Name kinda in lights again
Fame strikes again at Tong Ji university! I’m up on the illuminated billboard for the second time this term. This time, it’s a pixellated photo from the Christmas party, when I got roped into the balloon stomping game. I’m the one in the black tights and brown skirt second from left, flailing about.
Brrrrrrr
It’s really really absurdly cold today. As I walked the long walk to the not-near metro, my face hurt and fingers ached through my gloves and my core just shrank into a tight little quivery knot. For whatever reason, Shanghai somehow manages to feel colder than Romania in mid-winter (which was -20C with ice on the inside of the window). It isn’t icy or snowy but it makes me ache. I miss my two duvets and bed-hippo and bed-elephant.
Down to the last few days of classes- it would have been the last day of classes if they hadn’t rescheduled the professional development course for next week rather than the end of this week. I’m scrambling to find relevant things to teach that don’t require photocopying. We’ve done reflection-on-the-term letters to their September selves (regrets? I’ve had a few). I got a good giggle from how they addressed the letters:
Dear Former Harry…
From Current Harry
Dear Past Self
From Future Self
Dear Allen-in-the-Past
Yourself, Allen (now)
We’re working on identifying multiple intelligences today and how to adapt their learning patterns to better suit their styles. If anyone out there has ever taught a. Chinese university students or b. EFL students in a teacher-centred culture, then you’re probably laughing out loud by now and slapping your knees in delight at my absurdly inappropriate task. I have a multiple intelligences bubble chart and a self assessment quiz and a British Council podcast on learning styles and tactics. The end task is for the kids to identify three goals they have for the next term (their own goals, not their parents’) and to think about how they learn best and to critically assess how they might go about achieving these goals in a step by step plan.
Again, any university teachers/teachers in memorization-happy learning cultures, you can continue giggling. I just thought I’d give it a shot.
I am anticipating a whole bunch of "I want improving my English. I am goal I will IELTS 6.5 on June and speaking foreigner and good writing. For this I will study hard! The End!"
Lo(l)st!
The dude who made a Lolcat version of Sex and the City and Twilights 1 and 2 has now started a project of Lolling all the seasons of Lost. This is a serious mindfuck. Yay! Click on either picture for link.
Another 6 degrees of separation
A colleague of a colleague of a colleague in Istanbul is making a documentary about *sigh* English teachers in Istanbul and has posted his first installment on YouTube. Inevitably it features an alcoholic man, because so many teachers in Istanbul tend to lean that way. It’s an interesting watch, though I’m having a really hard time seeing my 6 years through those eyes. I get the feeling that he made some very different choices than I did. All the background shots, the location shots, are as familiar as my own hand though. I guess I haven’t lost the scenic aspects of my life there yet. [ETA the shot of the steep hilly backstreet at the 9 minute mark is actually the street that was right off the flat I shared with Dixie in Tunel in 2006/7, with that view being exactly what I saw through my windowbox bedroom]
It’s monday and I’m having a really, really hard time getting my act together to go to work. I feel utterly depleted though I have no reason to be so.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
One thing that still blows my mind in Shanghai is how everything is constantly changing and the things that are changing actually change into things that are completed and usable (as opposed to what I’ve known elsewhere, where things are torn down and nothing is really ever rebuilt to replace it). Since we moved here nearly a year ago, the big road at the bottom of our street has been a construction zone, with plaster splattered privacy walls and awkward detours and signage illegible to illiterate gringos. There was a rumor that it might be a metro station eventually but rumors are rumors and really, I waited six years in Turkey for that fabled Bosporus-link metro that never materialized. I assumed that the construction zone at the end of the street would always be a construction zone and that if I happened to come home by taxi from western Shanghai (like from my monthly meetings at the other uni) I’d always have to be dropped off six lanes away on the far side of the road because turns were blocked.
Shanghai is not Istanbul. On our walk home after lunch, as we neared the wine shop off Jiashan lu, D. noticed something he had never noticed before and which I also had never seen before (though my perception/memory skills aren’t the sharpest): a south-pointing Metro sign, with a fresh baby blue 9 on the Insert-line-here square. We are now 2 minutes’ walk from a metro station! Not 20! Well, still 20 to the one I need for work but if I wanted, I could be lazy and take the metro home three stops beyond my usual and then change to our new line and get off two stops later and save myself no actual travel time but spare my tired legs the walk. Or, if I get transferred to the other university next year, I could take our new baby blue line over to the line 3/4 change then up a few more to the awkwardly located station that currently takes me over an hour to get to.
Sweet.
Oh, and all the construction on the big road at the bottom of the street has cleared overnight and now it’s all open and clean and on the verge of being manicured by the surplus of cheap labour.
Goodness.
A gluttonous start to a new year
This is what we have been eating all day.
We started with breakfast at the noodle place up the street. We had the daoshao mian, which is the slices of handcut noodles in homemade broth with cilantro, bok choy, green onion, chili paste and aromatic vinegar. It’s good for warming you up and clearing out any congestion.
After that, there was a lull back at home, with a lot of lovely strong coffee and reading on the sofa, wrapped up in a big fluffy duvet.
For lunch we braved the mild, sunny day and marched up to Fuxing lu for our favourite weekend lunch at the Dongbeiren place, where they make food for the cold cold north east of China, quite appropriate for warming up freezing foreigners.
We had blackbean spud over a flame
And garlic broccoli (inevitably)
And my personal heroin substitute, glutinous rice discs with bok choy and garlic
On the way home, we cut down Yongia lu, where there is always a parrot on a perch hanging out on the street. This time, there was a cat beneath it, assuming said parrot was to be lunch. Parrot owner shoo’d cat away before I could get a close up of the intricate hunter-dance.
We are now at home for the day and I have this to look forward to (the gold wrapped slab at the back is the remaining 6/8ths of a bar of Whittaker’s caramel-filled dark chocolate):
Happy new year to all!
Miss ShimaHippo has my shawl
I’m shit at making resolutions because I usually completely forget I made them within a week or so, or if I don’t forget then I generally feel so constrained by their existence that I give them a metaphorical boot to the head and run off in the metaphorical opposite direction.
So, really, no resolutions to be found here.
I am thinking about working on a theme though. Somewhere in my anarchic Google Reader stream I came across a blog by a woman who does an annual Word of the Year and then tries to live that year with a conscious awareness of that word– hers were cheesy, vague ones like ‘pioneer’ or ‘bountiful’, neither of which appeal to me, but I am curious to try such an idea. I’m trying to merge this Year-Word to D’s notion that everything the universe flings at you has a purpose, a reason, and a lesson and that nowt is random and that these thematic universal bollickings will continue until you finally get the message and learn the lesson. Since I’ve had a pretty messed-up year (lesson aims and objectives still unidentified and universe still not releasing lesson plan), I’m thinking that a Year Word might get me back on track and help me figure out what the hell the universe thinks I ought to learn.
I welcome suggestions from anyone out there who can objectively pinpoint a decent word that I can carry around for the forthcoming year.
One interesting resolution I read in a comments section somewhere in my readings: Replace judgment with curiosity
I may work on that too.
New Years eve is…
Gnocchi in gorgonzola cheese sauce at Pane e Vino on Maoming lu, with a fine antipasto full of mountain cheeses and thin slices of red, cured things. Cold white wine topped up unnecessarily whenever the glasses are down to an inch. Home on the sofa with Elephant and Miss ShimaHippo with some iffy red South African (Soft and Fruity!) and a state of inertia. I doubt I’ll even make it to 11pm.
