Merry Christmas! Having read some of my entries from the last few months, I hope it's obvious that I've learnt a lot from teaching English in China this semester. I had hoped that exactly what I have learnt would be equally obvious but, in many cases, I've got more questions now than when I arrived in September and a few more answers without questions as well. As it's Christmas, and there's nothing on the telly that you haven't seen before, I thought I'd go over some of my highlights from my time here so far, and add some spuriously connected 'lessons' as well.
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My Chinese name, in characters: 高森森 Gao Sen Sen Lin and Irene, who work in the office, gave me this name. Their own, special brand of logic is that Sen sounds like the latter part of Mason, this has to be repeated because their names Mo Mo, Lin Lin and Anna's An Na Na are all repeated and we all need to have the same. Gao means high or tall, Sen meaning trees or forest (which it sort of looks like) so it roughly infers that I'm big, tall and strong or, at the very least taller than the average Chinese person.
Telling people my name gets a range of reactions - Wendy (Scottish/Chinese, she teaches Anna and me Chinese, she's married to Cal, another teacher here) seems confused by it as there are plenty of other Chinese words that would've given sounds a lot closer to my English name. Well, to be totally accurate, they would've given Ad-wood May-son. Randomly, we met a professor of logic at Henan University on the train back from Shanghai. He seemed very impressed with the name, as did the thirty seven other people on the train he took it upon himself to introduce to us, despite their not speaking any English but principally because they'd never seen a real life foreigner before. I'm not sure if writing only Gao Sen Sen on a letter would get it to me - I rather feel it's more of an office-thing, like when they call me 'handsome man' and Anna 'beautiful girl'. X Hello,
Wow, it's busy here! I finally managed to buy tickets to Shanghai for National Holiday. It took four trips in total, even taking student translators with me, because you can apparently only buy tickets ten days in advance for the train in China - no early bird prices to be had here - and the demand for travel next week is so high. But we've got tickets now for a sleeper train leaving ZZ on 30th September in the evening, arriving in Shanghai after lunch the next day. These were, supposedly, the last available tickets for either the thirtieth or the first! It's a sleeper train, so we'll have bunks, but the description "Hard Sleeper" sounds ominous... Last night we went to see Inception, in English with Chinese subtitles at what seems to be the only English-language showing of any film in the city this month. When the lights came on after the film, I was half-surprised to find myself in China, having zoned the Mandarin subtitles out for two hours. We still don't have internet in the apartment block, so I'm spending a lot of time in the International Studies office over the road to prepare lessons, drink coffee and check emails. It's actually quite convenient as I get more done here than in our lounge. The staff are also really friendly, and enjoy teaching us short Chinese phrases. They've named me Gao Sen Sen, which roughly translates as Tall (or Big) Forest. The symbol for 'sen' looks like three trees arranged in a triangle. Photo of my attempt at writing it to follow shortly. There is also an English Club - second- and third-year students with a good level of English who help the foreign teachers around the city (buying train tickets, negotiating in markets, getting buses etc.) in exchange for extra help with their English. My first lesson is looming. I'm fairly well prepared, I think, I hope... x |
Photo Blog hereThere's a selection of photos from my time in China, and travels over Spring Festival, on these pages. Categories
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