Week 2 in Beijing

So these posts, like the next few to follow, are very overdue. This is because the internet has been VERY temperamental recently – TIC! Right now i'm desk surfing at work because I don't have a desk to call my own - I've been promised one very soon. This means that poor Tom has lost half of his desk to me this week - what a trooper. So we are now in Foshan in our new (and permanent school) but more of that later - first I have tales of the second week in Beijing to regale...

After finishing and passing our TEFL exam in the first week (the rumour is that no-one got below 80% - those years of uni studying have been good for something!), our second week involved both being a pupil and a teacher. Our mornings were taken up with learning 'survival Chinese' and in our afternoons we were teaching REAL Chinese pupils. I really enjoyed the Chinese lessons, even though the language is really tricky and I probably sounded like I was speaking martian. It has definitely provided me with the motivation to start getting lessons as soon as I can. I also learnt that the Chinese equivalent of my name is Lian Yang - Lian meaning lotus flower and Yang being a Chinese surname.

My Chinese name

Our afternoons were spent in the Yangzhen No. 1 High School; apparently it is one of the top high schools in Beijing - even though it was even further out of the city than we were in Shunyi. In the UK the area would have been definitely be classed as a Shire.  Saying that though, it was really nice to get on a bus and see some countryside. We passed a bridge with the Olympic rings from 2008 still on it. It was surprising how many residual items from the Olympics were still in use and evident in the city; there were sun brollies and stretchy barriers all over the place with ‘Beijing Olympics 2008’ written all over them – it was refreshing to see that these things hadn’t just been thrown out because of the logos on them.

The pupils we were teaching at Yangzhen were doing an intensive 10 day - including the weekends - English class; so as well as giving up their weekends they were also spending their summer holidays in school...by rights they should have hated us!  I really enjoyed the practice teaching sessions and I was very glad we had them – they definitely prepared me for having to plan and teach my real pupils in Foshan. In hindsight though, we were spoilt by the standard and the caliber of the students; they have hoodwinked me into thinking that all Chinese pupils have an exceptional grasp of the English language – I’m quickly finding out that’s not the case.

It was lovely - after my last class on the Thursday afternoon - one of the girls presented me with some origami roses she had made. They are beautiful (they survived the journey to Foshan), and I tried to get her to teach me how to make them – that didn’t go so well.  This wasn’t because she was a bad teacher, but because it was much harder and more time-consuming than I expected.  I genuinely thought it was going to be a case of make an origami fortune teller, add a few extra folds and viola; you have an origami rose – definitely not true! After 15 minutes of relentless paper folding I think I managed half of the required folding, sadly we never got to finish because we had to start the next lesson. So happily I went home with 3 beautiful colour coordinated paper roses (and a piece of folded paper).

 Yangzhen No.1 High School - you can't deny it looks fancy

The kids from our practice class. The girl holding the paper flowers is the one who made them for me.

The beautiful origami flowers

After our week of teaching we decided to celebrate.  We all went to what had become our regular haunt for food, Baba’s, and then went out afterwards. The plans were slightly delayed though by the onslaught of a Beijing thunder storm.  I now know that the perfect attire for a thunderstorm is a knee length skirt and sandals – great for when you have to navigate through a newly developed street river 1.5ft deep!  Some people went out during the full blown storm – the lightning definitely put me off that idea – so we stayed and drank beer with the locals until it finished. Obviously, more beer is the wisest choice when you’re stuck in a thunderstorm.

Since Friday was our last day in Beijing, I decided to explore the area we had been staying in a little bit – I felt like I didn’t know where I’d been living for two weeks.  It was nice just to walk around and see what all the locals were up to.  Shunyi is nothing special but it was nice to explore a little.

 Some Shunyi Pictures...

 These taxi bikes were everywhere

 I admired this lady's ingenuity in regards to her choice of seating

On the Friday evening, we had a little TEFL graduation ceremony – it was nice to see everyone get their certificates but there were an awful lot of speeches for such a minor affair… Friday night wasn't wild, or mine wasn't anyway – it consisted of packing and dancing round the hotel room with my roomie to some 90’s classics - When in China!

G x