It says “Can you guess these nationalities from their costumes?”
Picture From My Chinese Book
It says “Can you guess these nationalities from their costumes?”
Oops.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so you’ve just been spared nine-hundred-and-something complaints about buying an ironing board that’s not actually heat resistant.
Out!
I threw a kid out of class yesterday. He was really asking for it, he had already earned frowns for his team, and then got himself a corner, and then I told him to get out of my classroom.
Whenever I say something like that, I secretly laugh because it just sounds so weird coming out of my mouth. My little brat doesn’t know it’s been, like, ten minutes since I was on the other side of the desk, and he was pretty intimidated. Plus, then his Chinese teacher saw him standing in the hall and yelled at him.
One unexpected side effect is that now when I point at the door in that class, I get dead silence in the classroom.
That One.
I came across a site for ?????shirts (white people can’t read this… there’s also a Facebook group for the same thing). I kind of want the shirt but it’s a little too true in my case… The font is way too funky for my limited character recognition, it makes ? ren look like ? ru, and ?bai looks like ?ri.
Anyway, then I saw this one. Quite possibly the funniest shirt ever:
Posted in New York City
Tagged ?????, ?????, ?????, ?????, ?????, ?????, ?????, ?????, ?????, Chinese life, e3, Facebook, New York City, UMass
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Ali Bali
We had another lame department meeting on Friday, at which the foreign teachers were asked to sing more songs, add more chants, and more “action songs.” Now, I’m not adverse to teaching and singing Head&Shoulders, or the ABC song (with both tunes, I’m multi-cultural!), or even the Hokey Pokey, when it actually relates to the lessons.
But there’s a foreign-monkey aspect to random required singing and dancing that bothers me. Maybe I’m still bitter about my Yantai “Surprise! The foreign girl is going to sing to you!” But I don’t know if asking kids to add a tune they don’t know to words they can’t say is really helping them learn.
As Stick pointed out, “Nope. American entertainers get paid more than this.”
So my awesome TA brought in a tape today. “I have a very good song, it’s just perfect for your class.” She played the tape, and what do you think the excellent song was? The one that I just have to include in my English classes?
That song was Ali Bali, with all the Gaelic bits, and most of the English words, replaced with nonsense sounds.
“You know that’s not English, right?” I asked.
“The last foreign teacher liked it very much. It’s a very good song. You should use it in class tomorrow,”
There are a lot of reasons why I’m in China, but today I’m pretty sure I’m not here to teach English.
Sunday Afternoon
This afternoon, Stick and I took a long walk to our new favorite restaurant. Our new spot isn’t very different from any of the other little not-dumpling restaurants in the area, but the differences are significant ones. The tables and plates are clean, and the staff are friendly. The first time we went, I asked for egg rice (ji dan mi fan) and the waitress said the proper name of the dish for me (it’s chou something fan)… without giggling. Everything that a foreigner does is inherently amusing, and any attempts to speak Chinese are extra funny, but the waitress failed to giggle even when I made an obvious mistake. She’s the greatest.
The food is good, too, and it’s a good place to try new things because everything is clean and cheap. We get a dish of cold cucumbers and a dish of egg fried rice and then I order a few other things almost randomly off the menu. My reading is improving at an amazing rate, so I ask Stick “Would you like beef something noodles today? Or mystery potatoes?” He’s pretty good about mystery food. We discovered a yummy peppery-peanuts dish this way, and second-rate version of tomato-egg.
Anyway, today we took what we thought was a shortcut to this place, and found ourselves in an old-fashioned hutong, a labrynth of crumbling brick walls and veggie gardens growing up courtyard walls.
It ended up being quite a long walk through a maze of twisty passages, all alike… except for the ducks and chickens running wild. Hard to believe we were just a few blocks from the ritzy shopping strip and the international grocery.
Posted in New York City
Tagged chinese, Chinese life, e3, garden, hutong, New York City, noodles, random, reading, Stick
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Two Foreigners!
Stick and I went to the Auchan market today, and we split up so I could look at clothes and he could not look at clothes. I guess I must have looked lost without him, because a random man passing by grabbed my arm and then pointed down an aisle, towards Stick.
Beijing Traffic
If you can’t tell, I’m honking with my right hand.
