Halloween in China

Every Tuesday afternoon we're required to meet with the bureau for either a meeting or a demo lesson, where we go to someone’s school and watch them teach. This week though, the demo lesson was cancelled and no meeting had been planned. Of course a Tuesday afternoon to ourselves was out of the question, so we were summoned to the bureau for a ‘cultural exchange’ involving pumpkin carving. I expected some students to be involved in this too, but it turned out to be just us in a room carving pumpkins. The bureau had bought one pumpkin between two of us and some knives. There was a competition afterwards where we all voted. As confusing as this was it was quite therapeutic after my Tuesday morning classes (one of which is a demon class). The pumpkins are now in a classroom in the foundation school.

Halloween is not really celebrated in China. There are decorations in some of the busier places and costumes in some supermarkets. The children tend to learn about it in their English textbooks but generally it is not very well known. I didn’t even think of doing anything at school for Halloween, but one of the teachers told me that the children were very excited and that last year the foreign teacher made paper bats with them, so I got the hint. Due to a lack of resources, I had all of my grade 8s at my first school designing their own Halloween town. My grade 6s and my grade 8s at my second school would be making paper bats. At first I wanted to be really cool and do some origami bats, but realised this was a bit ambitious when I tried to do it at home and failed miserably. I went and bought some card and decided to make paper bats with them. I thought this would be too boring and basic for my grade 8s, but they were really excited when I showed them what to do. At my first school I ran out of card, so had some tables making pumpkins and skulls. Halloween turned out to be a great excuse to relax and let them draw and make things, which they don’t have much opportunity to do normally. The lack of resources was a bit of a problem; in some of my classes I had to make 43 kids share one pair of scissors. Fortunately some of them had scissors in their pencil cases and I even found one girl cutting her bat out with a Hello Kitty Stanley knife. I decorated my classroom with the Halloween towns and hung the bats, pumpkins and skulls up. I also decided to buy a pumpkin at the weekend to carve and take to school for my Halloween shrine.

My attempt at an origami bat

Grade 6s doing their bats

An expat bar in Suzhou called Meisterbrau was holding a Halloween party on Saturday, with all you can drink draft beer for 100kuai (10 pounds). Expat bars here are really weird because you sort of forget you’re in China. There are some Chinese people who go to them but you are still just surrounded by Westerners. Some are a bit pretentious and not interested in being polite or friendly with other foreigners. One of these ones shoo’d us out of the way so that he could see the football screen AT A HALLOWEEN PARTY. Another called me a bitch for having a wee in the men’s toilets because the ladies had a huge queue and I was going to wet myself, even though there was no queue and he was actually peeing into a urinal as he called me a bitch. Some though are lovely and enjoy talking to other expats so there’s usually a really nice atmosphere. After staying until 100kuai beer ended at midnight, we were all pretty drunk and decided to head to a Russian club called Pravda. I haven’t been clubbing very often here, and when we have it’s always been free for everyone to get in. So it was a strange experience getting to Pravda and being let in for free as a female when all the boys were stopped and charged 50kuai. They eventually let everyone in for free but I was still completely baffled by this. I wasn’t in there for long, I had to go home and vomit. I then spent Sunday violently vomiting (at one point from the bath into the toilet. Awful). In between the vomiting sessions I managed to carve my pumpkin, which was crap but my kids thought it was great so I didn’t need to tell them why hardly any effort had gone into it.

7-day week: dream schools, sports day and my first school trip

So all the fun I had on holiday last week was repaid to the bureau this week with 7 straight days of work. This began on Saturday, the day after I got home from Hangzhou. As a result, my lesson plan was rushed and fell apart in the first few minutes of the first lesson, and so I pretended I had just planned a ‘games lesson’ as it was the weekend. I didn’t mind as I felt sorry for them anyway; I walked into class with pretty much the full front row asleep on their desks.  My worst class on a Tuesday morning was much worse than usual. Tuesday mornings usually consist of me getting bullied by 43 teenagers for an hour. This was made worse by the fact a ‘teaching intern’ suddenly turned up to watch me get bullied for an hour. But she will become their regular teacher in a few weeks so at least now she knows to bring her gum shield. 

Walked into class to this on the first day back from holiday

Starting on Monday I was doing an activity with my classes where they had to design their dream school. I showed them a video from youtube of a reconstruction of a British school day. It involves a really irritating child called Jamie showing you through his day at school, and I had to watch it 11 times. There was an uproar in my classes when they realized that our schools finished at around 3.15pm. It was quite tragic to see that many of my students’ dream schools started at 9am and finished at 3.15pm. One group also wrote that at their dream school, they would have ‘only an hour of homework every day’. Yeah an hour of homework still seems a lot. But my students have 8 classes a day, and are given homework for each so you can see why an hour a day seems like a breeze to them. As their usual learning style doesn’t encourage much creativity, it is usually very difficult to get them to be imaginative but this lesson plan was a success. There were some really good ideas. There were a lot of ‘eat’ schools and ‘game’ schools, but my favourite was ‘life’ school. This is located in a big forest where you ‘learn how to life’.

I was invited to my second school’s sports day on Thursday and a school trip on Friday. This was great news as I honestly believed that 7 days of teaching was going to result in some sort of break down. I walked into school at 10am to roars of cheering around the sports field. Most Chinese school have an athletics type field, with basketball courts and a running track. The kids take their sports days very seriously and each class had made their own signs. When I first arrived I was asked to take part in a teacher’s activity. There are 5 boxes each with a certain amount of points. The teachers for each grade compete against each other and you have to stand behind a line and throw your bean bags into the boxes and they count the points. I only got 2 points but it was good fun. I sat with class 3 for the rest of the day and there was a great atmosphere. Whenever one of their class mates were competing they would wave the sign with ‘class 3’ painted on it (三班 san ban) and shout ‘san ban jia you!’. Jia you means to ‘refuel’ or ‘add extra effort’. They did the standard relay, 100m, 400m, long jump etc. There were also three-legged races and one where they link arms back to back with a balloon between them and race like that.

Teacher's game

Girls 400m relay

Cheering with class 8

A sign made and signed by class 3 to remember their sports day

Cheering with class 3

I usually only start at 2pm on a Friday, but as it was school trip day, I had to get up at 6.30 which I was obviously NOT bitter about. I walked into school at 8am to the Pirates of the Caribbean theme tune which is always exciting. This blasts from all of the school speakers to let the students know they need to line up. I got a lot of staring from the younger children. We went to a botanic garden in Suzhou along with 6 other schools, so I attracted lots of attention from the younger children there too. There was lots of 'hello!' and 'nice to meet you!', but ‘waiguoren’ was the main heckle, meaning ‘foreigner’. We all get this everywhere and just naturally respond to it now. We even use it ourselves when talking about other westerners we see in China. I had a wander around the domes with one of my mentors, which were full of tropical plants and parrots. For the rest of the day the teachers all just sat in the café eating and talking. I assume the students just did the same elsewhere. I enjoyed talking to the other teachers as I haven’t spent much time with them so far. Many of the Chinese English teachers tend to avoid speaking to me, either because they’re embarrassed by their English or simply can’t speak enough to have a conversation with me. I discovered that all of the children at this school, my second school, are not from Suzhou. They all come from different provinces in China for their parents to find work. I had recently read an article about China's 'gaokao' exam. This is allegedly the most difficult exam in the world and is taken by every student in China expecting to go to university. It is a controversial exam as poorer students are disadvantaged by the fact they cannot afford tuition and are ranked based on the student's position in the region. So I wanted to know if the students at this school are expecting to take the exam. My mentor said that some might, but it is likely that they will go back to their home towns to take the test, as it would be too difficult in Jiangsu. I assume by this she meant that the competition would be too difficult in Jiangsu (as exams across the provinces are the same, but the competition changes). I realised just how much pressure the students are under.

Botanic garden

There were REAL parrots!

Golden Week: Nanjing and Hangzhou

In October over a billion Chinese people get a week off work  and school to celebrate National Day, and everyone goes on holiday. We had to hand over our passports to the Public Security Bureau in order to get our residency permits, so we couldn’t fly anywhere. We were able to get a train as long as we had photocopies of our passports and the receipt from the Public Security Bureau to say they had it. We decided to go to Nanjing for 3 days first, just an hour and a half west of Suzhou. And then on to Hangzhou for 3 days,  an hour and a half south of Suzhou. Our first train (to Nanjing) was at 8am, and so we got to Nanjing at around 9.30. We were too early to check in so we went wandering around the Qinhuai district where the Confucius Temple is and other tourist attractions. There is lots of street food here and gift shops, and it is just on the banks of the Qinhuai River. We decided to get a taxi to the hotel as our bags were heavy. We had the hotel confirmation up on our phones, with the address in English and Chinese. The first two shook their heads and drove off, leaving us in the middle of the road shouting ‘but why?!’. The third taxi took us, and we never figured out what the problem had been.

Relaxing in first class (it was all they had) on the way to Nanjing

Outside Confucius Temple

Confucius

The Presidential Palace was our next stop. This used to be the royal residency and housed the Office of the President of the Republic of China from 1927 until 1949. Now it’s a museum. This was nice, it reminded me a lot of the gardens in Suzhou. It was fairly busy but it was so big inside that it wasn’t much of a problem. After this, we went to check out the Gate of China (also known as Zhonghua Gate). This wall was built by Emperor Zhu YuanZhang from 1366 to 1387, to defend Nanjing from attack. Zhonghua Gate is the south gate of the city. We walked for quite a while to get here and it was really nice to look at, as it was night time and all lit up. There is quite a lot to see inside but we were too hungry to stick around. Qinhuai district by night was full of tourists but this only added to the pleasant atmosphere. I noticed people wandering around with little red balls on a stick, I decided to try one and it was literally mini toffee apples on a stick. Worth the 10 kuai.

Presidential Palace garden

Gate of China

Qinhuai District with my toffee apples

We decided to spend a whole day at Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s Mausoleum. He was one of the leaders of the Chinese democratic revolution and the ‘father’ of the Republic of China. This attraction is within a large scenic area, which allegedly represents an alarm bell as can be seen from the air. It was quite a long walk up to the Mausoleum but definitely worth it (although it was swarming with wasps). It was really busy but not in a restrictive way, we were just walking with a herd of other people all the time. Once we got up to the mausoleum at the top of the steps it was beautiful. You have to queue to actually go into the Mausoleum and you just walk straight around and go out again, as you are in a line and not allowed to take pictures. There is a huge statue of Sun Yat-Sen and then a bloke in front of it shouting the Chinese equivalent of ‘oi’ at anyone trying to take pictures. We then paid quite a lot to go into the garden area containing the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum. We all got quite hungry but the only food around seemed to be really expensive pot noodles. Trying to get back to the metro station we got quite lost and deliriously hungry. We wandered into a food place and paid 18 kuai for what looked like a decent meal and turned out to be a pot noodle - heartbreaking. 

View from the Mausoleum

View of the Mausoleum (and me and Ant)

One of the things I was most looking forward to seeing was the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, as I have seen documentaries and read about this before. It's a museum built in 1985 to remember the people killed in the Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing (1937).  The first thing you see on the way in is a huge statue of a woman holding a dead baby. There are smaller statues all along the way up to the main entrance of victims along with quotes from first-hand accounts. Just from this I knew the museum was going to be intense. It was quite cramped inside and the captions were very small, but apart from this it was really well laid out. It didn’t actually go into as much detail about the killings as I thought it would, but that’s probably because they are horrific. One interesting fact I found was about a German called John Rabe who worked for German Siemens Corporation. He settled in Nanjing and became the director in charge of the Nanjing branch of the Nazi party. He hid potential victims of the massacre in his house, which is also now a museum.

Main statue on the way into the Museum

One of the smaller statues on the way to the entrance

The Peace Bell in the garden of the memorial museum: it was installed the day before the 66th anniversary of the massacre, and weighs 6.6 tons to represent the anniversary

Another one from the museum garden

Next was Hangzhou. We went to find an H&M first as we needed supplies like boxers and socks. We decided to get the metro to the most central stop and hope for the best. We walked straight into a huge mall and found an H&M on the third floor. There are H&Ms everywhere in China, which is really handy when there is just something you need as you never know what to expect in Chinese clothes shops. We then went to check in. Our hotel was right by West Lake and also right near a metro stop so it was a really convenient spot. We went to get some lunch first, which again was hard as it was quite a touristy area. Then we wandered around the lake all evening. West Lake has amazing views, and it wasn’t even too busy. The next day we walked all around it the opposite way to see some things on the other side. We wanted to go up Leifeng Pagoda but it looked really busy and it was quite pricy so we decided to carry on. Eventually we came to Precious Stone Hill, which was worth the long walk to the top. The views of the city and the lake were incredible. There were photos being taken of a couple; a man in a suit and a woman in a wedding dress. This was for a photo shoot, not an actual wedding. But we were all wondering how the hell they got up there looking immaculate.

View of West Lake on our walk around

Another West Lake view

Photo shoot at the top of Precious Stone Hill

The area we stayed in in Hangzhou was picturesque and really lively. We were right on a cobbled street full of shops, cafes and bars. A lot of the bars were coffee shops by day so were really cosy and welcoming. We went for a drink on the second night and ended up staying out longer than expected. We were just on our way out and had paid the bill, when two Chinese blokes asked if we would stay and talk them if they bought as another beer. I looked at Kate and she apprehensively replied ‘erm, you have to say yes to everything in China…’. So we stayed and chatted to them. This was really cool because they spoke a bit of English but not very much, so it meant we got to use quite a lot of Chinese and practice. We ended up agreeing to meet them again the following night but I woke up quite hungover and immediately decided against it. On the last morning we treated ourselves to a proper coffee at one of the cafes - it was perfect. Coffee is quite expensive here so I have gone without, but the coffee shops looked too appealing. We then went to the Grand Canal, the longest canal in the world which runs all the way to Beijing. I felt quite ill at this point and didn’t fancy walking too far up it, but it was a great place to see.

Top notch coffee

The Grand Canal

As it rained quite badly for the rest of the day we decided to get a boat on the lake. The lake was all misty and choppy and although it was raining we stood on the deck and took loads of pictures. The boat took us to a scenic area on an island and then to the other side of the lake. We had a wander but then discovered that the boats had stopped. We were absolutely starving and couldn’t find the right bus as all of the traffic on the main road was going the same way. Finally we found out that the traffic on the other side of the road was turning around somewhere, so we eventually got food and got home. I would say that has been the main issue with travelling around China. We ended up in fairly touristy places (as that's where most of the stuff is) and its hard to find a descent and affordable place to eat. Maybe that's because we live in small communities of local people in Suzhou and so notice the price difference more. 

Looking very tangled up in red on our boat trip

I expected the whole week to be busier and wetter than it was. There were lots of people but it never restricted us in anyway and we were never queuing for long. We did see lots of other foreigners in Hangzhou which was strange. I have only seen the odd one in Suzhou outside of our ELA group. The weather was also much better than expected. It only rained properly on the last day and we actually had a really sunny day in Hangzhou. Nanjing was very polluted and grey but nothing troublesome. Overall a very successful first holiday in China.

Lit up high-rise buildings in Nanjing combined with pollution to create some lovely colours 

Hangzhou train station on our way home: as mentioned in one of my previous blogs, the stations are like airports. You can see the gates along the sides

Touristy stuff, ebike incompetence and more teaching

Life in China is gradually starting to calm down but this week has been hectic. I had to do a 6-day week at school because of the days off we had for Mid-autumn festival last week (in China, you have to make up time you have off, even at a weekend). So my work week started on Sunday. This obviously takes its toll on the kids just as much as me so it’s been an exhausting week. Having students fall asleep in the classroom is quite a common problem, hopefully not because my lessons are so dull. I have one student who is quite sassy and has a bad attitude. He talks over me every lesson and I asked his regular class teacher if he is ok as he seems to really dislike English. She said he doesn’t dislike it, he just likes to talk, but if he isn’t allowed to talk he goes to sleep. I would rather he go to sleep than talk over me so I’ve had to start moving him to the back. In my second school, one boy was stood up the whole time. I asked him why he wasn’t sat down and he just responded ‘I can’t’. He couldn’t tell me in English why not, so his friend said ‘if he sits down, he falls asleep’. As funny as this is I just feel like education here would be much more effective if they had a bit more sleep. They are at school 8am until 6pm and then generally just do homework until late at night. So a 6-day week wasn’t going to help matters.

As a result of the long week, we ended up desperate for something to do mid-week. So on Wednesday a group of us went to watch the night show at the Master of Nets garden. Ant and I have been to the Master of Nets garden before when it was raining, which wasn’t as bad it sounds as there was no one there and it was really peaceful. For the night show, it was quite busy with tourists and other Westerners but there was a great atmosphere. There are coloured lights all around the garden which reflect into the pond so it was good to see at night. The show consists of 8 performances each in different parts of the garden, and you wander from place to place for each performance of Chinese opera, instrumental music, dance and singing. Some of the Chinese opera was really weird and creepy but the folk and instrumental music was amazing. 

One of the opera performances at the night show

Instrumental music with a dancer

On Friday we found a burger. We were invited to a live music event at an expat bar called Meisterbrau in SIP (Suzhou Industrial Park). This is quite a wealthy part of Suzhou with Singaporean influence and loads of expats. We had all planned to get a beer and burger deal for 50 yuan but I assumed it would be a Chinese version of a burger, not a burger as I know it. But it was a real burger, complete with gherkin, egg and cheese. It even came with real beer, and I got quite drunk throughout the night here as I had grown used to drinking Chinese 3% beer. So the next day was filled with hungover tourism. We went for a wander around Panmen Scenic Spot, which is right near our home and it was beautiful. This area is famous for its historical relics and the oldest pagoda in Suzhou is also here. It was just 20 yuan to get in (£2) and I think I’ll be going there quite often. We also visited the Humble Administrator’s Garden on Sunday which is one of the most famous gardens in Suzhou and much bigger than the ones we have already visited.

Perfect. My Friday night burger

I have finally been able to ride the ebike in real traffic which is so fun. It started with us deciding after a meal that I would ride it home, but I shat myself in the middle of a main road and had to swap with Ant again. Once we got onto a better road I went to the front again and have driven it quite often since. It is such a convenient way to get around. We’ve been going to the gym quite often which is one metro stop from us, so it only takes 5 minutes on the ebike. There was an incident on Wednesday night though. We had just been for some tea and I was getting ready to drive us home, but Ant had turned the bike on with the keys whilst it was still on its stand. So I pushed it off its stand and pulled the throttle back to do so, lost control of the bike and it ran me into some other parked up ebikes. The alarms started going off I was shouting for help whilst Ant stood and watched, until some chefs outside a restaurant ran over and rescued me. The problem was I couldn’t have let go of the throttle without letting go of the bike completely because it was pulling away from me, if I’d have let go of it completely the damage would have been worse. It was highly embarrassing but the chefs were so nice and were checking the bike to see if anything had gone wrong with it. We already knew it hadn’t, it was just pure stupidity but we stood looking speechless anyway as though it was totally the bike’s fault. They waved us off as we drove away and didn’t even laugh at us

The oldest pagoda in Suzhou at Panmen Scenic Spot

Panmen Scenic Spot again: you can see where it gets its name

The Humble Administrator's Garden: A classic Chinese ambiguous warning sign

The Humble Administrator's Garden

And another Humble Administrator's

First weeks of teaching and strange Teacher's Day celebrations

I have taught classrooms of children before, and even classrooms full of my peers (which is worse). But that doesn’t make it any easier when it comes to meeting a new class for the first time, and giving a good impression. The first thing I did was introduce my classroom rules. I realised immediately that I had overestimated their level of English and had to improvise my lesson from this point. The worst thing about my first week was the fact I just wasn’t used to such a basic level of English-speaking. So I would give out what I thought was a basic instruction and they would just laugh at me, because here is some stranger just talking at them in a foreign language. This was overcome by the second week as I learned to give instructions that they could understand. The students are also really withdrawn and shy. The style of teaching they have been exposed to since starting school is sitting and listening to lectures for an hour, so it is almost impossible at first to get them to talk and be creative. If I have a student stand up to answer a question, they behave as though they are being punished and just stare down at the floor and tremble until you back off. We all had a bit of a dilemma as to whether we should back off, in fear of making them cry, or persist. The problem is unless you persist, they learn that they don’t have to answer because eventually you will leave them alone. It’s just hard to watch them sometimes, you feel as though you’re torturing them. Apart from small problems like these, I have really enjoyed teaching, and I can feel myself getting better at it and learning what works.

I had them making ‘information cards’. In TEFL training, we were given an idea to give each child an index card and have them write their grade and class number, their English names, their Chinese names, their favourite subject and one fun fact about themselves. And then you can use these cards to choose children to answer questions and learn their names at the same time. I got great results and some of the cards were hilarious. They had clearly been left to their own devices when choosing English names; I had a ‘Hobby’ (you can see how that happened), a ‘Blower’, a ‘Carrot’ and a ‘Super Brother’. Some fellow ELAs and I discovered that we had quite a few ‘Hobo’s between us, but we recently found a textbook containing a character bear called Hobo, which explained everything. I also have a boy called Wendy. I decided to try and give English names out, but ran out very quickly. Currently in one class I have Phoebe, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Ross, Joey and Gunther. Some of the fun facts I got back were equally entertaining, some of which are in the images below.

You can see here how much trial and error went into deciding on the name 'Carrot'

Sue's great fun fact

I could never imagine myself being brave enough to ride a moped, but the longer I stayed here the more normal and efficient it seemed. Also, seeing some of the ELAs from last year riding one made it seem a bit more normal. They had told us their school gave them one and when I went to check out my school, I asked ‘Driver’. He asked how many years I had been in China, when I responded ‘3 weeks’ he said he was responsible for me and I was not yet used to China’s traffic, so basically, no. But when I got home I found out that Ant had been given one by his school. It was terrifying just being on the back. I felt so vulnerable being surrounded by crazy Chinese traffic whilst hanging off the back of a little electric bike. I had a little go myself the first time we had it, just on the pavement. I still haven’t driven it myself on a main road, but hopefully soon I’ll pluck up the courage.

My first time riding the ebike

On Tuesday, we were told that Friday is ‘Teacher’s Day’, a Chinese national holiday celebrating teachers (a much respected role in China), and that we would not be working on Friday morning. Instead, we would have to go to another school for a ceremony and the boys would have to wear black trousers, a white shirt and a dark tie. The girls would have to wear a black skirt (no trousers, irritatingly) and a white shirt with a collar. We would all have to wear ‘black patent leather shoes’. So this was my first experience buying new clothes in China. Most of us didn’t even bother adhering to the strict dress code, but as I had nothing even slightly close, I had to buy a white shirt and some black shoes (which definitely were not leather). So we all turned up dressed in a mix of patterned/blue/collarless shirts and a range of different bottoms. We met at the Bureau, where the girls were given a blue silk scarf each. We then got the tube to a different building (dressed like a gang of Mormons), where we were taken to conference room. One lady came around and tied our scarves, leaving us looking like air hostesses, and another came around with stockings and told us we had to wear them. We went to the toilet, had a rant which concluded we were not going to wear them and then went to sit back down, where we were then told to put lipstick on. We just shook our heads, dumbfounded. After this, we had to go outside and stand with lots of Chinese people and were positioned as if for a class photo (I still have no idea who these people were). Then in front of cameras, we had to repeat a chant (in Chinese) and hold a fist in the air. This was allegedly on the news, but only a very short snippet of it. This was definitely my strangest experience so far. I know it was for Teacher’s Day, but I still don’t really know what it was about. We just sort of turned up, did as we were told (mostly) and then went back to school. We were also given mooncakes as a gift.

Having pictures taken at the Teacher's Day ceremony (I'm second row down, fifth from the right)

Second in from the left

It was Ant's 23rd birthday on September 14th, so I had my first ever experience buying and eating a Chinese birthday cake. This was really hard to do without decent Chinese. In my lunch break at school, I went to a big bakery chain here called Holiland. All the cakes looked a bit 1950s; all white and covered with fruit. I found one vaguely chocolatey looking one called 'chocolate monsoon'. I asked if any of the staff spoke English which none of them did. So I dug up any bits of Chinese I knew that I thought might be useful. I said 'Xingqisan, wo qu zher...na ge' which means 'Wednesday, I come here...that one' and I pointed at 'chocolate monsoon'. They got the gist and on Wednesday I went to pick it up. When we tried the cake it wasn't very chocolatey and by no means a chocolate monsoon. We already knew that China did not do cake well but it was nice to look at. We had people over for beer pong (seeing as we had all the equipment) and that was our first China birthday celebration.

Birthday beer pong

Ant looking creepy with his Chinese birthday cake