Some 12,000 pieces, over 26 hours of work, and the Imperial Star Destroyer is finally complete! Here's how.... It's not his first, but the others were cheap and broke fairly quickly. We struggle to find wide open spaces, but he's flown it in our neighbourhood basketball court a few times with only a few crashes. The inbuilt camera can take photos and video from quite a height, albeit low res.
JD has left his Chinese Primary School for the last time. After 5 years there, he said his goodbyes. He will miss his friends and some of the teachers, but he won't miss the daily 3-4 hours of homework! The plan, starting today, is for me to home-school him for 6 months, to try and get his English level (spellings in particularly) up to the right level to start in a UK Secondary School in September 2024.
With this probably being my last Christmas in China, I pulled out all the stops in my small classes and once-to-one lessons. My students - young and old - watched a Nativity Story powerpoint, reconstructed cut-up Christmas cards, made paper angels, opened presents and crackers, completed wordsearches/crosswords, acted out charades and played Christmas Bingo. Back to grammar next week...
I first met LaiLai when I was a VSO volunteer 25 years ago - she worked in the Beijing Office for a year. We last met 15 years ago when she invited me to help on a Red Cross trip to assess the needs of a remote village near Kunming (LaiLai was working for the Red Cross by then). We've kept in touch now and again through the years but it was still a bit of a surprise to get a message from her saying that her family were on holiday travels from their home in South Korea, and would be passing through Kunming on Boxing Day if we were free to meet.... So we shared a nice meal together a couple of days ago, chatting about old times! Her husband is from Devon and was also a VSO volunteer during my time with the charity (though we couldn't recall each other!). JD quickly broke down their kids' shyness and took them downstairs in the restaurant to barbecue "smelly tofu" together!
Despite a last-minute panic when we couldn't find a shop that sold chickens(!), JiaJia managed to rustle up another fantastic Christmas dinner. She even made a lemon cake for dessert. Yum yum!
25th December here is a normal school day for JD, so Santa kindly agreed to come a night early - complicated by the fact that JD woke up with a blinding headache at 2am! He was asleep again by 2.30am and alarms were duly reset!! The title refers to "1-2-3" in Chinese. JD hung up THREE stockings!
A bit of a low key Christmas this year. JD got his main present a month ago (a bicycle) and has been off school ill for the last week. Jiajia is busy studying to pass her English language exams to qualify for a Spousal visa, and I am packing, preparing lessons and trying to finish my huge Birthday Lego model! So limited festive excitement here. But the decorations are all up and we have a nice pile of presents.
And Jiajia has promised to rustle up a Christmassy meal on Sunday! Whatever it is, JD has it, according to blood tests at the hospital yesterday. It's been sweeping through the classrooms of China recently, so it was probably only a matter of time. JD has a fever, headache and cough. He's off school, sleeping a lot and vomiting up anything he eats. He's on antibiotics now which should help (though internet messages are mixed on that one). Fingers crossed for a swift recovery. His Primary School yesterday suggested JD have his last lessons with them at the end of this month. So he needs to get better quickly to say goodbye to his teacher and classmates. Then it's home-schooling until starting a UK school. My brother Dave's thriving consultancy business, Mind-gap, recently funded a food programme for 1000+ kids from the slums in Bangalore, India. We (including JD) added a small donation too. Some wonderful photos arrived yesterday showing the work in progress.
The only exercise JD got during his school's Sports Meeting last week was walking to the stadium and back with his classmates! Athletic prowess isn't really part of JD's skillset. But it meant less homework for a few days, which is always welcome.
Jiajia and I went to the cemetery this morning to move Druncle's ashes from the temple to his grave plot. After the ceremony, Jiajia and I were looking out at the scenery when two doves flew down right in front of us. This was quite strange as we didn't see any other bird elsewhere, or before or after. Jiajia's Gran is also buried in this cemetery and it was she who adopted Druncle as a child and brought him up. So the two doves seemed to have some significance...
JD's class were chosen to be the guinea-pigs in a maths teaching competition this week. JD is centre in the second row.
After learning the spellings of certain words for ages, he'll take a 5-minute break and then forget them all! But we're very slowly getting there, I think. Very slowly!
JD went on his annual school outing last week - along with half the school (2000+ students). The trip started and ended with a 90 minute journey by coach, with various kids throwing up. The location was just some place housing a handful of animals (pigs, some llamas and a camel) with very little to see and do. The weather was cold and wet. There was some sort of presentation, but most of the 2000 kids couldn't see or hear anything. It seems that none of the teachers had visited the site in advance and the hosts had been caught unawares by the number of visitors. Kids were unable to do the various craft activities, squeezed 15 to a table. And JD's class had been told not to bring raincoats, so the outdoor activities were mostly cancelled. JD was so excited beforehand, but returned very disappointed. The one redeeming factor for him was the promise that there would be no homework that day - until three papers came through later in the evening to be completed by the next day! More broken promises. This is the third outing in three years that has been something of a disaster. You'd think the teachers would learn...
I can understand their reasons, and we ourselves now get more daylight in our living room, but it is still quite sad to see dozens of stumps around the neighbourhood.
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AuthorPaul Hider lives and works in Kunming (SW China) and regularly updates this blog about his life there. Past blog entries
April 2024
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