Easter weekend in China... sadly not a single chocolate egg in sight

Today I'm walking round with a massive sense of achievement as I feel like I've finally conquered the art of travelling in China! Friday after school I made my way from Houjie to Guangzhou on my own and then on arriving in Guangzhou made my way to the hostel to meet my friends...and then the next day battled through the Guangzhou metro to make my way to the bus station and successfully arrived back in Houjie! This sounds very unexciting but when everything is in Chinese (well GZ has a fair amount of English but still) and there are very few people who speak the same language as you this is actually quite impressive! On top of that, people that know me well will tell you I can barely find my way around my hometown after living there my whole life. London will be so easy for me now!

That aside, this weekend as I said I went to Guangzhou for Kathryn's birthday and to see some faces that I was reunited with last weekend (plus a few random Chinese tag ons, for example new chinese friend Luke - called this because he likes Star Wars). We celebrated Friday night and then on Saturday went to watch some women's rugby ( Kathryn is a huge fan). England vs USA was delayed for an hour because a massive storm came out of nowhere, but aside from that it was a great albeit slightly hungover day. 

The ridiculously heavy rain stopped me from staying in the big city another night, so I resentfully made my way back to Houjie for a more peaceful night in. This did mean however that on Sunday I was alive enough to go for lunch and shopping with my Chinese assistant Linda! We had some amazing duck noodles and I got some bargains (£3 for a beautiful top, about £5 for a leather bag) and it was so interesting to talk to her about her life... for example, the fact that she wants to travel around the world but Chinese people don't have passports and need to apply for one and get official permission to visit other places... it makes you realize how lucky British and other nationality people are that they can pretty much come and go where ever they want, whenever they want. It was also good just to be out with a Chinese person. I definitely got less ripped off than I would have done without her! She wouldn't let me pay for lunch or drinks and even bought me some face wash when I said I needed some, despite me begging to let me pay, she kept saying it was her honour and that we are friends. This goes against every bone in my British body, but I think she was just so happy that I wanted to hang out with her. But it was a lovely, girly day of shopping and eating, I guess some things are pretty much universal. I also discovered where the good shops in Houjie are which may come in useful when payday comes around....

Me and Linda and yes she is that tiny!

We only have a three day week this week as this weekend is Qing Ming, the Chinese tomb sweeping festival (basically where all Chinese people visit their ancestors graves and set fire to fake money and stuff to send to them in the afterlife). Soo me and Phil have decided to use this opportunity to leave the South and see some more of China and some other very missed people from Beijing... so we're off to Chengdu! Home of the pandas! It's a tad expensive (even in English terms... very so expensive by Chinese standards) but I worked so hard before I came out here so that I could see and do anything I wanted to when I got here so it's gotta be done. Can't wait to be reunited with people and see my first panda!

And then there were 6...

So Sean left us this week to go to a much better paid job in Xiamen... so now 6 of us are left including Phil who is pretty much loving life as the now only boy in our apartment. They're hoping to send us someone to replace him, so fingers crossed for a fluent Chinese speaker so we will never be lost again (in our dreams)....

Yesterday was a bit more exciting as during our afternoon classes, an announcement came on over the school tannoy about 20 minutes before the end of class... of course it was all in Chinese, so I didn't understand a word, but this hasn't happened before so it caught my interest. My assistant told me "class is over now" and when I asked what the announcement was she said there was "bad weather" and the children needed to go get their lunch. Very odd seeing as it's been raining a lot the past few weeks and I've never had a class cut short because of it, but I wasn't complaining and hurried off to get my early lunch. When I left the staff canteen with Iris a little while later, the sky had turned completely black. No exaggeration, normally the sky remains a shade of white all day from the sun and the mist, so seeing pitch black in the middle of the day was a bit concerning, especially after the Chinese announcement that still hadn't been translated to us. We ran into the head of English to ask what the hell was going on, to which she told us there was a "typhoon" coming and that we should stay in our office and not go outside. "Should we be worried?" We asked, being new to these tropical climates. You can imagine our response when she said... "Yes". We ran to Phil's office to take cover (as ours is up on the top floor and Iris reckoned this was a dangerous place to be), with all our worldly possesions, sitting and waiting for the typhoon to hit. Sadly this is where this story gets a lot less interesting, as we sat and watched the rain (pretty heavy, I'll give it that) fall and the black sky gradually turn back to normal. If that was a typhoon, I am thoroughly disappointed. Either it was a mistranslation, or the typhoon got really pathetic before it finally hit Houjie... maybe we'll never know. All I know is next time I get warned about a typhoon I might not act with such panic, kind of a boy who cried wolf situation maybe? All in all, my first typhoon experience was a complete utter letdown.

Last night was a unexpectedly good night as we went out for "one drink" with some foreign teachers that work at our partner school across town. This ended up in going out for some incredible street barbeque food with some locals, being toasted about twenty million times (remember a Chinese "cheers" translates as "down your drink in one"), heading to our local English bar for the pub quiz....and losing.

                                                                  Epic street barbeque food

Also, I'm on the hunt for a second job this week, not because my job isn't good enough but just because I've never been the type of person to be satisfied with just the one job. Hopefully some private tuition or something in the evenings so that I can still travel about on weekends, and save enough money to add to my Thailand fund for after the internship!

Bored in the office = updated blog

Things I love about China...

- The laid back approach to things getting done. England is so dependent on routines, schedules, structures... but guess what? Things still get achieved without such rigid structure!

- The friendliness of the locals. No where back home would you get treated with so much respect just for being foreign. Free drinks, people taking photos with you, people bending over backwards to make sure you are enjoying yourself and wanting to be your friend. At home I get so frustrated with people who come to England and can't speak the language, which makes me feel guilty now I'm here in that exact situation, especially when the locals here are so good with handling our poor communication skills (even if we do occasionally end up with the wrong food or end up lost because of it).

- The food. I knew it would be, but it's so different to the Chinese food you get at home... I haven't seen a single resturant serving battered chicken balls, and prawn crackers are actually pretty hard to find. Food here isn't greasy, stodgy or unhealthy, it's so delicious. Dumplings covered in peanut sauce, fried noodles, soup, sticks of barbequed meat... I eat the same meals again and again and again and I haven't got bored of any of it because it's all so tasty. I just hope and pray I can get hold of some dumplings when I get back home... the addiction has got pretty serious.

- My students. So amazing. They work so hard and are so dedicated, even the really young ones. 7 days a week school for a lot of them, but they never complain. And they're so cuteeeee (if I haven't already mentioned this 10000 times)

- How cheap everything is. A massive meal for 50p. Eat in a restaurant for about £2. Bottle of coke for 30p. Get a taxi for an hour or so for about £5. Or a bus is 30p. Western food is probably the most expensive thing... a KFC will set you back about £3.

...Things I don't love so much about China 

- The spitting. I don't think I'll ever get used to it. Everywhere you go (resturants and public transport included) you will always hear a lot of people coughing up things from deep down below and spitting it out on the floor. The worst experience of all is hearing someone do this from a balcony as you walk underneath, when you can do nothing but hope and pray it doesn't land on you (NEVER look up).

- Lack of queues. ANYWHERE. It goes against everything I know as a westerner to not queue for things. I'm starting to get the hang of just pushing your way in for things, but for the first weeks I was definitely standing at the back of the non-existent lunch queue for ages waiting for someone to let me get in to get my food.

- Squat toilets. Enough said.

reunited with some beijing buddies

I'm a firm believer that the best weekends are always the ones that don't go by the initial plan, and this weekend definitely proves that theory. Me, Phil, Sean and Elin set off to go to Zhuhai beach (which is right next to Macau), planning to have a night out there and stay in a hostel. Easy. Yep. Far too easy to go to plan in China. Our '2 hour' journey turned into an hour long journey to a central Dongguan bus station, an hour long wait for a bus there, our bus then returning to our local bus station in Houjie (making our journey to Dongguan a monumental waste of time), a 2 1/2 hour journey to Zhuhai, and what seemed like eternity wondering round Zhuhai trying to find the hostel we'd found (which was apparently just a block of flats... very difficult to find in a city filled with millions of blocks of flats). In the end we gave up on finding a hostel and decided to find a few others who had come to Zhuhai on the beach and figure it all out later, as the sun was going down and our day to the beach had turned into a frustrating day of buses and getting lost.

But this is China! And right when things are going terribly, something will come along and turn it around. And in this case, that something was when Lewis and Kathryn appeared like angels with their chinese friend Matthew. Given that I haven't seen anyone I was close to in Beijing since I've been down south, I was so happy to see these guys that the day instantly got a million times better. Everyone else decided to go get some dinner, so me and Phil went in Matthews car to try and find our hostel again. Even with a Chinese navigator we still failed. This is when an idea popped into all of our heads like a lightbulb being turned on... why didn't me and Phil just go back to Zhongshan with them? bingo! So we abandoned the beach, Zhuhai and all of our original plans to go to Lewis and Kathryn's new home and see a lot of other familiar faces... and it was goooooooooooood. We even had a bed to sleep in completely for free as they all have spare beds in their apartments, cushty!

Me and Phil even managed to find our way home without getting lost once today, which is a very rare occurence here, so all in all it's been a pretty successful weekend. I'm sure the beach will happen at some point so I'm not too upset about that, probably will go ahead when we've made a completely different plan altogether.

English Stage....

Today I did the YMCA on stage in front of the whole of grade 2 (and that's A LOT of children), all of the teachers and the principle. Behind me was a massive billboard sized photo of all of the foreign teachers doing cheesy poses with some of the students.

This is as funny as it sounds.



We were guest judges of the grade 2 'English Stage', which is basically a talent competition between the classes where they all perform English songs. To be fair, they were pretty good. Unfortunately this meant we had to perform a song of our own.. which we were told the day before, without any time to prepare. This lead to a shaky (to say the least) rendition of YMCA, complete with dodgy singing and half-complete dance moves in front of a giggling group of children. I think they loved it. Or they were just being polite.

We have the grade 1 'English Stage' next week, which is all my students, so I'm already planning our performance for them - SUGGESTIONS WELCOME.

The billboard sized photo is another story. We had some photos taken a week or two ago of us being friendly and playing games with the students; we assumed this would just be used to show prospective students that the school has foreign teachers, maybe put in an advertisement for the school in a magazine or something (no-one really gives you a straight answer to these sorts of questions here). So you can imagine our shock and horror when we turned up to school to see our faces blown up round the school on giant posters, grinning cheesy grins with the kids. I have honestly never felt like such a celebrity.

Iris and the billboard... this photo barely shows how big it actually is but you get the idea!

Anyway, the weekend has rolled around again and its shaping up to be another good one. Tonight we're off for a 'korean bbq' with all you can eat meat and all you can drink beers, so that will be a good chance to eat some decent food and chill out. Hopefully we're going to get to go to the beach tomorrow to soak up some south China sunshine (if the weather picks up - heavy rainstorms this week have been clearing away some of the humidity), and then on Sunday I have a lunch date with one of my Chinese assistants, Linda. She is so keen to take me out, saying it would be her 'honour'... but really I feel like it's a privalege for me that she wants to hang out with me out of school hours! Maybe she can help with my mandarin, which is still not really improving. At the moment I just about order myself a beer and some fried noodles, but that's about it. Actually, maybe that's all I really need to survive here...

As I write this, the whole school are outside doing their daily morning exercise to 'Everybody' by the Backstreet boys. And this is completely normal to me now. I don't think I've experienced proper 'culture shock' since being here, but everything is still totally weird in the best way. England is going to seem so boring when I get back. Maybe I will even miss the chicken feet everywhere and live toads hopping about on the meat counter in tesco.

We experienced the nightlife in Dongcheng this weekend, which is where the main bar street in Dongguan is.... and my gosh we were celebrities. Girls were fighting each other off to get photos with me on their phones, everyone wanted to dance with us and give us free drinks and free food. I could get used to this! The clubs were pretty cool but so strange, with models in UV underwear dancing around with glowsticks. We also met some other westerners who live in Houjie, two of which work at the kindergarten attached to our school, the other two are dutch and work in the furniture business. This is great news as it means our crowd of English speakers in Houjie is growing by the day... so even if there is a lack of things to do in our immediate area, we have a nice group of people to sit and do nothing in the market with. We've also started playing a lotttt of poker when we get bored  and too tired to go out in the evenings, so when I get home I'll be straight down the casino to win back my travelling expenses ;)

Other than another great weekend, this week has been pretty uneventful so far... a lot of our lessons have been cancelled due to tests and practice for a show on Friday (of which we are the guest judges, of course). This means a lot of sitting in the office 'lesson planning', aka sitting on facebook/running to the fake starbucks round the corner/escaping home for naps. The weather has gone very humid too, like the air makes you literally damp when you walk through it. Hopefully it will rain it out this week and be sunny again for the weekend so that we can go to the beach in Shenzhen!

Week 3....

So this week has been exceptionally good for three reasons....


1) I found MILK in Tesco. Real milk (kind of), with a actual picture of an actual cow on the box. For about 30p. This might not sound too exciting, but China just doesn't do milk. Even in Starbucks.... they just use a sour tasting milk replica that just doesn't do the job at all. So for a tea addict like me, finding something that actually tastes enough like milk to pass off as the real deal in a cup of tea.... this is life changing stuff. I can actually function at school after a morning cuppa now. So that made me very happy indeed.

2) This was the week that I discovered the true wonders of ... THE WORDSEARCH. I really don't know how I survived teaching up until now without them. Wordsearches keep even my rowdiest grade four classes entertained for a good half an hour, which is nearly the whole lesson taken up. The kids are strangely competitive too, so when you make the wordsearch into a race to who can be the first to finish, they shut up completely and keep their heads down all lesson, which is great for me as a teacher as I can just walk around pretending to care while in fact enjoying the peace and quiet (doesn't happen a lot in class). If I can find a 5 month supply of wordsearches, life will be good.

3) As we started teaching literally the day after we arrived here (which is not actually in our contracted days of working), we received our first pay check for the extra days we worked in February yesterday. In cash. It was beautiful. It only equates to about £40, but that will go farrrr here, so it was a very welcome surprise and now means we can have a good few weeks until our first proper pay day!

So things are pretty good today. I have a general 'I'm in China and I am LOVING it' attitude this week. But just wait until the wordsearches run out.....

This post is about food

I had ITALIAN last night. Real proper Italian. It was Louise's birthday so we headed to an Italian restaurant owned by real Italians about 10 minutes from our apartment that we had spotted earlier. I had red wine and spaghetti carbonara and I was actually in heaven for a while. It cost the equivalent of about £15, which is really expensive for here... so this may not become a regular thing. But I can tell you one thing... I will be going back! I haven't missed western food too badly yet, but the one thing that just doesn't exist here is pasta. Or cheese. Or bread. Luckily I quite like noodles so I don't think I will starve to death here. But I will still be going back!

Guangzhou

So sunday has rolled around again and what a weekend it has been. My flatmates decided to go to Guangzhou to meet up with some other interns, which is the biggest city in Guangdong and only an hour or so away from us, so naturally I decided to tag along to see what this place had to offer.

We got the bus which cost about £3 for an hours journey (national express is going to seem such a rip off when I get home) and found our hostel which was right along the riverfront on their "bar street", and had a little look around at our surroundings. To say I felt a bit depressed about where I've been placed in Dongguan would be an understatement. Guangzhou is beautiful.... lots of skyscrapers, water and bright lights... kind of like a Chinese version of London or something. Of course our first priority was to see what Guangzhou's nightlife had to offer after some drinks on the riverside overlooking the main city. Sean's googling had found him an address to "the best club in Guangzhou", so we headed in taxi's to find this magical place. An hour taxi ride later, we wound up instead at a strange Chinese dingy hip hop club which was showing weird japanese cartoons on big cinema screens in the bar. Another thing about China... even if you have an address, unless you know how to direct yourself in perfect Chinese, it is very likely your taxi driver will have no idea where you want to go. Of course we made the best of it... and the cheap drinks helped. A club was round the corner, so we headed there afterwards for our first experience of what I think must have been Chinese trance music. Very strange to say the least. After talking to several Chinese locals (who each asked me why on earth I would choose to live in Dongguan.... and laughed a lot when I said I didn't actually choose to be there at all), I met the club's owner who proceeded to let me into the VIP area and ended up with a lot of free champagne. One experience I did not imagine when I signed up to live in China.

The next day 5 of us woke up in our double hostel room, which was cozy. that's a lie actually, I slept curled up at the end of the bed by Phil's feet. After finding the nearest McDonalds (we really embraced the culture), a short ferry ride on the river and a mooch around the shops as Guangzhou is "the shopping capital of the world", we decided to call it a day and head back to Dongguan. As I said before, Chinese taxi drivers are likely to get lost even if you have an address... so while me, Iris and Jen waited at the bus station for what seemed like eternity, the boys were taken on a tour round Guangzhou and surrounding cities while the taxi driver searched for the biggest bus station in the city. A few hours and a few hundred quai later, they arrived with minutes to spare and we made it onto our last bus of the day.

Painful hungover ferry ride with my new flatmates. Phil (the brummie), me, Sean (the canadian), Jen (the "essex girl") and Iris (the belgiun)

We all felt a bit depressed about the amazing city which we had just visited. Yes Dongguan is a huge city too, but kind of notorious for the less glamourous aspects... well, to put it bluntly we live in the crime and prostitution capital of China. Houjie, our little suburb of residence, is also a bit shabby around the edges compared to somewhere like Guangzhou. We all rather sulkily made our way out to get some dinner.

This is when I realised that in fact I am living exactly where I want to be and am getting a real Chinese experience like I wanted when I decided to do this. We have an amazing night market about 5 minutes walk from our apartment which is filled with stalls of people making the most amazing fried noodles, barbequed meat, freshly made breads and dumplings, as well as any fruits, vegetables and homeware that you could possibly want. It's huge. And not touristy at all. The locals dont stare at us, but we also don't get special treatment or get ripped off like in some other places (being white gets you varying degrees of service in China)... so you pay about 50p for a massive plate of food and another 40p for a beer. A stick of meat will set you back around 20p. And its all so tasty! So I decided then and there, while sitting with our noodles listening to the Chinese laugh and talk and smelling all the different foods being cooked, that this is the Chinese experience I was after. Guangzhou is great, but a little bit too western for my liking. A lot of people speak English, and there is a McDonalds on every corner. Don't get me wrong, I'm so glad we are close enough to pop there for the weekends. And while Houjie is a bit rough around the edges, it's got charm. So next time someone asks me in shock "WHY do you live in Dongguan?!?!", I will reply "because I want to." :)

So tomorrow is women's day in China and I asked my class to make 'happy women's day cards for their mums, sisters, friends etc. This is what I then received on my desk :)

 

a few recent Chinese observations

• chinese people aren't as small as I thought they would be.
  
• however everyone is about a size zero; the "fattest" teacher is probably about a size 8.
  
• HOWEVER, some of the kids are enormous. adding a whole new meaning to the phrase puppy fat.
  
• you can't ever get too used to something as normal as it can be shot down in the blink of an eye. for example, one day you may have perfectly working internet and the next it is gone (perhaps for good) with no apparent explanation.
  
• but, things can also go from bad to good in just a few seconds. earlier today, I walked out of possibly the worst lesson I've taught since I've been here. the class wouldn't listen and when they did I just could not get anything through to them. walking through the school grounds (sulking), three of my lovely grade one students ran from the other side of the forecourt towards me screaming "Raaaaachel! Teacherrrrr How are you!" and gave me a running hug from all angles. It's pretty difficult to be in a bad mood after that :)
  
• a large, tasty meal can be bought 5 minutes from our apartment for the equivalent of 30p. goodbye, awful canteen food.... hello dumplings!
  
• although we are living in a "tiny suburb village" of Dongguan itself, we have 3 McDonalds, Starbucks and KFC all within walking distance. not to mention tescos on our front doorstep!
  
• MANDARIN IS REALLY HARD. we started our mandarin lessons with the school last night and I'm still completely lost by it all. but I'm determined to master it at least at a conversational level by the time I leave!

one week down... 4 months to go!

So I've managed to survive my first week of being a foreign teacher in Houjie without being eaten alive by chinese children (but have been munched to bits by about a million mosquitos... but that's a different matter altogether). And despite still not being able to find real milk to satisfy my desperate need for a giant cup of tea, I've come to the conclusion I think I'm going to like it here :)

When Friday night rolled around, me and my fellow teaching buddies decided to head to our local English bar for a relaxing drink to let off some steam. We met Annie, who taught at our school last semester, who gave us some great words of wisdom and introduced me to "the king of Houjie".. a mad old Iranian man who kept my glass full all night. After a few too many free drinks, me, Annie, Sean and Phil met a group of Chinese men who wanted to practice some of their English on us... which then lead to them taking us to the only nightclub in Houjie for some more free drinks. In China, they have a tendency to shout 'Gambai' at you if you have a full glass, which essentially means DOWN IT. Twenty million gambai's later, we decided to call it a night and jump in a taxi back to our flat. This all seems very good and simple until we realized we had no idea how to explain to our taxi driver where we lived as he spoke no English and our Chinese was a little shaky to say the least.

At first, this didn't seem to bother us too much so we asked to instead be taken to the nearest Mcdonalds for some late night grub (because everyone in the world knows how to translate McDonalds). We jumped in another taxi from here, who again, could not understand our vague description of where we lived in our broken mandarin. THREE HOURS LATER we were still driving around Houjie desperately trying to work out where the hell we lived. I know it was three hours because I had a little snooze in the back of the taxi and woke up still to be driving around in no particular direction. Finally we found Tesco (god bless you Tesco), so were able to direct ourselves back from here to our apartment, where my hard, uncomfortable mattress has never seemed so comfortable.  Lesson learnt... never go out in China without an address written down in chinese. If someone doesn't speak English, they REALLY don't speak English. Apart from McDonalds of course.

Last night consisted in a night of disney movies, recovery and a Chinese takeaway (50p noodles and our favourite greasy bread thing)... well deserved bliss.

T G I F

On a bit of a roll with this whole blogging thing and have a bit of time spare as everyone is having a friday nap so I thought I'd write a second blog post in two days (don't expect this to happen alot).

I can't express how happy I am that it's the weekend... literally never felt such a TGIF moment in my life as when I punched out this afternoon. While this week has been a great experience and I've met some of the cutest children in the world, I have spent every waking moment wishing I had pins to keep my eyes open with as I can't get used to the rock hard mattress + early morning starts + recovery from ridiculously long train journey + over excitable children combination that describes this week.

 I probably didn't do justice in my last post describing my new students, but in a word.... CCCCUUUUTTTEEEEEE. Teaching the first grade means a lot of chubby Chinese children with equally as adorable English names.... Banana, Flower and Ceiling to name a few. When I walk into the classroom they all run up to me with a chorus of 'Hello' 'What's your name' 'Beautiful' and high five and hug me. Cute when it's one, but after the 40th high five I have to shake them off my legs and arms so I can actually teach them something. My three 4th grade classes have even been a bit more bearable today as I get to know them a bit better... still can't turn my back for one minute though or they will literally be dancing all around the room chanting my name. For most of my classes I have a Chinese teacher assistant, who shouts random orders at them in Chinese (I assume translating what I'm saying if they don't understand) and disciplines them for me so I don't have to deal with their sad little faces. Unfortunately this means I have to watch while they beat them in front of me for talking while I'm talking or for getting too exitable when we play a game. As helpful as they are to have around, I hope they don't stay in my classes for the whole few months as I don't know how much of that I can watch without getting annoyed.

I also had a surprise lesson last night with the PE and music department of the school. I turned up as asked to a "meeting", assuming I'd be sat in the corner while they spoke mandarin just to show my face. No no no. I was put at the front of the class while they tried out their English on me and had me correct their pronunciation, as well as acting out sports and singing to me and asking me to translate what they were doing. They said they would help me with my mandarin in the same way... shame I only know how to say Hello and thank you, not really worth asking for help on... but good to know they are happy to help if I need it. They also gave me a Chinese name which they now shout at me around school. It's slightly embarrasing that I can't pronounce it, but nice all the same.

This weekend hopefully we will get a chance to explore our area a bit more past Tescos and the street markets, as well as let of some steam and have a good old relax. Apparently there's a beach not too far from us which is good to camp on, so tracking that down would be handy too. It's so hot here somewhere to lay would be perfect.

Enough for now, a well deserved Tsing Tao is calling me.