htm

Got lost at the end

We got really frustrated at the end because the last landmark the final wanted us to find was by this restaurant which we had some difficulty finding but we found it

Then our teacher gets a call and our boss tells her that we found the right chain of restaurants but the wrong location
This causes me to become a heat-seeking missile and become completely oblivious to everyone around me so I end up finding the landmark but then I realize I'm all alone

Luckily I passed the final but I was still pretty frustrated

Later that night we got our first experience of KTV compliments of Teach for China

It was really fun and I noticed that we really Americanized it because instead of the reserved Chinese way of sitting back in the leather couches and singing a song all of us Americans crowded around the TV and sang Adele as loud as we could

Trip to Lincang

We had way too much luggage

I think all 13 of us ended up bringing about 3 bags with them and we had a heck of a fun time trying to stuff all of these into the cabs

And as you can see by the picture below, we effectively boxed out people so that we could get all of our baggage on the train

8 hour bus ride

The title says it all but it wasn't that bad

We watched Kung Fu Hustle and Mission Impossible 4 in Mandarin on the way there but if I had to choose it would be transportation by train all day, every day
I did love the scenery though so if you're going from Kunming to Lincang I say take the bus but by 2 seats for yourself so you have some legroom

Arrived in Lincang to the estrogen room

The Summer Institute is being held at Teachers University in Lincang, Yunnan, China and I love the room they put me in

You can tell girls lived there the semester before and it's just so funny that they didn't take any of the decorations down yet

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Second Week of Language School

Making Vanderbilt Proud With My Performance

So far on every exam (we have a 10-minute oral and 30-minute written exam every Friday) I have scored above a 95

On the first one I actually had so much time left over that I drew a picture of a pirate ship

- The grading is pretty relaxed though
I have my first ever stalker

I’m used to Chinese people staring at me because I’ve been here for a month and I’ve learned how to deal with them

You’ve got to give them the eyes that say, “I will eat your children like the imperialist American I am”

But now I have the first ever girl who’s doing some pretty strange things

Like most new Chinese female friends I make I just casually started talking to her while I was studying Chinese (she says she’s 18 but she looks like she’s in middle school)
She works at the hostel and so we’d see each other just about every day and she’s friends with most of the BLAST fellows too but it’s what she did to me while I was asleep that made me think twice about talking with her again

One day I came back from work and I was extremely tired so I took a nap

Well my bed is right near the door and someone left the door open so this girl came in and took a photo of me while I was asleep
The only reason I found out about it was that she showed me the picture while I was in the hostel restaurant later that night

I told her it was very bad and that she shouldn’t do that but she’s backed off a lot since then because I think she found hotter foreigners to stalk

Experiments in Chinese Music

So one of the nicest things about being in China is that you can legally download music for free here

Apparently the record companies must have basically just given up and they’ve given websites the green light to let people download music
This is so true that even if you go to the Chinese iTunes store you can’t even buy music, you can only buy apps because even iTunes has given up

So the stalker girl happened to give me a lot of recommendations for Chinese music and they’re not that bad

Of course it’s music that a 14-year old girl would listen to and after a while it gets kind of old but songs like “Superstar” and “中国话” by S.H.E are actually really good

The problem is that most Chinese music is so sappy

The top 100 of Chinese music is filled with so many songs about love, feelings, emotions, and all of that other communist drool
I think I’m too hooked on American music where something violent or awesome happens

Droughts suck

So Kunming (the city I’m in for Teach for China’s language school) is in a severe drought that’s been going on for about a year now and so now the Chinese government has decided to shut down the water supply to the city

Right now our hotel has no running water except for one spigot that must be shared by 7 floors worth of people for bathing and cleaning needs
It’s not that bad though, I’m currently on day two of loofah bathing with cold water and it’s definitely do-able

Chinese Medicine>Western Medicine

So I got my first experience of sickness from food in China after eating at a western-style restaurant where I ordered a quesadilla and the bean and chili dip

So note to anyone out there to avoid eating Mexican food in China
Plus I think it’s ironic that after all of the street food I’ve eaten in China over the mast month and a half I’ve been fine but when I try to eat the Chinese attempt at Mexican food, that’s the food that makes me sick

I know it was the Mexican food too because the four people who had the Mexican food at this place (which I won’t name for legal reasons) all got sick

I packed a lot of peptol-bismol and other medicines but after two days none of them were effective

So I decided I had nothing left to lose (and I was sick of buying so much toilet paper) so I went to a Chinese pharmacy, told the lady “我拉肚子” and she gave me this tea mixture for me to drink twice a day
I took one pack of that stuff, put it in hot water, drank it, and in two hours I was significantly better and by the end of the day I was completely fine

Sunday, July 1, 2012

First weekend of language training

I’m so good at making friends with Asian women 7-10 years older than m

For two consecutive nights (Thursday and Friday) I’ve managed to have hour long conversations and get QQ numbers (the Chinese version of instant messaging) from woman who are not that noticeably older than me but you can tell they’ve been out of college for awhile

The first lady was a “Free Spirit” type who was in Kunming on travel after quitting her job as a company photojournalist

The only reason I started talking to her was because I was practicing pronouncing the pinyin “sh” and “x” which are very close to each other and she came over and helped me
And when I say, “I had a conversation with her” it was more like half of it was spoken word and half was on google translate

It was a good conversation though because for half an hour we looked at her pictures of her travels around China and now I have some new photo pose ideas to use

The second lady was a lady at the hostel who was an English tutor/manager of the hostel

I went to the “Chinese Corner” they have here at the hostel in order to figure out how to translate my phone now that I have it switched to Chinese characters in order to immerse myself in the language
I feel I made a pretty good friend because she even let me borrow her dictionary which had all of the names of fruits and vegetables I would find at a grocery store in English (which I now have to translate into Chinese so when I’m shopping at Carrefour I actually know what I’m getting this time)

When I asked her how I would return the book she said, "Oh I'm a manager here so I'll just go to your room and get it from you and if you're not there I'll just use my key to find it" which didn't really sit that well with me when I heard it but then I thought about all of the cleaning ladies that come in and out of my room when I'm not there and I thought I guess it's not that bad the manager can come and go as she pleases

Learned a lot of useful phrases in language school

Now when someone asks me in Chinese why I’m doing Teach for China I actually have a Chinese answer, “每个孩子都应该有机会” Měi gè háizi dōu yīnggāi yǒu jīhuì or “Every Child Deserves A Chance”

Now I also now to say something that happens to me a lot in China, “我迷路了” Wǒ mílùle or “I am lost”

On Saturday morning we learned some lessons in emergency Chinese

I guess they don’t think we’re going to go all American and say, “I’m going to beat the hell out of you when I catch you!” if someone steals our bag but it is nice to know how to call someone a petty thief
It was also nice to know that if I ever cut myself bleeding I know the difference between calling an ambulance (120) and the police (110) but I still need to figure out how to actually talk to them in Chinese so I'm hoping that the Chinese government is really good at tracking cell phones

I need to build up my alcohol tolerance if I’m going to do well in business in China

I overheard one of the fellows talking about how at a business meeting in China they bring beer and they like to target the weakest drinker so they’ll say, “I’ll toast to Bruce” and I and the guy (or girl) will have to drink

Well they do this so many times that (if it's me in this case) I will pass out and they won’t stop until I pass out

I think this is common because I remember one guy talking about the Chinese idea of a drinking game is, “basically we drink until the first guy passes out”

Another guy added, “Well the medical bills are probably so cheap here that it’s not that big a deal”

Awesome hiking brought to us by the staff of TFC

So instead of a full day of classes our TFC BLAST institute took us out hiking to Dragon Gate which is on the outskirts of Kunming and you can see the entire city from the top

Besides the guy who tried to commit suicide on the train tracks on the way to Dragon Gate it was an awesome trip with the highlight being 3 of the fellows busting out singing "Monster" by Kanye West in front of the cable car entrance
Oh, and this kid who had a star carved into his hair

And these guys were pretty awesome who just set up their food carts right on the train tracks (which were still in operation)

And here are some actual photos of the park

Then you know this guy must have been awesome to have a flying tiger put on his gravestone

Sunday was Chinese, Chinese, Chinese…

Today I reviewed all 31 lessons of the pronunciation of Chinese Pinyin characters

It took me 4 hours total but about half an hour of that was laundry Chinese style (in a sink with soap) and another half an hour was a mid-study nap in order to recover from the sheer amount of information regarding where my tongue, lips, and teeth should be in regards to producing the right sound

Sightseeing in Kunming

Yuantong Temple

It’s the cheapest Buddhist temple I’ve been to in China (6 RMB) and it was actually a really nice and beautiful place

The one thing I really liked was all of the turtles this place had

Kunming Zoo

Next time I go here I’m bringing peanuts because I don’t want to be the only one there not feeding the animals

My favorite was this little kid whose parents put him over the guardrail separating the public from the monkey cage, gave the kid a peanut, told him to go feed the monkey, and a monkey fight broke out right in front of the kid

It is the kind of zoo you see PETA protesting but it was still really cool

Some of the zoo honestly reminded me of American prisons but the peacock park was my favorite place because the peacocks will literally walk right up to you and you can pet them

Watch out for the puddles

I was walking around and I noticed all of these little puddles and although it rained I thought it didn’t rain enough to make standing puddles
Then I saw all of the little kids running around with the classic Chinese kiddy pants that run across the places where the sun is not supposed to shine on and I concluded, “Oh man, these kids are publicly urinating in the zoo”

发票 (Fapiao) Paradise

So it has been a little bit of a struggle complying with TFC’s meal reimbursement policy that I have to get a 发票 (official government tax receipt) everywhere I go because few restaurants have them because these restaurants don’t want to pay any higher taxes than they have to and the government can’t cover 1.4 billion people that effectively
TFC does allow us to get replacement 发票 which is a tax receipt from any type of store (like a zoo ticket) that if we use this replacement 发票 and show the receipt of the restaurant with it then we’ll be reimbursed

Rolling in the 发票

So each ticket to the zoo costs 15 RMB and I noticed that some people were just throwing away their ticket and I thought, “Hey, if I get their zoo ticket then I can get a meal worth 15 RMB at a restaurant that gives receipts but no 发票 and get reimbursed for it” so I started asking people for their zoo tickets
In the end, I got 590 RMB worth of 发票 so now if I eat at a restaurant that illegally doesn’t have 发票 then I’m ok because I have all of these zoo tickets and everyone (me, TFC, and the Chinese government) is happy

I don't get a spirit animal

So most of the fellows got assigned a spirit animal based on their physical characteristics (one person got a dog for facial construction reasons) or personality traits

I didn't get one because I remind people of a migrant worker during the Great Depression who leaves their family to go find work to support them

This only came up when I came back from Carrefour with 2 boxes of breakfast crackers

I didn't have any hands available and I had an umbrella so I just slipped the handles for the boxes into my umbrella and flipped the umbrella on my shoulder so when I walked into the hostel I looked like I had a satchel on my stick and therefore it came up that I reminded people of said migrant worker