China Love

I have big time China love. I love the school I teach at. I love the students. I love teaching grammar (sarcasm), I love downtown Beijing, and I love the ghetto that I live in. This is a plethora of China love coming at ya.

It is 4:30pm on Friday afternoon. I have just finished my first week of salary-based teaching, in my chosen career path. I'm too legit to quit...it's ridiculous! I still can't believe I am here, and that I am a real teacher. Ideally, this elation I feel will never end. The first week is as busy as I was warned eons ago when I started my internship in Fredericton. The week seemed even longer and busier though, because the meetings and assemblies were first given in Chinese, and then translated in English. A part of me dies at each staff meeting. There is almost nothing left in my soul.

I drew a lucky card with my classes too. Some of my coworkers are teaching classes of students who have relatively little English speaking skills. My kids are bright, funny, and best of all...happy. In turn, I love my job so much that it doesn't even feel like work. The kids (grades ten-twelve) are so friendly; all of them smile and say hi in the hallways and around campus. They volunteer answers in class. They love learning English (at least most of mine do). They are the cutest people on earth and I get to be with them for the next ten months. Pumped! My grade eleven classes are the funniest kids ever. We have some good laughs (at my expense mostly)! One difficulty I have while teaching is not using slang terms or clichés. They just haven’t ever heard them, and have trouble understanding what “it’s ballin’” means. We actually have to teach a unit on slang terms so that when these kids attend university in Canada or the US, they can comprehend words like ‘bromance.’ Ridiculous. I do know that I hate our language, I mean, ‘there, their, or they’re??’ You try teaching that to an ESL student! “It’s or its?’ Come on! Our language sucks. It’s definitely not ballin’. To teach them verbs this week, I played a K’Nan music video and we picked the verbs out of Wavin’ Flag. It was cool, they thought it was ‘tight.’ Hah!
As a tourist, I have also been having a touch too much fun...We live a decent distance from downtown Beijing, a cab ride is about $15, so typically we go in with a driver for free on the weekends. There is lots to experience close to the school though. It is more rustic (dirt roads, veggie/fruit markets, stray dogs, stray cats, fleas, yummy BBQ food, cheap restaurants, and squatter toilets everywhere you look). Most nights, my friends and I eat out and practice our broken Mandarin through ordering dinner and beers. I rarely spend more than $3 on a HUGE dinner out. It is wild! My room-mate Bri, and I buy our daily goods from the markets and try one new Chinese packaged snack each day. So far, I have only eaten one thing that was either SPAM or...hamster. Tough call.
Downtown Beijing on the weekends provides for much frivolity. We found a bar that serves free drinks to ladies all night on Fridays. Our first night there was... a little... out of sorts. Luckily, we have some big guys on our team who we trust, and they made sure we got home alright. Otherwise, most bevvies are $2. I have only gotten lost in a cab going home once. It was scary as hell, and the cabbie was angry and kicked us out for not knowing where we needed to go. Cabbies here do not have gps, so we have to give them directions in Chinese, and that is tough to do when you are a little "out of sorts." Instead of eating 'drunk pizza' after the bar, we now eat 'drunk meat on a stick.' Last week, while eating Drunk Meat On A Stick at 4am, there was a huge bar fight across the way, and blood and glass landed all over us. It was disgusting but I didn't panic. I pulled out my handy alcohol swabs and swabbed myself and my friends down and stopped eating the meat. It was time to go home. The highlight of that night was when I decided that if I ever get married, I want my "first dance" song to be to "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" by Whitney Houston. I've never danced so hard...and felt so alone. Hah!

I can say north, south, east, west, left, right, one, ten, and beer in Chinese. Haha. I'm a success story.

My team is a magical grouping of people, we all love each other very much. There are four couples, a few single guys (who, for the record, are lovely people, but I understand why they moved to China to find love), a few single girls, and a couple old people. We hang out all the time, and our apartment building is like a college residence. I have the girls hooked on Big Love, and someone introduced everyone to True Blood, which sucks.

I apologize for this blog being so long and wordy; it is, after all, the first one and I have two weeks to cover. I think I'll wrap it up now, because in a few minutes, we are heading into Tongshou for Korean BBQed meats and succulent vegetables. Afterwards, we are having a ping pong tourney and I plan on winning.

I'll post pictures (and MUCH shorter blogs soon, promise).

Missing you.

xox