You know what makes me feel like a "real" teacher for the first time?

My red pen!!

Greetings from a wonderfully filthy but oh-so-cheap net cafe near my school in the urban jungle that is Jinan. The internet both and home and at school has been practically non-existent for a couple of days but good to see that these little holes still have their guanzi (read: connections) working for them among the ISP companies.

Life here is not that exciting to write about, the days are spent mostly teaching, working, recovering and eating.

But have I ever told you about Chinese shops? The weird things about them is that all the shops selling the same items are always located in the same area or in the same street. In that way, there is street of just mattress shops, another street of motorbike shops, another one of window frame makers and so on and so forth. It's bizarre in the way that you pretty much have to know where you are going if you are looking for something particular. Yu can't just wonder about some shopping streets, hoping to find a music shop. And when you find one, chances are there are a few others right next to it. And of course they all seem to have just about agreed on all their prices.

So, on saturday my mission was to find myself a used bike, so that i could join the masses of people fighting their way through the smog clouds in the streets. As i had no idea where to go, i started my search randomluy near the centre of the city and kept asking people if they knew of a place selling bicycles. The first guy i asked said no, but he wanted to sell me his own rusty bike instead. We started to haggle over the price, buty in the end he stuck to 80 yuan while I was ready to pay 70 tops. So on i went with my search.

After getting a few mei-yous (don't have), one guy finally told me to keep walking along towards the north. And asking along the way, I finally found my way to the 'used-bike-street' with lots of little shops selling bikes. The funny thing was that the people I asked not just told me where to go, they started to give me all sorts of advice in the line of "Make sure that you try the bike before you pay" or "Don't you let them rip you off, the right price is this and this."

Result: I now have a nice rust-spotted grey speed monster! Yea!

well, the bike story shall be it for this time. I'd better get home to see if our new flatmate, Andy, has moved in. Rebecca got another fancy job at a magazine/TV production company, so she left the school and moved out this morning. Her room in the flat is now taken over by andy, who also teaches at Aston 3. Laters!

It's saturday morning, i'm sitting in the kitchen with my flatmate's laptop, eating jujube and lotus seed paste for breakfast while the rain keep pouring down outside. it has been raining for the whole night, non-stop, and it seems like it's not about to give up, either. Which is one more reason why i'm glad to have my first day off today. Talking about rain, by the way, a lot of the country has been hot by extremely heavy rains in the past week, flooding Beijing for a couple of days, and also bringing life in other cities to a hault. Maybe it will keep raining here in Jinan until monday morning, and the whole city will be flooded, so that i don't have to go to work...ehhh...
 
Work, then... Teaching itself isn't too bad, sometimes i even enjoy being in the classroom, making a total fool of myself in front of the kids and making them laugh, sometimes being the strict teacher and ordering kids around and just teaching this and that. But the job here is A LOT OF WORK. I was a little apprehensive about having to work 30 h/week, but i was not even including the extra 10 hours of lesson preparation and marking homework!!! And 10 hours is probably not even enough, as i'm teaching all the classes for the first time, so no using old lessons plans... For example yesterday I stayed at the school for 12 hours!!! 6 hours of it active teaching time and the rest preparation and marking and so on. ARGH.
 
I'm teaching 5 different levels of kids, starting from level 2 (who are just above beginners) up to level 6 (who are still doing pretty basic stuff also). In every class i have a Chinese teacher with me, who i can use to help with activities, do translations or whatever i need him/her for. Especially with the little ones it's helpful, as you can only explain so much using basic colours and numbers and 'sit down'. hmmm.

It just feels like i'm in a totally different world now. I can't write anymore about observations on the Chinese life that much, as i feel i'm not really seeing the Chinese life! Though i guess i'm just seeing a very different side of it... We'll see how it goes on and what i will be able to get out of it all.
 
But for now, the rain keeps falling and for me, it's finally the chance to grab a book and curl up on the sofa, or even watch some choice programming on CCTV9, the China Central Television international channel. Whoa! 
 
  

Ok, for those of you with no degree in Chinese geography, here is a quick intro to my new home: Jinan is the capital of Shandong province, which is located just south of Beijing and east of Hebei. The population of the city is around 6 million, out of which apparently about 4 million or so are living in the actual city and the rest just around it. Jinan has got to be the most polluted place I have ever seen, there is a white haze hovering over the whole city and it's so bad that while standing in the street, you can't clearly see the tops of the tall buildings. Yesterday i climbed all the way to the top of a little mountain nearby, and took in a view of the city and it truly looked like a sea of white haze, with some tall buildings sticking through it. But other than that, it looks just like any other Chinese city I have seen in the North-East... What Jinan is famous for are its springs, which in fact are located right in the city centre in a park area. I have yet to check that out but it's definitely on the list of places to go very soon.

As for something completely different, when in Beijing, we were browsing through the channels on the TV and on the national movie channel, CCTV6, they were showing a Swedish movie, located in the Finnish speaking areas in the north and telling a story of a little Finnish girl called Elina. How strange was it to see something like that here, all dubbed in Chinese of course!

A new place, new people, new job - a new life. After a few days in Beijing, i fought my way through to the Jinan-bound train (with a full 2 minutes to spare) and 5 1/2 hours later I was being met at the other end by a bloke called Apple (got to love these Chinglish names). And now here I am, in my new flat, which seriously ressembles a palace. I am so not used to this standard of living, I thought I had it better than good in Baoding, but you should see this place! However, this time I don't have it all to myself, but am sharing with two other girls, Rebecca and Anita, an American and an Aussie who both work at the same school as full-time teachers.

From the sound of it, life here for the teachers is *very* different to what I have been used to in Baoding. I will be working at the Aston school, which is an American private English school mainly for primary and middle school students. The school has around 40 (!!!) teachers, who are teaching at 3 different sites around town. And from what Rebecca told me, the foreign teachers tend to spend their time as a group, and not many of them have 'non-Aston friends'. ARGH! Laowai attack! There are also about 20 teachers coming just for the summer intensive program, like me, most of whom are coming straight from the States... So it'll be fun and games in the Laowai wonderland... A good thing is that our flat is outside the main teachers' compound as i'll be teaching at Aston 3, which only has 4 teachers while the majority work at Aston 1. And yeah, we live on the 7th floor (no lift, of course) so it's exercise time.

To be honest, i'm really not looking forward to the next 7 weeks here as it sounds like a fun working holiday for American college kids, but i'll try not to be too negative and get the best out of it. If i'm lucky, it might actually be a good bunch of people. and in any case, it'll be an opportunity to explore another city and province.

Just another sunny summer day in Baoding. The milkman was doing his rounds in the morning, blowing his whistle, the girl selling the filled sandwich wraps is smiling at me, the old people in the Zhuguang compaund are walking around patrolling the area and stopping for an occasional chat in the shade beneath the trees and the donkeys still look like they couldn't care less about what's going on around them as they stand chewing their watermelons in the street.

But for me it's the last day in Baoding for now, I'm trying to clean up the flat, say some final goodbyes and figure out what an earth I'm going to do with all my stuff. And in the afternoon it's off to Beijing with Griselle, where we are finally planning on checking out the summer palace. I suppose it's kind of appropriate that we are doing it in the summer...

It's a funny thing how leaving Baoding doesn't really feel like the end of anything, usually when I move on, leave a city or country for the next, there is always a feeling of ending something and starting something new. Now it's just like taking another train and continuing on my road.