Adam’s Not Here

Mike left today, after staying here the last week. We had a lot of fun and I was finally able to see the city and do some of the tourist stuff. We also really got to check out the night life which is always fun. Shanghai seems to have a pretty happening scene. There are lots of trendy bars and clubs across the city. The nightlife seems to be generally a foreigner-centric scene. It seems nightlife for Chinese if fairly non-existent, they have KTV (karaoke) but it seems like only a fairly small number of young and/or wealthy Chinese are to be found at the night spots.

Mike and I also took a 3 day trip to the neighbouring cities of Suzhou and Zhouzhuang (check the gallery for pics). I heard Suzhou has really nice canals, so I was expecting this quaint city with sleepy rivers. It is actually a fairly modern city with almost 6 million people. Although it does feel quiet compared to Shanghai. They had a lot of nice old gardens that would have been private gardens for various officials several hundred years ago. From there we took a bus to Zhouzhuang which is a small tourist town that has a wonderfully preserved old town. The old town is full of one and two story wooden buildings with tile roofs. They are built along a network of small canals with nice stone bridges and really narrow lanes. Mike and I first arrived in the evening, so we got to stroll through the old town when it was very dark and almost deserted. All the shops were closed and there was only the odd light or bit of noise from someone who lived there. At about 9pm the only life on the street was the periodic local middle aged man, standing around in his underwear while getting ready for bed. It was really cool walking through it, the ambience was fantastic. Unfortunately, with daylight the town was revealed for what it is: A beautiful old town that has been turned into the typical tourist trap. Most of the streets are lined with shops selling cheap Chinese cultural “artifacts” or serving ridiculously overpriced food. Almost all the tourists were Chinese, but as white people, Mike and I stood out and attracted all the attention from the vendors. So, it was rather tiring during the day, but truly a special place at night.

School started today. I got my schedule and I am teaching grades 1 and 2. I have 13 different classes that I see between 2 and 3 times a week for 35 minute periods. Tuesdays and Thursdays are my busiest days, with 3 classes in the morning and 4 in the afternoon. I was pretty nervous getting started, there were about 30 grade 1s staring at me and two staff members sitting at the back of the room. The school had only received the coursebooks yesterday, so we weren’t given much time to prepare. The grade 1 classes in the morning went pretty well, we had a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the material for the grade 2s wasn’t as interesting and I had to deal with them after lunch. It was much more of challenge and I don’t think it went that well. I think the classes were a bit boring, which made them not pay attention, which meant I had to try and discipline them. So I am seeing how fun and easy it can be when it goes well, and how much of a challenge it can be if the class isn’t interested. Luckily, there are lots of other teachers, both foreign and Chinese, who seem to be good and willing resources. I hope improvement comes quickly.

So now work has started and I am basically settled in. My money situation had gotten pretty rough. I basically cleaned out all my available savings getting set up here and was (not) looking forward to pretty much being limited to eating steam buns until my first paycheck in 4 weeks. Happily, money from heaven came in the form of back pay from the city due to a wage harmonzation (dating back to amalgamation - 1998!) settlement. I really should stop bad mouthing unions. But this means I can now afford to start looking for a Chinese tutor. So I will hopefully be starting lessons in the next week or two.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2005 at 11:10 am and is filed under China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.