From the Surreal to the Surreal

So, more and more exams this week. Exams coming out my ears. Well, it goes with the territory, don’t it? The students are enjoying the Shrek DVDs that I am showing them anyway!

Last night I found out that one of the TV stations here was showing Roddy Doyle’s “The Van”. Great, says I until I turned on the box and found it was dubbed in Chinese! “Jaysus”, says I! It was gas. I never realised how good Colm Meaney’s Chinese was!

The Chinese language dubbing on Western movies is so bad. The voices never suit and it always seems so over-acted. Well, Chinese soaps are the same. They did find a gruff man’s voice for Jimmy Rabbite. It would have been good if they had them speaking Chinese with Dublin accents too! It was funny to see the scangers queuing up for Chips and speaking Chinese, haha! I might put a video clip of it up for the laugh!

I also wonder what they did with all the swear words from the original. Chinese don’t swear that much, unlike us potty-mouthed Paddies! So, the whole thing was a tad sureal!

This evening was a bit surreal too. My singing was required again. This time, it was an event organised by the English corner people. It was like a cabaret of acts. Some singing, some doing dancing. There was also one drama. And some games: an English guess-the word game and also some singing game where one team had to think of and sing a song that began with the last word of the song the other team had just sung! Since it was all in Chinese, I just fell asleep.

Fair play to these people for organising stuff like this. I don’t think DCU ever did anything like this. Anyways, I did my 3 songs, including that usual Chinese one. Some of my first year lads were there in the audience. They did me proud, as all I could hear was “Go on, boy” and “howaya, boy” in Cork accents. The boys done well!

So, I decided to sit with these lads that I teach. Navigation class 4, or the zoo, as I should call them as they are wild and one of them is called Tiger. Mental bunch of lads and a good laugh. Just a bit over-energetic in class. This compensates for the living dead second year Transportation students that I teach.

I had a good laugh with the lads and the evening seemed to be drawing to an end around 8:30 when all of a sudden the place turned into a disco! So, Tiger and the boys were going mad on the dance floor! Usually people need to be off their tits on E’s to dance like that! I’d never seen Chinese going mad like that as well! Fair play to them! But, as the clock struck 9, bang, it all ended! They didn’t want them to have too much fun after all!