This week on High School Musical 8: Teaching English in China...
It wasn't going too well though. They didn't seem to care why a Belgian airline had had to change it's logo from 13 red dots to 14 to please superstitious flyers. They apparently didn't care to learn anything about Belgium. Ther was something else on their mind: whether I'm staying next year.
Their faces fell. In unison, they put their pens down, their work away and refused to carry on. Amy seemed to look for a way to hide in the desk. I wondered if I could do the same. Fonda looked as if he might burst into tears. Nancy did. Mercifully, the bell rang for the ten minute break midway through class.
If it hadn't been already, class was abandoned, and Anna and I took them for frozen fruit cups in the Riverside restaurant. That improved things a bit, and the endless photo-taking helped, but they still looked as if I'd just told them their Christmas presents would have to be returned, and the frozen fruit was very suspect, mostly soy beans. Anna suggested we all go to a karaoke bar and sing all the songs - in English and Chinese- entitled "I'll miss you" - Anna didn't suggest the last part, but it's they wanted to do.
What they also did was a) get drunk on three beers each; b) Nancy started crying again; c) Linda started crying; d) Jack consoled Linda; e) Seamus (Linda's over-protective boyfriend) launched himself at sweet-as-pie Jack; e) I sang Robbie Williams's Angels through the ensuing fight. So, so high school. They calmed down, Linda knocked seven shades of Saturday out of Seamus for embarrassing her in public and I butchered a Kylie Minogue song with an indecent video.
We took a break at 3am. More accurately, I fell asleep midway through Twilight at 3am, only to be woken up at 4am by KFC being forced into my mouth. Not once, in four years of university, did somebody else buy my breakfast after a night out, let alone feed it to me, so I'm seeing this as a win.
No, Granny, it's definitely a win.
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