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Cool and wise

31/5/2014

Jiajia and I took JD to our nearest Walmart supermarket the other day, Jiajia to look for groceries and baby products, me to look for Chinglish. I managed to find some "chafing sausages" and a pack of "low-temperature wisdom" before a snotty little shop assistant tapped me on the shoulder and said in Chinese, "You can't take photos here!" I was my usual polite, smiley and slightly stroppy self, "Why not?"
"It's forbidden" she replied.
"Why?"
"Because it's against the rules."
"What rules. Show me the rules."
"The rules say you must not take photos."
"Then show me the rules. I don't believe you"
"Urgh, foreigners!" ...and off she strutted, somewhat defeated I feel!

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Miner tradegy

29/5/2014

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A seemingly unbelievable story emerged in the Chinese press recently of a miner, Cheung Wai, who had been accidentally found after being trapped underground for ...wait for it ...seventeen years!! An earthquake in 1997 had collapsed the mine and, believing no one could have survived, the mine was closed and funerals were held for all 79 miners. Yet, when another mine opened up it again this year, they found this poor man who had been trapped there all these years, saved by a ventilation duct which still connected his underground prison to the surface, and an emergency stash of food and water, designed to keep 80 men alive for a month or two. Wai had complemented his diet by eating rats and moss and had managed to bury each of his co-workers during his first year underground. What a story!

The previous record for surviving underground was 142 days by a British guy, Geoff Smith, who had been voluntarily buried in the backyard of the Railway Inn, his favorite pub, specifically to try and break the record. If true, Cheung Wai has blown that away!

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Chalk and talk

27/5/2014

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JD is becoming a lot more vocal these days (especially if you include the screams!). If he is in the mood he can say about a dozen words, and he understands a dozen more. We read 2-3 books together every day and last week we drew pictures for each letter of the alphabet on the path outside the house. Quite a few passers-by stopped for a look throughout the day, with various local children trying to work out what the pictures represented. Of course, if it rains, the gallery will disappear but, since we've been without running water for two weeks now, rain would actually be most welcome.

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Can will give?

25/5/2014

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For those who want some sweet strawberry, look no further than a plastic bowl I bought last week, for it can will give you a lot of happy...?

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i phoned

23/5/2014

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I've had an iPhone since Jiajia decided to upgrade to a newer one and insisted I'd never regret changing to Apple. She also bought me an iPad for my last birthday which was a surprising and, to be honest, unrequested present! Since then I've been struggling with Apple's odd way of doing things. Some things which should be simple(deleting music from the phone, copying photos onto the phone, sending a text to a group, etc) prove to be impossible and leave me missing my cheap, old phone which could do all these things easily.

However, there's no doubt that Apple machines do other things incredibly well. My iPad "boots-up" immediately, gets great Internet connections for Skype or Facetime and downloads all the podcasts I enjoy listening to without me even asking it to. JD also enjoys the free painting, animal recognition and and letter-tracing apps. But yesterday, I was blown away by my friend Leah's use of an iPhone app I'd not seen in action before. Kunming's taxis need to be flagged down - there's no centralised office to book or request one - and, at busy times or places, that can mean a long wait. But Leah insisted she could get a taxi easily. She pressed a button on her iPhone and her location was immediately sent to any taxis within a kilometre (whose drivers also use the app). Five seconds later she got a call from a nearby driver who asked where we wanted to go and how many passengers. His name and registration then popped up on her phone and two minutes later the cab pulled up. Now that is a mightily impressive use of technology! And all for free.

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Loo lurker

21/5/2014

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In Chinese, the word "ta" is used for he, she and it, so students often forget to use the right one or choose the wrong one in English. Even official translations get it wrong.

This one was spotted by my friends Peter and Judy in a toilet in Hong Kong. The sign in the LADIES loo says: "No abrupt push. Beware of man behind door"

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Flashback: This day in ...2006

19/5/2014

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Another in my occasional series of "Flashbacks" looking back at blog entries made before this Weebly version started.

Today was another teacher-training trip to a remote school in XiaoCaoBa village.

Despite a hold up from an accident ahead and two small landslides we arrived in under two hours. After the debacle of my last school visit (“teaching a lesson” to 600 students in a playground), I had made it very clear that I wanted to teach my well-prepared model lesson to a single Grade 1 class using textbooks and a blackboard. So my heart sank when we drove into the school to see another playground full of students waiting excitedly for a lesson. I calmly explained yet again the differences between a model lesson (primarily for teachers to see new teaching methods) and shouting at 800 students in the open air (primarily for “look at the strange foreigner” reasons). As ever, I compromised - 20 minutes chat and a song for everybody, then Grade 2 and 3 students left so that I could give my model lesson to the remaining 250(!) Grade 1 students, sharing textbooks, aided by a tiny blackboard! Not ideal, but what can you do?

In the afternoon, I observed two very different lessons. The first was a 45 minute grammar monologue totally in Chinese – simply appalling! By contrast, the second was a fantastic lesson with a song, a game, flashcards and superbly executed pairwork. One of the things I like about my job is the frequent need to think on your feet and solve problems given very little time. So, as all the English teachers and I walked back to the staffroom for my feedback session, I had to think of a way to tackle the “excellent/excrement” nature of the lessons without leaving anyone upset!! I started with a big smile (always helps!) and congratulated both teachers on the clever way they had shown us the differences between the old and new teaching methods! I went on to contrast all the bad things about the old way with all the good things about the new way. And finally, I thanked both teachers once again for making this so clear to us all in their lessons! Amazingly, both left with big smiles on their faces as if it had, after all, simply been a well-coordinated demonstration!

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Happy Bir...

18/5/2014

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It's my half-birthday today. Start saving everyone!
(...and I'm fast running out of time to tell people "I'm in my forties"!)

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Rude alert: Dad, look away now!

17/5/2014

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Spelling cock-up, or selling cock up?
(sorry, simply couldn't resist that pun!)

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Now, where's my pin...?

15/5/2014

My wife never reads my blog (or so she assures me), though she often coos over my shoulder when spotting pictures of JD that appear here. She does know that my blogging means a lot to me, though, often waiting patiently while I take a photo of some odd sight or Chinglish that I've spotted. She has even started to photograph little things herself which she thinks I'll enjoy, to send on to me. And so it was that this balloon boy appeared on my phone last week, courtesy of my wife who thought it was bizarre enough for the blog here. I'd have to agree.

Love channel?!

13/5/2014

The images that might spring up when you hear of a "love channel" are likely to be quite wide of the mark here in China ...fortunately!

A "love channel" turns out to be the Chinglish used to describe a wheelchair ramp at a bank near my school. All the more bewildering when the sign immediately below it has the more accurate translation of "Wheelchair Accessible".

Noah chance to work

11/5/2014

The rainy season often leads to some flooding in Shenzhen, the city where Jiajia is currently attempting to get some work done, but this year is earlier and worse than Jiajia can remember in all her years of flying there to buy clothes for her store. The photos speak for themselves!

So Jiajia's holed up in her flat for now, amidst heavy thunderstorms, in the knowledge that she wouldn't be able to get to the markets she needs to, even if she did venture out. She did manage to Skype this evening though, to assure us she was safe.

War(drobe) of words

9/5/2014

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A good friend of ours, Gemma, is visiting JingHong in the south of Yunnan at the moment and recently sent me this amazing Chinglish which she found etched into her hotel wardrobe. It reads;

"I watched into the church for the wedding you put your heart. I love you my favorite trace of the sweetest I hope you have a lot of hardships if we do not separate you are my favorite and I'll rely on the road again if we do not separate remote." !!

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Super pupa

7/5/2014

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I spotted this huge pupa the other day, attached to a neighbour's car tyre. Goodness knows what sort of monster will appear from within.

Mind you, being attached to a tyre is probably not the most sensible place to undergo such a life-changing tranformation, so maybe we'll never get to know exactly what would have emerged!

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Well-trained

5/5/2014

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We took JD on his first train journey today. The narrow gauge track sees only one train a day, making a 50 minute run to the outskirts of the city before decoupling the engine from the front, re-attaching it to the back and making the return trip. As usual there were more workers than passengers on board and the dozen or so people taking the ride were all parents with small children or train-spotters.

It would be nice to report that JD was rivetted by all this locomotive action but, if I'm honest, after ten minutes or so he found the water bottles far more interesting and preferred running up and down the carriage with the other toddlers to any of the window views! The most fun part of the trip is actually watching all the traffic that gets stopped to let our honking train cross various roads. Some onlookers even managed to exchange friendly waves.

The station master was really friendly and said that the railway was built by the French about 100 years ago. From the look of the station's instrumentation [see below] I would imagine that's right! It's hard to see how it can survive much longer though with Kunming's subway system starting to come online, and the cost of a return ticket for our journey being only 2RMB (20p). They must make a huge loss on running the service, so I think we've been wise to jump aboard when we have, before it gets cancelled for good. And, now that we know the time of the train, we may just make the trip again someday soon.

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Templ...

3/5/2014

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Jiajia and I took JD out for an outing this afternoon. We had seen a small road leading up a mountain about 15 mins drive from our house and had been told it led to a forest/park. The road got smaller and smaller until we hit a locked car barrier. We thought about getting out the baby stroller, but then spotted 100 steps leading further up the mountain. So we took turns to carry JD and trudged on up, stopping off at various small pagodas to catch our breath. We seemed to be the only people there - maybe it wasn't public after all?

At the top, we stumbled on the half-finished "LianHua Temple", due to be finished by the end of the year [see artist's impression above]. The people overseeing the work there were very friendly. They opened up an office to let us have a rest and started plying JD with apples! JD, meanwhile, was much more interested in the attention of two puppies who enjoyed chasing him round the courtyard.

It was the first half-finished temple I'd visited and the basic statues, in particular, were fascinating - bizarrely unfinished as they were [see below]. We plan to revisit early next year to see it in its finished form.

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Daizzy and dizzy

2/5/2014

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We were treated to a visit from Daizzy and her family this week. She was in Kunming for a couple of days from Qiaojia (5 hours away by car - used to be 13!) where she lives and works as an English teacher. I did a week of training there some 8 years ago and we have kept in touch ever since. The weather was hot and warm and her daughter, "Amber", enjoyed playing on the slides with JD in our local children's park. Unfortunately, the following day was suddenly quite cold and wet and, perhaps because of that, I found myself feeling quite dizzy throughout the day (something I suffered from a lot a few years ago, but have been free of since). Hopefully it's just a blip on the health front.

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Good idea

1/5/2014

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Our school has been short-listed to introduce a "Creative Thinking" course to Kunming which has already been run successfully around the world and in other Chinese cities. Some of the foreign teachers at my school, along with our Sunday morning students, attended a demo workshop recently to see what it was all about. It was led by a guy called John Biggs who admitted to me afterwards that he had run that particular class hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times before. It still came across as fresh though and, not surprisingly, very polished. With a few tweaks I can see it being really useful for Chinese students for whom "being creative" is severely undervalued, compared to learning and reciting facts, passing exams etc. Whether it can make any money for the school is another matter.

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Cool and wise

Miner tradegy

Chalk and talk

Can will give?

i phoned

Loo lurker

Flashback: This day in ...2006

Happy Bir...

Rude alert: Dad, look away now!

Now, where's my pin...?

Love channel?!

Noah chance to work

War(drobe) of words

Super pupa

Well-trained

Templ...

Daizzy and dizzy

Good idea

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