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:
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.
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.
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.
My honors students and I watched the first half of Peter Pan in class today. I was a little worried about 20 seven-year-olds sitting still for a foreign-language movie, especially the clever little hellions who’re in honors English.
At the beginning of class, we had a bit of drama with the DVD player. By “drama”, I mean that I handed TA B the disc, and she stared blankly at it. Yesterday’s conversation about a TV and DVD player for the honors class wasn’t just hypothetical! Oh, when will I ever learn that “yes” means “I acknowledge you’re speaking to me”?
Anyway, it was all worth it when Captain Hook lunged at Peter Pan and my students all shouted “Oh no!” “Look out!” and “Run, Peter!”
We’re watching the ending next week. I can’t wait to see if they believe in fairies.
All copies of the Beijing Times are sold out — the greatest mei you ever.
So the Sunning Electrical Appliance Store bought a huge color ad in the Beijing Times, just in time for the National Day shopping extravaganza. But a competitor launched a freakishly well-organized campaign to send minions out to every Beijing Times-selling kiosk in the city. These minions were assigned kiosks and sent to buy out every single copy of the paper, even if that meant paying double the selling price. They were also sent to follow the delivery trucks to seek out any stores that might have been missed.
Then, the minions tossed out Sunning’s ads, substituted their own, and found locations to hand out the modified papers to shoppers, free of charge. Seems like a rather expensive venture, all in all, but quite effective as a means of blocking Sunning’s ads. Good money for the Beijing Times folks, who made up and sold an extra print run, at any rate.
Sunning execs, who were notified by gloating anonymous text-message of the scheme (how mafia is that?), say they’re seeking legal action. I don’t know if anything illegal has happened here. Seems like buying a paper and tossing away ads are legal activities, and I think handing out papers and adverts in China is so legal it’s almost mandatory. Can’t wait to see what happens next.
The full (English translation of the) story is here, thanks to EastSouthWestNorth.
