Thursday, April 8, 2010
new job
Yesterday was the last of my introduction classes, so I've seen every student I have. There are many. I think close to 1000. I will not be learning names. I'd be surprised if I remember faces.
So far the school is fine. The apartment is nice enough, the other staff reasonably friendly, and my workload is very light. I am still teaching at another college in my copious free time, so money is not an issue. For now, I have nothing to complain about.
I teach 9 classes a week, all double periods. Each class is one and a half hours. Twice a week (including a little later today) I teach Business English students. The rest of the time, I am teaching non-English majors, many of whom don't really want to learn English. Some are wildly enthusiastic. About what I'd expect. The 7 non-English classes are every other week, so I have 14 classes of them. These students do not receive a grade, so I only need to grade one class, and homework is not necessary. So I teach them if they want to learn, and ignore them otherwise.
I went exploring the area around my new home last night for a while. I was looking for, and found, a market, the supermarket, restaurants (preferably one with pictures, so I can point at what I want), a convenience stores, bike repair shops and places with pool tables. I was also hoping to find a bar or club and a dvd shop, but oddly enough failed at both. There are guys selling dvds off of carts, but they only have Chiense. Still, how can you have a large college and no bar in walking distance? Stranger, I found a few tattoo places. Tattoos are not very common in China, and while there are a few tattoo parlors in Zhongshan, I have no idea where there are a few here in the middle of nowhere.
I've gotten better at calculating how much power my scooter has, so trips to and from the center of the city are getting quicker as I am now able to go over 20 kph. (must remember to remind Michelle and Karen that if they want me to drive them around, it is important to mention that before I drive around a few hours. Those last few blocks home, it's more fun to ride the scooter than to push it)
last night, set up the Wii and decided to play to make sure it was working. Somehow, 5 hours disappeared. I think I know what will eat up a lot of my time soon.
So far the school is fine. The apartment is nice enough, the other staff reasonably friendly, and my workload is very light. I am still teaching at another college in my copious free time, so money is not an issue. For now, I have nothing to complain about.
I teach 9 classes a week, all double periods. Each class is one and a half hours. Twice a week (including a little later today) I teach Business English students. The rest of the time, I am teaching non-English majors, many of whom don't really want to learn English. Some are wildly enthusiastic. About what I'd expect. The 7 non-English classes are every other week, so I have 14 classes of them. These students do not receive a grade, so I only need to grade one class, and homework is not necessary. So I teach them if they want to learn, and ignore them otherwise.
I went exploring the area around my new home last night for a while. I was looking for, and found, a market, the supermarket, restaurants (preferably one with pictures, so I can point at what I want), a convenience stores, bike repair shops and places with pool tables. I was also hoping to find a bar or club and a dvd shop, but oddly enough failed at both. There are guys selling dvds off of carts, but they only have Chiense. Still, how can you have a large college and no bar in walking distance? Stranger, I found a few tattoo places. Tattoos are not very common in China, and while there are a few tattoo parlors in Zhongshan, I have no idea where there are a few here in the middle of nowhere.
I've gotten better at calculating how much power my scooter has, so trips to and from the center of the city are getting quicker as I am now able to go over 20 kph. (must remember to remind Michelle and Karen that if they want me to drive them around, it is important to mention that before I drive around a few hours. Those last few blocks home, it's more fun to ride the scooter than to push it)
last night, set up the Wii and decided to play to make sure it was working. Somehow, 5 hours disappeared. I think I know what will eat up a lot of my time soon.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Hacked
If you received any strange e-mails from me; no, I did not make an unexpected trip to Europe, get robbed, and ask you for money. I have lost access to facebook and my hotmail accounts. If trying to reach me, I guess you can use the same name at yahoo instead of hotmail.
Hopefully, that gets resolved soon.
Hopefully, that gets resolved soon.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Birthday
I aged another year. 36 is aooarently a moderately interesting birthday here, as it means it's the same zodiac year as when I was born. In other words, I'm a tiger, and it's the year of the tiger. Seems a flimsy excuse to celebrate, but flimsy excuses are better than no excuses.
Spent Saturday at work. hardly exciting, but useful, as i tend to spend money on things like food, rent, and toothpaste (need to buy toothpaste, preferably mildly offensive toothpaste, later today).
At night, a friend came by to cook. Of course, being a female friend of mine generally means you can't cook, so I cooked for us and a roommate.
After that, went to Friends Bar. A night of drinking was planned, but kind of derailed by Karen. her gift to me was to buy tickets for some wargaming thing Sunday. She didn't think to ask the time, which led to us having to be there at 8:30 on Sunday. Good news for my liver, as most people opted for the simpler "let me buy you a beer/shot for your birthday" plan. Kudos to Robert for successfully making Dr pepper using booze.
Sunday started early. Karen popped up to make sure i could get there. coincidentally, she arrived hungry as i was cooking. Christ says to feed the hungry. he never said there'd be paintball involved as a result. More people probably would if he had.
Due to her expert guidance and detailed knowledge of her hometwon, we arrived only 25 minutes late, missing most of the safety demonstrations and other useless nonsense. We were not there too late for the pre-shooting activities:
first, climb a tower about 7 meters high. Once there, jump out and catch a trapeze bar. This does require a harness, as most missed the bar. This was awkward, as I am deathly afraid of heights. Climbing up 20 feet or so seems like torture to me, much less leaping out into the air. having travelled with me and been on mountains and cable cars, karen is well aware of this, so she set out to explain the problem. Or rather, tell the guy in charge i was too fat and would probably not be able to climb up. I can recognize shameless manipulation when i see it, so I'm not sure how i wound up on top of the thing. Making the leap was easier for me than for some I guess in that I did it with insane laughter, while some cried.
Next up was wargames. Well, not exactly the wargame part. More like dividing into teams and choosing a captain. This was followed by choosing a name, a slogan, and a competition to see who could sing revolutionary songs better. I was at a slight disadvantage, in that I had never heard most Chinese revolutionary songs before, but really, it was a slight disadvantage, as no one else seemed to know any either. Once my suggestion i teach Clash songs was rejecte, i kind of tuned out.
next up would be the killing, except it was lunch time. karen has a slight speech problem, in that she told the team I'm a good cook, so i wound up doing about half the cooking. Inexplicably, I was able to give good advice on fish steaming. I have never cooked a fish in my life. the veggie stuff was ok.
After lunch and a brief nap, our fearless band headed over to the staging area, where we .... played some sort of game that involved standing is a circle spouting gibberish. losers were required to sing songs mocking their own posteriors. I swear every word of that is true.
from there, we moved to place involving an odd balance challenge. trying to move the entire tema through a filed stepping on little stones and not touching the ground. Karen has unusually small hands and feet. I'm about 8 inches taller than her and don't have unusually small feet. She thought this was challenging. I may have used bad words more than once.
next we headed over to the building where the guns were stored. we went there to use the rope tied toa tree to o something where you need to swing the team from a platform to a tire. First step was getting the rope, which was hanging in the middle. I suggested we tie our shoelaces together and tie them to a shoe, then swing the shoe until it cathes on the rope and pull it in. karen refused to translate, as it was a dumb idea. which in the end is what we did. Uncoordinated people + rope swing=comedy gold. The easiest thing to do was have someone lift people up on the rope, then they get flung acroos, where someone on the other sidecatches the rope and they hop down. This leads to the tallest and strongest person needing to swing over near the end, when the tire is packed full of people. My first attempt was not too different from bowling
Finally, we went out on the field and shot each other. Being the biggest target leads to getting shot a bit. Karen earned a timeout by removing her mask, and we both got one for shooting our team. repeatedly. in her case, at close range. I at least had the decency to snipe at her from behind a tree for a while. In the end, we lost at capture the flag, which i believe is because the team rejected my suggestion that we dig trenches and scrounge for barbed wireOr maybe it was that the other team had a few cops and our team was mostly salesman. Or maybe the ammo we wasted shooting each other would have been better spent onthe other side. Who knows.
So, 8:30 -5:30 had roughly an hour of actual fighting, and I got to cook three times for other people, including a group of ten. it was a lot of fun, though k was worried I'd be annoyed by all the non-shooting stuff. She took me out to dinner, and continued her amazing streak of choosing awful restaurants. Do not ever go with her to try somewhere new. I think she was served cat food.
The highlight of that day? Going to sleep around 8:45 at night
Spent Saturday at work. hardly exciting, but useful, as i tend to spend money on things like food, rent, and toothpaste (need to buy toothpaste, preferably mildly offensive toothpaste, later today).
At night, a friend came by to cook. Of course, being a female friend of mine generally means you can't cook, so I cooked for us and a roommate.
After that, went to Friends Bar. A night of drinking was planned, but kind of derailed by Karen. her gift to me was to buy tickets for some wargaming thing Sunday. She didn't think to ask the time, which led to us having to be there at 8:30 on Sunday. Good news for my liver, as most people opted for the simpler "let me buy you a beer/shot for your birthday" plan. Kudos to Robert for successfully making Dr pepper using booze.
Sunday started early. Karen popped up to make sure i could get there. coincidentally, she arrived hungry as i was cooking. Christ says to feed the hungry. he never said there'd be paintball involved as a result. More people probably would if he had.
Due to her expert guidance and detailed knowledge of her hometwon, we arrived only 25 minutes late, missing most of the safety demonstrations and other useless nonsense. We were not there too late for the pre-shooting activities:
first, climb a tower about 7 meters high. Once there, jump out and catch a trapeze bar. This does require a harness, as most missed the bar. This was awkward, as I am deathly afraid of heights. Climbing up 20 feet or so seems like torture to me, much less leaping out into the air. having travelled with me and been on mountains and cable cars, karen is well aware of this, so she set out to explain the problem. Or rather, tell the guy in charge i was too fat and would probably not be able to climb up. I can recognize shameless manipulation when i see it, so I'm not sure how i wound up on top of the thing. Making the leap was easier for me than for some I guess in that I did it with insane laughter, while some cried.
Next up was wargames. Well, not exactly the wargame part. More like dividing into teams and choosing a captain. This was followed by choosing a name, a slogan, and a competition to see who could sing revolutionary songs better. I was at a slight disadvantage, in that I had never heard most Chinese revolutionary songs before, but really, it was a slight disadvantage, as no one else seemed to know any either. Once my suggestion i teach Clash songs was rejecte, i kind of tuned out.
next up would be the killing, except it was lunch time. karen has a slight speech problem, in that she told the team I'm a good cook, so i wound up doing about half the cooking. Inexplicably, I was able to give good advice on fish steaming. I have never cooked a fish in my life. the veggie stuff was ok.
After lunch and a brief nap, our fearless band headed over to the staging area, where we .... played some sort of game that involved standing is a circle spouting gibberish. losers were required to sing songs mocking their own posteriors. I swear every word of that is true.
from there, we moved to place involving an odd balance challenge. trying to move the entire tema through a filed stepping on little stones and not touching the ground. Karen has unusually small hands and feet. I'm about 8 inches taller than her and don't have unusually small feet. She thought this was challenging. I may have used bad words more than once.
next we headed over to the building where the guns were stored. we went there to use the rope tied toa tree to o something where you need to swing the team from a platform to a tire. First step was getting the rope, which was hanging in the middle. I suggested we tie our shoelaces together and tie them to a shoe, then swing the shoe until it cathes on the rope and pull it in. karen refused to translate, as it was a dumb idea. which in the end is what we did. Uncoordinated people + rope swing=comedy gold. The easiest thing to do was have someone lift people up on the rope, then they get flung acroos, where someone on the other sidecatches the rope and they hop down. This leads to the tallest and strongest person needing to swing over near the end, when the tire is packed full of people. My first attempt was not too different from bowling
Finally, we went out on the field and shot each other. Being the biggest target leads to getting shot a bit. Karen earned a timeout by removing her mask, and we both got one for shooting our team. repeatedly. in her case, at close range. I at least had the decency to snipe at her from behind a tree for a while. In the end, we lost at capture the flag, which i believe is because the team rejected my suggestion that we dig trenches and scrounge for barbed wireOr maybe it was that the other team had a few cops and our team was mostly salesman. Or maybe the ammo we wasted shooting each other would have been better spent onthe other side. Who knows.
So, 8:30 -5:30 had roughly an hour of actual fighting, and I got to cook three times for other people, including a group of ten. it was a lot of fun, though k was worried I'd be annoyed by all the non-shooting stuff. She took me out to dinner, and continued her amazing streak of choosing awful restaurants. Do not ever go with her to try somewhere new. I think she was served cat food.
The highlight of that day? Going to sleep around 8:45 at night
change
I haven't been much, as I've mostly been looking for work. finally worked out a pretty good deal with a university here. i'll get a place to live, decent money, a fairly light work load, easy classes, and can continue teaching elsewhere, so long as it doesn't interfere with their classes. so i'll be making pretty good money by continuing some of the part time gigs. it's moe hours than i worked before, but i like most of my classes a great deal, so i don't mind.
one of the best things about the job is that it's in Zhongshan. The last frustrating month or two was made way better by friends. In particular, people like Wendy, Lucy, Norm, Mark and probably a few others tried to help me find students, while Karen, Yolanda and Sandy helped by tracking down people at schools where no one spoke English. It was encouraging watching people try to keep me here. Thanks
one of the best things about the job is that it's in Zhongshan. The last frustrating month or two was made way better by friends. In particular, people like Wendy, Lucy, Norm, Mark and probably a few others tried to help me find students, while Karen, Yolanda and Sandy helped by tracking down people at schools where no one spoke English. It was encouraging watching people try to keep me here. Thanks
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
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