Life lessons

This weekend I started another side-job with a coworker who gives English lessons out of his home.  I taught two classes on Saturday: one group which consisted of three 13 year olds and another group of nine 11 year olds.  It was definitely a change of pace from teaching college students!  I also taught another class on Sunday which had three 14 year old girls, who cracked me up the entire time.  I am really looking forward to seeing them next week. 

Basically I did things like "The Hokey Pokey", "Never Have I Ever", "Categories", and this activity where I cut pictures out of magazines and the students had to tell me how to move my body to make myself look like the model in the photo.  This is not a hard task when you are speaking in your second language.  Directional words and propositions really trip students up! 

Alas, I have lost my weekends to even more teaching, but at least I am getting paid extra money and really enjoy the experience of working with pre-teens. 

我住了在德州/ I lived in Texas!

Today in my Chinese class, 田老师 asked me if there were many 杀人 (murderers) in America.  I paused, grumbled a bit, and asked him why he was wondering.  Then he said that there were towns (plural) in America where people were killed by 电链锯 (electric chainsaws). 

Turns out he watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and now thinks that there are places in America where people are murdered by Leatherface. 

This is exactly what America needs in the minds of people around the world.  I wish I had something witty to comment about this, but I think the conversation stands alone.

ROAR!

I was Skyping with my adorable 3-year old nephew, Alex, today when he decided to put on his dinosaur costume.   He calls me "E.E." the name for "mother's sister" in my mom's dialect.

Alex: EE, where is your dinosaur costume?
Me: I don't have one.
Alex: It's okay, you can look at mine.
Me: Yes, it is really cool, little dude!
Alex: Why don't you go and buy one?  You should buy one.  Mommy, I told EE to buy a dinosaur costume.
Me: That sounds like a great idea!

Moral of the story: I need a dinosaur costume and it should be more acceptable for anyone to walk around as a dinosaur saying "roar!"

Helen

I tutor a 14-year-old Chinese girl named Helen on the weekends. The hourly pay is double what I get normally, so it’s nice to have a little extra cash on the weekends. In my contract, I am actually prohibited taking outside jobs, but the director of the Foreign Affairs office gave me the job. Helen is the daughter of her friend, apparently. It’s pretty China-tastic.

I have met with Helen three times now, the first time at the Shangri-La hotel in downtown Qingdao where I ate at an all-you-can-eat buffet called Café Yum. It was so good and I had all sorts of yummy food, including bread for the first time since leaving the States. I also had a freshly made chocolate crepe, marble-slab style ice cream, and real coffee! I basically got paid to eat and make little chatter with Helen.

Did I mention that her family is quite wealthy? Her dad is a bank executive with one of the larger banks over here and her mom works at the police station. She also has drivers, one of which is her uncle with a sweet mini van with a DVD player and GPS system built into the dash. And power doors! Her family owns several apartments/ homes throughout the city and seems to be very well off…. Understatement.

The second time I met with Helen, we watched “Twilight” and talked about the movie afterwards. This Saturday I made a little vocab and question worksheet for “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” which she also enjoyed. However, I think I have started a Twilight trend in her school.

She told her class monitor about the gloriousness that is Twilight and he watched it and had his parents buy the DVD for him. Now their entire class is watching the movie on Monday together. Helen’s parents purchased all four books for her (in English!) to read. This cracks me up, excites me, and scares me all at the same time.

Twilight is invading a middle school in Qingdao. Six days until New Moon! I mean, uh, what are you talking about?

Why is there always a line?!

Saturday evening I tutored Helen, a 14-year old girl who is the daughter of my program director's friend.  I'm still not sure if private tutoring is allowed, but I'll take it since they pay me and it came from the director herself.  More about this story later, it's actually quite funny.

Wan Sheng Jie (万圣节）

Halloween in China is when the Americans all get dressed up and go to expat bars to pay for overpriced alcohol and/or cover charges.  This being said, it is a lot of fun.  When I was in Beijing, we forked over 100RMB for tickets to a sold-out warehouse rave party downtown.  It was a blast and I don't know if I'll eve be able to have a better Halloween.

This being said, my expectations were pretty high and I just had to get over myself and realize that I wouldn't be able to replicate the Beijing experience at all.  Costume shopping proved to be difficult but I managed to throw together the Chinglish version of an 80's costume, complete with bright purple tights, a horrible purple scrunchie, and my own Chucks.

It was a fun night overall and the other teachers and I had a good time dancing and drinking those overpriced Tsingtaos.  I actually said "真的吗？！" ("Really?!?!") to the bartender when he said my small bottle of Tsingtao was 30RMB.

Sunday Adventures

The other teachers and I stay at a hostel when we go out in the city over the weekend because it is only 25RMB for a bed there and it is about 45RMB to take a cab back to our school.  Plus, this way we can wake up on Sunday and do more adventuring downtown before taking a bus back to our school.

Sunday morning I got up and walked down the alley from the hostel to get a yummy 包子 for breakfast and the lady let me take a picture of her.

I like her veggie and egg baozi's a lot and she also does a pretty great youtiao (fried dough).  I enjoy walking around alley markets because there is always so many things to look at, like live seafood, fresh vegetables, and made-to-order food.

I also walked over to the Old German Cathedral, that was built in the early 20th century by the Germans (Qingdao was a German colony until the Sino-Japanese war), destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and rebuilt in the 80's.  I also attended Catholic Mass in Korean, complete with drum performance right after communion.  It was an interesting experience!

I also went to TaiDong, a shopping center in Qingdao and bought some things, mainly at Wal-Mart, funnily enough.  Jenna was with me and we had a conversation like this:

Jenna: You know what shopping in China is like?  Black Friday.
Me: Or preparing for the zombie apocalypse.
Jenna: Yeah, you know, there's people pushing and shoving... terrible lines... and even worse service.
Me: Yeah, it is pretty much Black Friday every day.  Why are we here again?

This is a picture of Tai Dong street from the escalator (yeah, not kidding) bridge that connects it to the other side of the street.   There are just so many people in China it never fails to amaze me.  I forget that there are 1.3 billion people in this country and they have to be somewhere.  This means more of everything: hair cutters (at least 2 on each block), mini-marts (probably 3 on each block), cell phone stores (5 on each block), restaurants (oh man...), and shoe repair men/ ladies who etch sparkles on your cell phone (everywhere).  I don't think I will ever get used to the sheer numbers of people here. 

As you can see, I have a proxy server that allows me to post to my blog, finally.  I no longer have to pay Matt in Chinese jiao (10 cents) and day old rice to post for me.