My first Chinese haircut

This was awesome. It's cold here in Jilin and so the glass doors of the local salon were frosted over. As I entered for the first time I didn't know what to expect...is it big, small, crowded? Do they cut Westerners hair? How am I going to communicate? Turns out it's big and crowded. As I opened the door every head in the place turned to look at me...it was just like when someone enters a bar in a Western movie. All talking stopped as everyone stared. Me, being a bit apprehensive about the whole ordeal as it was, stared back. As the tension mounted I realized that it was going to have to be me that made the next move, but you can imagine this is tough when you can't speak the language and don't know who's in charge. So I boldly looked around the room, slowly moved my hand close to my head, made steady eye contact and began making snipping movements with my fingers. It was like popping a bubble...the room sighed, a few people giggled and a young man leapt over and led me to a seat. The hair cut itself was pretty much identical to Canada but the entry was priceless...a moment I'll never forget.

Pedagogy

*Warning: if you're not a teacher you may find this post boring. **Warning: even if you are a teacher you may find this post boring.

If I was doing a headstand I'd be ankles deep in the pedagogical wilderness here in China. We're in a private program that has started slow. When I arrived there were only 5 students and as of today we're up to 15. They've been trickling in and in the last two weeks alone we've had 5 new students sign up. In one sense this is fantastic, but from my standpoint it's a mammoth headache. Imagine trying to lesson plan for this. I've got ESL students showing up 2.5 months into the year...it's insane. I've been fighting a losing battle against EVERYBODY to prevent streaming. The students have, predictably, identified the "smart" class and the "dumb" class. I'm watching the good and the bad of streaming unfold before my very eyes. It's fascinating...but kind of like a train wreck.

I'm also dealing with the issue of trying to provide meaningful education for a student who, I'm convinced, needs psych testing for a low IQ. I keep saying this to the people around me and they nod and agree when I say it but then the next day suggest that if she stays in the evenings for extra lessons or comes in on the weekends for extra lessons, she'll get caught up. It's unbelievable. It's like suggesting that if a dog just tried harder and took more lessons it might learn some math.

Assessment is, funnily enough, a cinch. The kids are cool with the new system that I was using at BiHi last year. I spend almost no time marking. It's awesome.

Discipline has been interesting. Furthering my theory that kids are the same everywhere...I was having trouble getting them to respond earlier this year. They were unfamiliar with a Canadian approach and couldn't figure out the boundaries no matter how hard I tried to explain them. So I started giving punishments out and, lo and behold, they figured out what appropriate behaviour was pretty quick!

I'll try to return to funny posts next time up :)

Fire in the Hole

...quite literally. There's a garbage chute in my school and today there was a big fire in it. Exciting stuff! Because of the proximity of my classroom to the inferno I was the first to notice the blaze. Gathering my courage, a coworker and I fought the conflagration thus saving dozens of lives and millions of dollars in infrastructure. Okay, so maybe I just pointed a fire extinguisher in a hole but it was still fun...how often do you get to pull the pin on one of those things? I think my bigger contribution to saving the building was checking the fire extinguishers afterwards and finding that, in true Chinese fashion, they had returned the empty fire extinguishers back to their storage place with pins replaced. Good grief, who are they trying to trick?

Talent Show

To entertain a group of American exchange students our school hosted a talent show last night. And a big talent show it was...2 hours and about 300 people in the audience. My students were involved as MC's and did a fantastic job (obviously) but the performers were primarily students from the rest of the school. What a show. It ranged from extremely talented young individuals to some of the most bizarre performances I have ever and will ever see. Let me tell you about some of it. First (and favourite) on my list is the Chinese hand puppet show which broke into a rendition of a Michael Jackson song. Four hand puppets in traditional Chinese character, like the Monkey King, singing Heal the World in off key, Chinese accents. I was sitting in the front row laughing uncontrollably. I nearly had to leave. Next up, things didn't get much more normal. A group of dancers came on stage. Girls first, and they were actually pretty good...but then the boys came on. Break dancers, but not good. Picture Elaine from Seinfeld on steroids and doing her best break dancing imitation. Out of sync with the music, deadly serious expressions on their faces, trying their best to work the crowd by raising their arms and shouting "Make some noise!", but completely awful at dancing. Now, normally, this isn't something you laugh at, this is a time when you feel sorry for the person on stage because they're not good, but the thing is, the crowd went nuts! The crowd loved it! It was some of the worst dancing I've ever seen! Coupled with my first experience at a Chinese club last weekend and I'm getting the impression that Chinese people are looking for something different out of their dancing than we are. One final highlight was a boy and a girl doing a duet version of We Are The Champions. They sang romantically to each other the entire time. It started well but as the music began to crescendo around them, they kept singing gently at each other like it was a ballad. It was really weird, but again the crowd loved it. I finished the night with sore cheeks from how hard I was laughing.

Things I Miss

Living in China you expect to miss things back home. Obviously friends and family are the most important thing but there are other little things that I wish I had here. Here is a list of my Top Three Things I Miss:

3) My iMac. I have to restart my computer here about 8 times a day - every time I get new a new add-on, update, software or hardware. It's stupid. What idiot would design a computer that you need to restart this often? And the pop-ups, my God! They're incessant. And if they're not bad enough, every time my browser blocks one it makes it's own personal pop-up bragging about how it's prevented a pop-up. C'est stupide, non?

2) Remote controls that are in English. I find remote controls hard enough to navigate as it is...there's like a thousand buttons on them. Imagine trying to find the menu button if the buttons weren't labelled. Now imagine trying to figure out how to change the language of the DVD and turn off subtitles when none of the buttons are labelled. It's an iterative process nightmare.

1) Milk. I've said it many times. I'd give up beer before I'd give up milk. But here I have no choice. The milk is awful. I dare not think what lengths I would go to for a glass.

Pictures...at Last!

Good news, ladies and germs...the pictures have arrived. Well, some of them. They're on a site called Flickr. Go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/44196127@N04/ to have a gander. I think you need to have a Yahoo account so you may need to go sign up at www.yahoo.com first.

Flickr has limited me to 100MB a month so this is just a small selection. I hope you like :)

Beijing

It's Monday night here, I returned from a weekend trip to Beijing early this morning. It's a pretty incredible city. The trip began on Thursday night by catching a 12 hour overnight train to the capital. I was pretty nervous about this...I'd been warned that this was a pretty brutal trip. My fears were not allayed upon entering the train and finding how tightly packed together we were. Bunkbeds three high and considerably less wide than university dorm beds. When the train started it made some pretty intense noises too, like it was going to fall apart. But it turned out alright. I wouldn't want to do it in the day time but the overnight was okay. Friday in Beijing my travelling companion and amateur tour guide, Jesse, took my to the Temple of Heaven and then to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. The Temple of Heaven is one of the lesser tourist attractions in China but still very impressive. It's a place that Chinese emperors used to go to to pray for good harvests. The traditional Chinese architecture and gardening was quite something. Tiananmen Square was a letdown I suppose. I guess it's more exciting because of it's historical importance. This is where Chairman Mao declared the founding of the People's Republic of China. I was hoping that I would recognize it from the famous student riots that occured there but these days it's just a big square with people hanging out in it. Kinda dull :) The Forbidden City on the other hand was anything but dull. Upon entering I definitely had a sense of letdown...I was expecting to be immediately wowed but instead I saw portable basketball nets and tourist shops. It is however a site that just gets progressively better and better. The deeper you go the more amazed you are. I won't even bother trying to describe it, it's a lost cause. You could easily stay there for a week and not see all of it. It's stunningly beautiful. And hard to believe that it was just over a hundred years ago that it was still the home of an all powerful emperor.

On Saturday Jesse had to go about her own business for the day so I joined a tour group and went to visit the Great Wall and some other things. If I was impressed by the Forbidden City, I was astounded by the Great Wall. I know it sounds obvious but the thing is just so damned big! I was joined on the tour by a couple of Bostonians and we hiked up and down the Wall together for a couple of hours. There are places where the stairs are so steep that you've got to essentially crawl up them. The whole way the Wall is covered with Chinese people climbing as well. We're talking everything from 80 year old women to 2 year old kids. The kids are particularly cute. Some of the stairs are pushing two feet high and these little kids clamber up them, positively delighted with themselves. If they were my kids I'd be terrified that they'd slip and fall...it would be a nasty, nasty tumble on these stairs. The view is, of course, astounding. You can see the Wall winding and climbing for miles in every direction. The thing is built on top of a mountain for heavens sakes. It's the sort of accomplishment that when first suggested must get a lot of laughs for being an impossible task.

Sunday I was taken to the Summer Palace. This is another jaw dropping tourist attraction. It's a huge palace/garden in the middle of the city. It's centered around a huge manmade lake and is designed in the most clever way. The Chinese philosophy about gardens is that you should never be able to see the whole thing...it's supposed to unfold in front of you as walk through it. Time after time I would walk around a corner and be stunned by the view that suddenly appeared before me. The decadance and grandeur was just out of this world.

Among other smaller things, I saw the Olympic facilities, a silk factory, jade museum, cloisonne factory and traditional Chinese tea house. I'm not usually much of one for these types of tourist attractions but I quite enjoyed it this time.

The trip ended on a bad note unfortunately. I started feeling ill on Sunday afternoon and by Sunday evening when I got on the train to head back to Jilin I was quite sick. I think perhaps the water did it to me. The train ride was hell. 12 hours, a lot of which was spent in the bathroom (haha, and not a western bathroom! just a hole in the floor), cramped quarters, people smoking like chimnies. It's one of the worst nights I can ever remember having. I stayed home from work today and I don't regret it at all. I'm feeling better now but what an awful night. Once I feel back to normal I'm sure it'll be a good story though...just another part of the deal when you're in a developing country.

With regards to pictures, I have hundreds from my time so far in China which I'm dying to post. It's not easy though. Getting the pictures onto the computer is hard because the setup is all in Chinese and then posting the pictures is proving to be quite a trick because of all of the blocked sites here. I'm working on it, I hope to have them up within a week.

Also, I have Skype now and it works great so if you're set up for it you should log on from time to time.

Cheers from Zhong Guo (Chinese for China).