I wonder what makes a fish tingled?
 Another in my occasional series of "Flashbacks" looking back at blog entries made before this Weebly version started. My trip to the VSO Conference in Beijing started smoothly enough with a 3 hour car ride to Simao shared with teacher Li (man), teacher Li (woman, no relation) and Ms Wu (very recently promoted to the Local Education Bureau). After a night there, we flew (45mins) to Kunming and met Sun Kang, a leader from the Provincial Education Bureau. He speaks great English and in conversation gave examples of how unlucky he’d been on recent trips (in Indonesia for the tsunami, in Vietnam during riots, in Thailand for the coup, etc). His jinx continued as our flight to Beijing was delayed by 1.. 2.. 3.. and finally 4 hours. At the airport we took an hour to find a taxi which then ran into a midnight traffic jam(?) and took another 2 hours to get us to our hotel. We finally arrived at 2am to find our rooms had been double-booked. And then I tripped and broke my ankle...!  At first I thought I had just sprained my ankle and continued to limp around for the three days of the conference. My talk on the first day went OK, and I learned a lot from the other talks (although some Chinese speakers were rambling a bit and, filtered through a translator, it often made it quite hard to follow ...and I was taking minutes). On the last day, VSO suggested it might be wise to see a doctor while I was in Beijing. He x-rayed the ankle as a formality though he suspected a sprain. But the x-ray came back showing a fracture, so on went the plaster! Crutches in tow I managed to get through the two flights and a 3 hour car ride back to JiangCheng, hopping up the 86 steps to my flat. I’ve been confined to quarters for at least this week - very frustrating when I had planned to finally launch my training here. Teams of Education Bureau colleagues are bringing me food, clean washing, bottles of water etc. So I’m trying to put my independent nature aside and allow myself to be “cared for” and “fussed over”! 
One of my private classes is with a lovely young couple, "Christie" and "Chester". We meet once a week for a fairly informal English lesson. This week I invited them to my house for the first time, for a simple pasta bake meal followed by some ice-cream. They really enjoyed the food and then we took a deep dive into the past tense!
I've done this before and sat through 30-40 videos of variable quality. But today there turned out to be 140 videos and the whole thing took 3½ hours! And unlike previous years none of the contestants was particularly outstanding. All very average. Oh well.
This is JD [bottom row, towards the right] as his class are about to launch into a patriotic song they've been learning recently, Lyrics include, "The glorious People's Party is the sun that warms the ground in China!" ...helps explain global warming.   Lessons at my Uni have started up again after the "Golden Week" holiday. This is one of my classes trying to rearrange the lyrics to the song "Love's Divine", sung by Seal, after I had cut and mixed up the words.
 "Starting" tomorrow is Kunming's long-awaited "COP15" Meeting. This huge UN Biodiversity Conference, involving 195 countries, has been the talk of the town here for literally years, having been put back three times due to COVID. Sadly, it was announced last month that it would now be a "virtual" conference which makes all the money spent on beautification. road repairs, flower-planting and "Welcome!" posters somewhat redundant. They say there will be a second face-to-face Conference here in April next year, but that remains to be seen. [COP means, "Conference of Parties" - I looked it up!]  |
 AuthorPaul Hider lives and works in Kunming (SW China) and regularly updates this blog about his life there. Past blog entries
May 2023
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