Time Flies

It’s week 15 already in the semester. Wow, it doesn’t seem like I’ve been teaching for 15 weeks! So, just 3 and a half weeks left. I’ll be giving hem exams next week. Should be fun. Or monotonous as the case may be.

I have an idea of what I’ll be doing at the start of my winter holidays anyway. I am intending to go to Taiwan and Korea. Spending Christmas in Taiwan and heading to Korea after that. In Feb, I hope to head to Hong Kong to see another friend. That leaves around 5 and a half weeks of space that I need to fill, smack bang in the middle of which is Spring Festival (Chinese New Year). I’ll have to find somewhere that ain’t Dalian to spend that time, cos it’s difficult to travel around then.

I’ve been coerced into singing again tonight at English Corner. Well, to be honest, I like singing and playing the guitar, so it’s no big deal. Whether they like listening to me is another question! I sang a couple of sons for the postgrads last Saturday morning. They got everything from the Dubliners to Oasis!

Oh, I got steak at the weekend. Pretty cheap here compared to back home. You can get a decent sized steak for €0.70! Got some chips and tomato ketchup as well. Had a right old feed! Next day I made myself a lovely steak sandwich, pictured below.

Sometimes eating Chinese food every day gets boring and you want something that you can sink yer teeth into!! I got some ham the other day so had a nice “hang sangwidge” along with a cup of Barry’s Tea for my lunch. By the way, I’m running out of Barry’s Tea. Could someone inform the Irish government and have some shipped over here right away?

Corker of a Class

I have come up with a new way to help my students speak in a more native way. TEFL is the acronym used for Teach English as a Foreign Language. No, I have come up with TCFL, which is “Teach Corkonian as a Foreign Language”. For those not in the know, people from County Cork in Ireland are called Corkonians. Their brand of English is a mix between singing and talking! Their speech inflects upwards and downwards and usually inflects upwards at the end of a sentence. I was telling the lads today in class about some different accents in Ireland, when I demonstrated the Cork accent, with “how are you?” When they all copied me, it was near-perfect, far more native-sounding than their normal English. So, I reckon I should teach in a Cork accent from now on.

On another note, I had to do a filler class for my Transportation class, since some one of the classes will be cancelled tomorrow. So, I Irished it up a bit by teaching them “The Fields of Athenry”. Proper order. Should’ve got them all pissed first.

I saw today that they have actually released a Gaelic Football game for the Playstation 2 called Gaelic Games Football! I remember wondering what a GAA game would be like but never actually thought someone would ever bother to make one. Well, an Aussie crowd called IR Gurus have done it! In all good game shops now!

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!

Moulding Them Into Good Irish Lads

As some of you may know, Australia went through to the World Cup by knocking out Uaregay on penalties in the play-offs. In my class today, I could hear shouts of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!” from the next class. It was Ken. He must’ve been telling them the news.

I wasn’t having that, so I decided to teach them an Irish football chant. So, “Come On You Boys in Green” it was! And they loved it. Stuck in a bit of 中国队!加油! (Zhōngguó duì jiā yóu: come on, China) at the end to keep them sweet. This is why I like teaching a class full of lads, cos you can do stuff like that! I’ll have to teach “The Fields of Athenry” next! They’ve already been trained to respond “howaya”, when I say, “howaya” to them and “same old, same old”, when I ask “what’s the story?” They’ll have no problems communicating with the natives if their ship pulls into Dublin port!

Me The Examiner

I decided to give my Transportation students an assessment today. It’s quite hard to assess Oral English, I reckon, especially since I am only a beginner at this game! The thing with my classes is that they throw people with all different levels into the same class. This makes it more difficult to teach and assess! If you teach to the higher level students, the rest are lost. If you teach to the lower level students, the rest are lost! I guess, you can teach some of the students some of the time, but you can’t teach all the students all of the time! I have nearly 90 Transportation students and nearly 130 Navigation students, so it’s sort of difficult to know them all!

They have turned on the heating in the apartment building at last! It’s getting nippier by the day! The funny thing here is that you can feel the sun’s heat through the windows and it’s quite warm, even though it’s freezing outside! Don’t really get that in Ireland!

For any of you who want to learn to speak proper English (Irish-English obviously), I saw this article in Wikipedia (If you live in China, where Wikipedia is blocked, you may have luck with the Google cached version here. It worked earlier but doesn't seem to work now...) and also this site with loads of slang phrases! I already have my students trained to say “howaya” when they meet my and “ah, I’d grand”, when I ask how they are!

2 Pubs With One Stone

So, I eventually got around to visiting the Irish pubs in Dalian last night. Started off having a BBQ in a restaurant in Hei Shi Jiao, which is 2 tram stops away. Found a cosy little pub near there as well. They had Christmas lights downstairs and were playing dodgy versions of The Green Green Grass of Home among others. Besides that, it was grand. The jacks was actually clean and had soap!

After that, myself and another Irish lad hit for town to meet up with some others. You can have great fun chatting with the taxi drivers here. They $are really down-to-earth and chatty! I guess the working-class folks are always the most friendly!

Visited the 2 Irish pubs in Dalian (The Tin Whistle and The Hole In The Wall), which are 2 doors down from each other! Don’t know if that was just coincidence! There was good atmosphere even though the All Blacks were hammering the shite out of us in the rugby. Seems like there are limited resources available for the fun-loving expat in Dalian. A handful of pubs and I’m told that the only club worth going to is JD’s, which we ended up in. All in all, not a bad night out!

Weather is getting nippy here these days! Can feel it in the air today! Have to go and buy the long-johns soon! Maybe I can teach my class via radio link from my apartment, as they do in Australia! And I hear that some of the restaurants do delivery! Now, if only the supermarket did the same! For my winter vacation, I’ll definitely have to head south!

Photos By Request

I was asked if I'd pt up the link to my photos from my trip to China (last year). Here it is:

http://photobucket.com/albums/v446/derekinchina/

For those who don't know, I have been on a number of Blazing Saddles Cycling Challenges to all four corners of the world! Blazing Saddles is the fundraising arm of the National Council for the Blind in Ireland (NCBI), which is a charity to train and support blind and visually impaired people in Ireland.

The trips work as follows: Everyone who wants to go on the trip must raise a set amount of money (around 4,000 Euro). This can be done by collections, organising events, getting sponsorship etc. A fraction of the money raised goes to pay for the trip and the rest goes to the charity. The trips are used as an incentive for people to raise money. I think it’s a great idea and it has brought in far more money for the NCBI than traditional fundraising methods!

Excellent, Smithers - Release the Hounds!!

I got my hands on some Simpsons episodes with English subtitles recently. I decided to do a test run on my second year transportation students to see if they could get it. I showed them a small part of the episode where Homer gets committed to a mental institution cos Mr. Burns thought he was an anarchist for wearing a pink shirt to work (which was pink cos Bart’s lucky red hat got mixed up with Homer’s white shirts in the washing). Remember?

They did manage to get most of what was going on, which pleased me cos I don’t think that there is anything about American culture/society that can’t be answered/demonstrated by an episode of the Simpsons! Some comments were “my family is not like that” and “do all people have to wear a uniform in American factories”. I will have to teach them the words “sarcasm”, “irony”, “exaggeration” and “pinch of salt” when watching the Simpsons! I don’t expect them to get most of the jokes as they are pretty much mostly cultural references. But it would be great to open their eyes to something approaching normality, compared to the usual stuff they watch like Friends and Forrest Gump!!

Dragon Tortoises and Performances

I got this strange looking teapot from the postgrads that I meet on Saturday mornings. Well, their supervisor gave it as a gift. It's like a tortoise with a dragon's head! The handle of the lid is another baby tortoise on the big one's back!


It's made from some special stone, which is supposed to be good for your health. Well, it makes a nice cup of tea. I haven't tried it with the Barry's teabags yet!

Anyways, Friday night I went along to see a performance put on by fist year students. My Chinese teacher was involved. She wrote and produced one of the programs in the show, so she invited me along. It was actually an interesting show!

First, some breakdancing students burst onto the stage. Quite impressive. A rock band followed and played a Chinese song, followed (to my amazement) by "About a Girl" by Nirvana! They sort of murdered it but it was good to se something with a harder edge compared to the vomit-inducing crap I usually hear blaring out f hops and establishments here!

My teacher's performance was next. It was a play based around a student growing up, leaving home and coping in University. Since the narrative was all in Chinese, I didn't get much of it. My teacher was doing some dancing. She should have sung, since she is a very god singer! The crowd loved it anyway, and they all performed very well.

More acts followed, including some traditional dancing and comedy acts. A lot of comedy here seems to revolve around 2 people in dialogue. They liked it but I was just laughing when they laughed!

Some of my Navigation students were there as well, and one guy as on stage, I don't know what was going on. They would all go up in groups of 4 to the mic and shout something ad the crowd would roar. They were all dressed in their military uniforms. I think it was something to o with debating.

I had to do my "token Westerner giving flowers to the singer on stage" thing as again! Ah, the trials of it all, having to give flowers to pretty girls! All my first year Navigation students will be bursting with jealousy, since the mention of a woman makes them all excited. They really need to get some women!

There was also a Tae Kwon Do performance, which wasn't bad. Lots of peole jumping about and breaking pieces of wood. People don't seem to be into martial arts at all over here, which is sort of srprising, since you would have thought they'd all be mad into Kung Fu. Most Chinese people don't seem to be into exercise at all. The education system is too focused on exams and books. for shame!

Weekly Blog Update, haha

Hmmm, blog entries seem to be getting further and further apart these days. Oh well, not that much to report!

I was gonna buy a bike these days. I went into town on Sunday with a couple of lads to look at bikes. Found a proper bike shop and even found out that Dalian has a cycling club! I didn’t want to spend much on a bike cos I dunno how long I’ll be in Dalian and also dunno how many times I’ll be out on the bike! The cheapest mountain bike was around 1000 yuan and the cheapest racer was 1400. So, more than I wanted to spend. I also reckon that it could be a bit iffy heading out on the open road! The club would be heading out in groups but I reckon that could be a bit dodgy, since I don’t know the roads and don’t like cycling in groups! On Wednesday I was gonna buy a second hand mountain bike off a student but it was a big small! He was asking 200 yuan, which wasn’t to bad a price!

Besides the usual English corner outing, I decided to try out the local pool, which is a brand new 50 metre one, so not too bad! I realised how unfit I was! Well, my problem is the breathing. My legs aren’t too bad with the cycling but I find it really hard to breathe. I end up running out of breath and can’t get more air in. More swimming is required! What surprised me is that all the Chinese are just doing the breast stroke. They are slowly ambling along in the swimming lane, just in the same way they ride their bikes on the street! I was told that they do this stroke, since that in most pools it is really crowded and the breast stroke is more suitable for those conditions! I don’t even know how to do it, so I’m not sure if they are too impressed with me ploughing past them with my freestyle stroke, haha!

After the swimming, in English Corner, I remarked how my legs were feeling rather heavy after the swimming. She said I should do the breast stroke and then I wouldn’t be so tired! She obviously missed the whole point of exercise: you’re supposed to feel tired!!

Only side efffect of the swimming was that I seem to have caught a cold as a result :-(