Friday class had a sticky moment when for the last hour we were down to a mere three men- myself, Becka and a Russian. Needless to say, the atmosphere was a little forced.
A friend of Peter's turned up on the hunt for laowai to appear in a commerical for the Guangzhou Asian Games. They like having laowai as it makes everything look more modern and sophisticated. The end result is that several of us are going to pretend to be spectators/volunteers and appear on TV :D Exciting! Plus we get 600元 for our efforts which is equally exciting!
Further on the job front, I went for an interview with Raymond today. I was met at the bus stop by Fairy (dilemma: does one point out that their choice of name exposes themselves to ridicule or tactfully keep quiet?) and taken to the 20th floor of a random building. The school specialises in teaching businessmen from companies such as Kelloggs' etc and sounds ideal for me. My role would be to focus on their oral and aural skills for 5-10 hours a week. I'd get 130元 an hour to start off with and see where we went from there-which is a pretty good deal. I have to do some trial lessons first so hopefully I will be clued up enough to run those well. I'll probably get Anthony to give me a hand as well. Fingers crossed a job will work out!
Went to LPG with Nick last night. We were meeting some distant friends of his, or rather friends of friends. One was a teacher here (although not of English- I think he taught IT or something) and another was from Nashville, Tennessee, who owned a tyre-making company "tyres bigger than this room" and had factories out here. He showed me lots of photos of his daughter's wedding in Las Vegas. Interestingly for me he had been to 徐州, Xuzhou, which is a city around 5 hours away. Near there is a farm breeding 果下, Guoxia, Under the Fruit Tree, horses. These are horses that are so small they can walk under fruit trees. A retired vet professor I know through the Exmoors wants me to collect some hair samples for him so I am going to go and visit and yank some hairs from some poor unsuspecting beastie. Anyway, Frank, his name was, was surprised at anyone voluntarily wanting to go to such a place and happily nattered away about how end-of-the-line it was. I suspect it was not quite as bad as he made out as he is used to a higher standard than poor students like me. Plus part of the reason we want to go is that we want to visit unremarkable parts of China to get a real feel for the place. But it did sound, er, like it wasn't exactly a holiday destination.
Xuzhou is a city of 7 million people. Nearly the size of London and yet its global presence is less significant than Loughborough. The numbers here boggle the mind. My province, Shandong, has 90 million people in. The largest has 120 million. How does such a huge behemoth even begin to function as a cohesive state?
I ordered chips as I was hungry and when they arrived the fat American girl squealed "who ordered French Fries!" and started shovelling them into her mouth. I was not impressed.
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