Sorry for being a bit delayed with posting stuff, peoples... Linds
and I have been doing our TEFL course in anticipation of starting
work pretty dang soon. In fact, I start work this afternoon!
And believe me, having to face a hectic schedule of three hours a
day, three days a week, has me shaking in my boots. Truth be
told, I can't believe I'm gonna get paid for slacking off. This
is almost as good as working at the WDC.
Apart from TEFLing, we did manage to have a leetle bit of an
adventure yesterday... that's right, we bought a printer! A
brand-spanking new HP F388 for a grand total of 460yuan (approx
$70USD), and it is a scanner and photocopier too. Not bad, eh?
Of course, the instruction manual is in Chinese, but we got it to go,
and it hasn't exploded yet, so it's money well-spent.
The journey to get this thing was, er, fun, of course, as with
most journeys around here... and we added to the danger by catching
the bus into town. Ok, I exaggerate a little, the bus is
probably the safest way to travel, unless you happen to have a T-80
tank handy, in which case the bus is second only to the tank.
You can tell the buses are safe because of all the bicycooters and
pedestrian body parts collected under their rear grill.
So we get to Tian-Fu square, which is effectively the centre of
town, and is overshadowed by a impressively large statue of Chairman
Mao. I have to apologise here, folks, 'cause I didn't take my
camera with me on this sojourn - the batteries went flat on me the
night before, and Linds was hogging all the charger slots, so you can
blame her. Her email is lindsayhoggedallthebatteries@dangit.com
if you want to send blame-notes directly to her inbox, and expletives
are acceptable currency of blame. She is gonna kill me when she
reads this post.
We wandered around the town square for a bit, trying our darndest to
look like locals, which mainly involved pretending that traffic didn't
exist. Unfortunately, traffic does exist, and even
worse, it pretends that you don't, so crossing the road truly becomes
an exciting experience, much like base-jumping without a parachute or
hunting Kodiaks with a knitting needle. Ok, so I don't have
experience in either of these activities, but crossing the road in
Chendgu makes one very much alive...
albeit somewhat briefly. Especially if a bus is coming (see
above).
Anyhow we returned via taxi and hung loose for a bit, which was
nice. However, our friendly neighbours upstairs were gonna get
dinner and catch a movie after, so we decided to join them. It
turned out to be a great idea, 'cause we wound up at this trendy
little plaza next to Sichuan University (which is different to
Sichuan Normal University in that it doesn't have the word “Normal”
in it). After din-dins was done, we headed up to this Parisian cafe
that was a little taste of home away from home. (Er, although I'm
not from Paris, but these
days even a Ukrainian snail stroganoff would seem more homely than
some of the things we've been eating... not that I'm complaining,
mind (see below)).
The “movie”, it turned out,
was being shown at this cafe, and it was a Croatian story about some
random dude who buries his brother for 20 years. The movie was kinda
entertaining to begin with, but when we hit Part 3 some four hours
in, we realised that this was a movie that did not end. The
highlight was when the protagonist dived under water to save his son,
and callously blatted some random fish away before being caught in an
underwater net (presumably to drown). The movie then went on to
detail some monkey-man's life 30 years after the protagonist met his
untimely demise, and we went on to get the hell outta there because
a) the movie was CRAP, and b) the sun was getting up soon.
Anyhow, I'm now finishing off
this post, and it has been several hours since I taught my freshman
students their first English lesson. These kiddies are screwed. (see
below)
Completely screwed.
I'll write about all this
tomorrow, so please stay tuned.
Pies out.
Pies tip of the day: If you want
to teach English in China, please learn English first. You see, I
didn't, and now 105 students of the grorious Sichuan Normal
University will wind up with “Flang” and “you's guys” in
their newly acquired vocabulary. Flang.
