Thursday, March 30, 2006

Last minute decisions

So my boss had told me I should give my second-year students three practice exams before they take the real IELTS exam in June, and for this I could use up all my class time and even have other teachers helping me give the practice exams.

So a month ago I prepare the exam schedule and tell my boss how many teachers I'll need and when. I tell my second-year students when to come. I prepare them for the exam.

Next week I'm to start giving them practice exams, when my boss calls me last night: "Caroline, we had a meeting yesterday. The teachers don't like the idea that you won't be teaching the students any more oral English. They're ready to help you give the students a practice IELTS exam but only once, when all the students are given the exam together, and at the end of the month."

I was so happy at the idea of not having to teach these huge classes anymore. I enjoy teaching my first year students a lot more, I've got to admit. Giving these practice exams was my boss's idea, I gave him my schedule a month ago, and he tells me a few days before I was going to start giving practice exams that I've got to change my whole plan, and start preparing for another three months of classes... *sigh*

And what will I look like in front of my students, who have been told for the past three weeks that they won't have class, and just need to come once a month to practice their exam? This is all such a joke...

Monday, March 27, 2006

student pictures

Some students from Class 4: Henry, Xiao Sheng (basketball), and Liu Hao (purple jacket).

We're standing in front of the track (volleyball and basketball courts to the left of the picture), with building #1 in the background (that's where I teach most of my classes).

Sunday, March 26, 2006

cockroach morning

Yes...I found a dried-out dead cockroach lying on its back in front of my closet this morning. It was as big as my index finger. *shudder* It's okay as long as they're dead. However, that probably means that the staff has put poison in my room and I'm unwittingly breathing and eating trace amounts of it....

This is the third dead cockroach I've found in my room.

Okay, I wrote this earlier on in the day. Now it's night time. My day is soon going to be over.

This evening, Katia, Loic and I found ourselves in my apartment, eating real French "foie gras" (for those of you who may not know what that is: I don't think you want to know more than that it's a French delicacy) - left around Christmas time by Guillaume, who had just received a care package from his family - spread on toasts using the toaster oven one of my students had given me last semester, and watching a French soccer match on TV (remember I get a French news channel - TV5), Lyons vs. Toulouse. It was a tie, 1-1. Foie gras is so unbelievably delicious.

A Chinese student of Loic's didn't know what a barbeque was. You can't blame her. Why would the Chinese have BBQs when you can get the same thing (meat on a stick) down the street for less than 20 cents...ready made and maybe even more delicious. Plus - at least in Beijing - there aren't any backyards to hold BBQs.

I didn't study Chinese this week-end. Bad Caroline.

Friday, March 24, 2006

Life in Shanghai

So much more than just an umbrella shop - behind is the entrance to one of the many tiny alleyways in Shanghai, which seem to lead to such secret worlds... A group of old men spend an afternoon playing Chinese chess, which is apparently quite difficult.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

More Shanghai

Shanghai Zhan - Shanghai's new train station where Katia and I arrived around 7 AM, Friday morning. Always a lot of people - everywhere!
Birds kept in close quarters at a "plant & animal" market we visited (near the expensive souvenir market we walked through first).
Fighting crickets that fetch high prices. Old men fight their crickets for money.
Saturday night we walked to the Pudong district, the very modern part of the city which is on the other side of the river from the famous "Bund," what was once "Shanghai's Wall Street," with many Western-looking buildings from the turn of the century (1930s...). In Pudong we went to the 88th floor of JinMao - the tallest tower in China and the 4th tallest in the world at 420.5 m, according to my Lonely Planet.
Views of the Bund (across the river) at night with the funky-looking TV tower to the right of the picture.
A better view of the Bund.
There's a viewing booth on the 88th floor which allows visitors to look down more than 30 floors to see the Grand Hyatt's cafe in their entrance hall on the 54th floor.
Of course, such spectacular views calls for a picture from "up top" - where it's in fact impossible to get a picture of both us and the view. :-)
The Bund during the day. As you can see, it's a beautiful day, but smog makes it look not so beautiful...
A view of the TV tower in the Pudong district across the river.
There are lots of different types of boats holding various functions that run along the Huangpu River in Shanghai.
Nanjing Donglu - Shanghai's Wangfujing (which is in Beijing). This is the flashy rather than ritzy pedestrian shopping street. Lots of shops with neon lights.
View of a modern tower behind an old clock tower, taken from a park we sat down in.
Modern Shanghai - a picture taken during a walk around the train station on our first day in Shanghai.
Run-down old residences in front of newly-built futuristic-looking apartment buildings. We actually walked along the dirty backstreets that ran through the old residences as we waited for Rita's train to come in (Rita is Katia's classmate who was in Shanghai to take an exam).
Our hotel room. It was cheap considering Shanghai's prices. Our Lonely Planet writes that "apart from a couple of dormitories, the cheapest double room will cost at least Y250." Here we had a double room with our own private bathroom (bathtub included and hot water when we wanted) for Y180, which is about $30 Cdn per night, to be shared between two people.

The morning we arrived we phoned a few of the "dormitories" listed in our Lonely Planet where a bed in a room of 8 or 10 would cost us Y100 each - everything was booked. A man came up to us and offered us a better price for a hotel "five minutes away." It ended up being on the other side of the train tracks, which meant finding a tunnel or bridge of some sort that would take us to the other side. This took at least 15 or 20 minutes in one direction, and another 15 or 20 minutes in the other...but this way we got to see another part of the city we would never have visited otherwise.

In the "old" Shanghai there's a very famous "Yuyuan" - Yu garden. It was very beautiful and very relaxing. We stayed there at least two hours.

The gardens provided a couple high-school students as free tour guides. It's a great idea - the high school students get to learn about their city's history and practice their English, while tourists get a free guide! We really enjoyed these tour guides (shown in the picture), but half-way through our tour guides were too flustered and didn't want to speak English anymore, so we got more serious students who weren't as fun.

These are some really nice views of the garden.


A little girl fed some fish her lunch while her mother looked on.
A famous "dragon wall" found in Yuyuan.
We went to the bathroom in a supermarket and fell upon these tea jugs - what must belong to the employees of the store. They bring their tea to work and keep it here, labelled with their employee number (or name).
An old Church we found by chance near Sun Yat Sen's old residence (which we visited for Y30 - around $5 Cdn).
A park we also found by chance and which displayed a "cow" exhibition that Katia had seen in Geneva and Moscow totally randomly. She was dumbfounded to find the same exhibition completely by chance in Shanghai. What a coincidence! She lives next to Geneva and spends her summers in Moscow (her mother is Russian).
The destruction of a building near the train station in Shanghai. It looked like a monster eating at it. It was pretty scary and quite a few people had gathered to watch.
A colourful shopwindow in "old" Shanghai - a touristy shopping bonanza district.
On Saturday we went to a well-known antique/souvenir market that was quite quiet, although the few people we did see there who weren't shop keepers were white-skinned foreigners. The prices for everything were outlandishly high and the shop keepers weren't willing to go down because they knew they'd find tourists careless enough to buy at their asking price. As a result, we didn't buy anything - no point wasting money on stuff we could most likely find in Beijing!
OK, so you see a Chinese woman in the foreground, but you can bet she's just passing through. It's better if you click on the pictures to make them bigger. It's hard to see clearly when the picture's so small.

To give you an example of the prices, Katia wanted to buy a beaded bracelet with a large stone in the middle. The asking price was 80 yuan. Katia would buy it for 20, maybe even 30 (crazy!). The lady went down to 60 yuan and wouldn't budge from there. Everybody was asking for 80 yuan for their bracelets. And another lady asked for 30 yuan for 16 postcards that we could buy in Beijing for 20 (and even then it's a rip-off!).
I loved Shanghai for its hanging clothes - they're everywhere. Makes the dull brown streets colourful. The blue-suited people were loud. When we passed they were yelling at each other for who knows what reason.
A sampling of what was offered at this market. There were also some beautiful wooden boxes.
The chinese enjoy their birds. You'll see old men slowly walking in parks, holding their precious bird cage and listening to their bird's song. Or the men will have sat down to play a game of Chinese chess, with their birds floating in a nearby tree. There are at least five cages in this picture...
On to a completely different part of town - the "old" part, the "original" Shanghai, which is actually an extremely touristy (and therefore newly restored and "re-fabricated") part of town. This part of town is always crowded. There are a great number of tourist shops along all the streets diverging from this "centre." What caught my eye for this photo was the mural of Chinese women on the wall in the foreground. And the man's head in the corner is an unanticipated bonus.
A classic advertising poster on one of the "old" buildings of Shanghai.
A shopping street in "old' Shanghai.
Starbucks and a bicycle in "old" Shanghai. It seemed like there were a lot more Starbucks coffee shops in Shanghai than in Beijing. Shanghai's a lot more Westernized.
Katia (in green) and Rita, one of her classmates who speaks English. Rita's actually the one who spurred Katia to go to Shanghai, since she was going to be there for an exam on Sunday. We ended up only spending Friday morning together, since we didn't take the same train, Katia and I slept in a hotel while Rita stayed with family, and we didn't see her after we separated early Friday afternoon... Rita went to Nanjing for a few days before returning to Beijing yesterday (Wednesday)! They're in a shopping street running east of the "old district" and towards the Bund - the famous walkway by the river.
More typical Shanghai architecture. This photo was taken not far from our hotel. Those bicycle carts (you can see one in the foreground) are so typical in China!!! You see many of them (and in worse condition!) in Beijing.
Old and new mashed together.

Wandering sellers set up shop pretty much anywhere and everywhere along the street. Katia bought two pairs of socks at this intersection. We later used the socks on our hands to keep us warm in the evening...
If you zoom in you can see the beginning of a neat little street in the centre of the picture - opens up a whole new world that may depict the "real" Shanghai.
However "westernized" Shanghai pretends to be, you'd never see somebody carrying a plastic bag like that on their shoulder in North America, nor a man pulling a wooden cart... If you look closely, you'll see there's a white wedding car to the left. A couple men lit super loud firecrackers that blew up high in the air right beside where Katia and I were buying socks. We soon realised it was for a wedding, since a groom came running out carrying his bride in his arms (she was wearing red slippers!). He brought her to the car, where a few photographers took pictures (I didn't have time to take out my camera!) and then off they went amid a crowd of well-wishers. It was totally out of the blue - we had walked into a not-at-all touristy neighbourhood where we were the only whites around.
Another street picture, with the possibility of zooming in to see some "back-alley" material.
Poverty is picturesque.
The constant reminder of how close progress and stagnation stand side-by-side in Shanghai. SUVs parked in a parking lot across the street from run-down apartment buildings with modern-looking towers in the background. The parking lot is for a hotel called "The Magnificent." How funny!

Ecological Footprint

Hello! I watched an ad for BP energy on TV and went to their "carbon footprint" site and realised that I use up around 4 tonnes of CO2 per year. That's higher than the 2.4 average in China - no duh!

So this reminded me of my "ecological footprint," which I googled and found this footprint calculator. If everybody lived like me (mostly one person in a huge apartment with no green technology) there would have to be 6 earths! Yikes!

For those wanting to learn more, here's MEC's version of the calculator.

It's the week-end! My afternoon adult class went very well. I got them to do group discussions about travel. There were three groups and one decided to go to Thailand, the other to Egypt and Hainan (Chinese island to the south of China that I spent four days on), and the last to the coast of Shandong province.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Hump day!

Today is Wednesday - the official "hump" day - my work week is almost over!!!

Of course, yesterday's post was about a new student in our wonderful Chinese class. He was half-an-hour late yesterday. He puts me on edge.

**For those of you who speak French**

I'd like to draw your attention to a new link in the sidebar. It's Guillaume's new blog (even though he's been here 7 months, lazy...).

**For everybody**

Going to Cafeteria #2 with Maluyi (his French name is Loic) and Geyidong (Gaetan) for dinner. Party at Katia's after.

**Chinese culture**

A Chinese student has told me that he and some friends would invite me to dinner if that would procure them a passing grade even if they didn't come to any of the up-coming midterms and exams...

A Chinese student who doesn't do anything in class comes up to me at the end, telling me I'm so lovely...

I was to study Chinese today, but I surfed the net instead. *sigh* I'm no better than anyone.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

It couldn't last...

Last night (Monday), there was a new student in class. He came late. He wanted the teacher to translate everything in English. His cell phone went off at least five times during class, and he kept looking at it. He would talk to us in English. He would make jokes that nobody appreciated...

I don't particularly like him. He's macho. I hope he doesn't stay...

He's here to "play" (so he told us) - and find "business." He's here for a year to I suppose foster connections with Chinese companies.

He told us in his last school the teacher would speak in Chinese and he'd write what he understood in English. Hmm...

It's funny because in class we would speak in French, but now that there's a guy who wants us to speak in English and keeps asking us what things means in English, we hate it.

Six hours of class ahead of me...*sigh*

Monday, March 20, 2006

Shanghai - street life

Alright, blogger's being a pain and the pictures aren't uploading properly, so here's just a start of the pictures to come (4 out of a total of 54). It took me half-an-hour to post these four and I'm not going to waste any more time. Hope this site works better soon, there'll be more later.

Shanghai's museum is the large circular-shaped building on the left, Shanghai's opera (not the best architecture) is the white semi-circular building in the middle, and out of the frame to the right is Shanghai's urban exhibition centre. We didn't visit one of them, but we walked around them all. We did visit Shanghai's contemporary art museum, which was really quite good (albeit small) It had a funky music video created by a Japanese artist that both Katia and I really enjoyed. It also had a handsome English-speaking guard who talked to us about one of the exhibits which was a door and a classic Chinese instrument that had been burnt in a wired cage...
Saturday seemed to be "washday" - so many people were cleaning their clothes in tubs (some using ancient wooden washing boards) along the street, and then clothes were hanging everywhere to dry, even on the conveniently-located bamboo scaffolds, sometimes dripping onto inconveniently-located pedestrians down below.
If you enlarge the picture, you might notice that it's of a whole bunch of small hole-in-the-wall restaurants. The architecture is quite different in Shanghai - a lot more European-looking.
Some wokers pushing bamboo poles along a street. Some more lovely architecture in the background. We did a lot of walking.