3rd Level

3rd level here is different. Or to be more correct it is the same. The same all over China.

The discipline is remarkable. Students actually turn up for class and attendance for my class at least is 80-85%. The only thing with the discipline is the seeming inability to think on their feet in English. Some show signs of it and I hope I’m not boring them. Others seem utterly lost. In a big class it’s hard to strike a balance.

I have no first year classes yet. They are still off doing national service. Which is a lot of marching it seems. They seem to enjoy it. Its fascinating to watch. For the first few days. Then you don’t even notice.

I don’t know where to start.

I thought, I thought yesterday I had this place sussed.

It has a rhythm, a very fucking noisy rhythm but I could kinda follow it.  Bells ring and the students go to class, bells ring and they go back to their dorms.  All very orderly.  Well apart from the torture that is Enya playing over the loudspeakers at 5:20 every evening. Its a “song” called the Celts and it just reminds me of an old Bord Gais ad.

So last night I was asked to go to dinner.  It’s the mid autumn festival.  Moon cake time1  There was no real food, moon cakes yeah but no dinner dinner.   I found myself in a room of students from other provinces that are far from home and there was a party to make them feel a little less homesick I guess.  I was the only white dude there.  As there are around 5 westerners in this city this isn’t unusual.

Unfortunately this always means I have to do something.  I hate singing so I told Mr B I wasn’t singing under any circumstances.  All cool.  Then this woman comes over to him and whispers in his ear.  He bursts out laughing.  I was like, OK, WTF, tell me!   At this stage we had had a few performances of musical instruments and a magician whose act went completely wrong as soon as he came near me.  Mr B told me I was to be in a game.  Phew.  No singing.

So the time for the game arrives.  Three balloons were tied to my ankle.  Green, Silver and Orange.  Kinda cool, kinda Irish.  The object of the game was to preserve your balloons and stamp on the balloons of the others.  So I ended up pegging it around the room with these poxy balloons until some kid in an army uniform tried to smash my massive feet.  It was fun once I got over the randomness of it.  The winner got a prize, and the runners up got a prize too.  I got one too, no idea why because I made sure my balloons were burst pretty lively.

So I sat back down confident that I had maybe made an ass of myself in front of maybe 40 people.  Oh no.  Not a bit of it.  The girl who had been wandering around earlier whips out a microphone and suddenly I have her and three cameras all up in my grill watching me eat the local moon cake and saying something incredibly inane about how nice they taste. I was so tired after yelling at my students all day I went along with it. I felt like Bill Murray doing Santori Time.

And I haven’t even got onto the bullfrogs you can buy in Walmart yet. Or the joys of trying to tell a taxi driver where the hell I live. As if he couldn’t guess.