Week 3 and surviving
Has it only been 3 weeks? Feels hell of a lot longer.. still, this week was a pretty good week. Interesting too.
Granny's guy is visiting at the moment so I met him and brought him to some famous roast duck restaurant here. Food was pretty good. Met him again yesterday again, I think my mandarin gets better each time I have to go out with him coz all the waiters/waitresses/sellers rattle off to me in Mandarin since he looks foreign (6 ft white guy in Asia does kinda stick out) whereas I look Chinese. We got stuck with an annoying trishaw puller somewhere around Tiananmen Sq who rode alongside us trying to convince us to use his services. After declining, he still rode alongside us, asking things like "where are you from" which I ignored, then finally asked K in English where he was from (a question which he evaded). Loads of roadside sellers selling cheap trinkets and kites kept targeting K.
Have also gotten to know Chia better over the last couple of weeks. We are actually quite similar and we end up having really long discussions over tea/dinner/whatever and losing track of time.
Class-wise, this week was a good week. We did more tongue-twisters on Thursday (always a welcome break from the usual listening class though I really like this teacher), and some singing yesterday. Basically, my speaking teacher got so fed up with us not knowing our new vocab (she got all of us to write the words on the blackboard so it's very apparent when you don't know how to write a character) that she decided to play a version of "Pass the Parcel". Instead of a parcel, it was an empty water bottle. She turned her back and started banging the blackboard eraser against the blackboard (not the dusty side, of course!) and when she stopped, the person holding the bottle had to read the passage from our books without any mistakes. The penalty for mistakes was that we had to sing a song (in whatever language). It got quite exciting as we started to lob the bottle across the classroom instead of passing it (which we weren't supposed to do but we got away with since her back was to us!) and chucking it onto ppl's laps. (buahahaha! I chucked the bottle onto the Italian guy's lap who was sitting in front of my deskmate just as the banging stopped) Towards the end of the game, it didn't matter whether you said the passage correctly or not, you still had to sing a song since all of us would be egging on the person with demands of "chang ge" and banging the tables. My teacher is incredibly sporting, one of us put the bottle at her table while she had her back turned and she humoured us with an Inner Mongolian song (her parents are from Inner Mongolia but she grew up in China). The afternoon class was on learning Chinese songs, and I found out that one of my classmates really loves music (she's previously told me that she was a Beatles fan and I found out that she also a Jay Chou fan and that she's brought a guitar with her here!). I quite like the Nicholas Teo song we learnt. The male teacher(?) whom I've previously only seen in the office has a pretty decent voice.
Tomorrow's Sports Day (but I didn't know how to sign up for anything and it's too late to do anything now) and it should be a pretty good show.. I've been hearing them practice the dragon dance performance the whole week. Going to the Forbidden City with the school after that and then the Natural Science museum with a couple of classmates. Ummm.. spliced cadavers, here I come!
Granny's guy is visiting at the moment so I met him and brought him to some famous roast duck restaurant here. Food was pretty good. Met him again yesterday again, I think my mandarin gets better each time I have to go out with him coz all the waiters/waitresses/sellers rattle off to me in Mandarin since he looks foreign (6 ft white guy in Asia does kinda stick out) whereas I look Chinese. We got stuck with an annoying trishaw puller somewhere around Tiananmen Sq who rode alongside us trying to convince us to use his services. After declining, he still rode alongside us, asking things like "where are you from" which I ignored, then finally asked K in English where he was from (a question which he evaded). Loads of roadside sellers selling cheap trinkets and kites kept targeting K.
Have also gotten to know Chia better over the last couple of weeks. We are actually quite similar and we end up having really long discussions over tea/dinner/whatever and losing track of time.
Class-wise, this week was a good week. We did more tongue-twisters on Thursday (always a welcome break from the usual listening class though I really like this teacher), and some singing yesterday. Basically, my speaking teacher got so fed up with us not knowing our new vocab (she got all of us to write the words on the blackboard so it's very apparent when you don't know how to write a character) that she decided to play a version of "Pass the Parcel". Instead of a parcel, it was an empty water bottle. She turned her back and started banging the blackboard eraser against the blackboard (not the dusty side, of course!) and when she stopped, the person holding the bottle had to read the passage from our books without any mistakes. The penalty for mistakes was that we had to sing a song (in whatever language). It got quite exciting as we started to lob the bottle across the classroom instead of passing it (which we weren't supposed to do but we got away with since her back was to us!) and chucking it onto ppl's laps. (buahahaha! I chucked the bottle onto the Italian guy's lap who was sitting in front of my deskmate just as the banging stopped) Towards the end of the game, it didn't matter whether you said the passage correctly or not, you still had to sing a song since all of us would be egging on the person with demands of "chang ge" and banging the tables. My teacher is incredibly sporting, one of us put the bottle at her table while she had her back turned and she humoured us with an Inner Mongolian song (her parents are from Inner Mongolia but she grew up in China). The afternoon class was on learning Chinese songs, and I found out that one of my classmates really loves music (she's previously told me that she was a Beatles fan and I found out that she also a Jay Chou fan and that she's brought a guitar with her here!). I quite like the Nicholas Teo song we learnt. The male teacher(?) whom I've previously only seen in the office has a pretty decent voice.
Tomorrow's Sports Day (but I didn't know how to sign up for anything and it's too late to do anything now) and it should be a pretty good show.. I've been hearing them practice the dragon dance performance the whole week. Going to the Forbidden City with the school after that and then the Natural Science museum with a couple of classmates. Ummm.. spliced cadavers, here I come!