Chinese Performing Debut

The weekend seems to have come and gone quite quickly!

Friday, I went to a party and met some interesting Scottish and Japanese people, among others, and then we decided to pile into a taxi and head to the Irish pub for a few more pints. Seemed like a great idea at the time, but I felt like absolute shite on Saturday. Was a vegetable for most of the day.

The previous day, I had for some reason agreed to be a judge in an oral English contest. So, Saturday evening, I struggled along to it. There were 3 other foreign teachers there and a Chinese English teacher. It dragged on a bit but we had our fun. The 9 contestants (all first year students) had 3 rounds in the "We Are The Future" oral English contest: prepared speech, explain-the-word game and an acting thing. There was supposed to be some sort of translation round but the computer wasn’t up to it, so they skipped it. We had to give marks out of 100 for each student’s performance in the first and last rounds. For some reason, my ass was hauled on stage for the guessing game round. The contestant in question had to explain a word to me, without saying the word and I had to guess it correctly. I did quite well despite the tiredness!

In the end, there was an unexpected winner. The girl who got the lowest score entering the competition actually won it. I had her down as second best! Here’s a photo of some of the contestants. The winner is the second from left.


Sunday was also busy, but at least the hangover had cleared, but some tiredness still remained! I went shopping to get some jumpers. I’m told people wear 3 pairs of trousers in the winter in Dalian. Holy shit! I still need to buy a lot of things!

The previous day, my Chinese teacher asked me if I’d sing a song for a performance. I just said yeah. Didn’t know what it was. Anyway, seems it was some performance put on by the first year students, with people singing, dancing etc. My teacher herself couldn’t be there as she was involved in a performance of her own, as director of a play in another place. Anyways, she asked me to sing my one and only Chinese song, 月亮代表我的心 (yuèliàng dàibiǎ

o wǒ de xīn), or The Moon Represents My Heart. I really need to learn another one soon!

I was a little bit nervous at first but when I saw the quality of the singers before me, I felt I couldn’t do any worse. It went grand except that one of the mics wasn’t working, so I am not sure if they could hear the guitar! Here’s a pic of m singing away.

I threw in The Fields of Athenry as well for good measure. I think they enjoyed it!

After that, there was still time to go and see the performance that my teacher directed. I was very impressed. Although I didn’t understand much of it, it came across really well. The guy playing the King particularly impressed me with his stage presence!

On another note, my mobile phone loudspeaker broke, so if someone rang me, I couldn’t hear the ring tone. And more importantly, my alarm clock made no sound! I had my sights splashing out on a new phone, so went to town this morning. In a Nokia shop, I was looking at a new phone. I took my old one out and explained what was wrong with it! Rather than saying that it couldn’t be fixed and pushing the sale of the new phone, the guy offered to try and fix it and only charge me if it could be fixed! He did manage to fix it, so I ended up not coughing up all that cash! So, they are not all out to rip off westerners, as some people might think!