english class

I had a dream last night. It was rather depressing. I dreamt that I woke up and checked the weather. That’s was it. It had warmed up, above freezing for the next two weeks at least. Warm front. I should be celebrating right? Wrong. Warm temperatures mean no ice snow or ice snow festival. Possibly one of the few redeeming aspects of Ha’erbin (I say possibly because I haven’t seen it yet). In the dream, I was devastated. I had bore over half a year of Ha’erbin life just waiting for this ice snow festival. How could the weather gods do this to me. I needed to get cold fast and stay that way. Turns out it was a dream. We have nice cold temperatures in the forecast. Today there are even 40mph wind gusts and snow! Might even call it a blizzard. It is pretty. I’m dreaming of a white china-mas.

I sat in on a two hour graduate level English class this week. Graduate level doesn’t mean the students are really good at English. In fact most cant speak a sentence. Graduate means they are graduate students. The way the class was taught made Chinese English abilities much easier to understand. This obviously doesn’t go for everyone, but at least for some of the younger generations in higher education. Many of these students can read and write English fairly well. Some well enough to get higher scores than me on some standardized test, like the GRE. Unfortunately few can speak fluid sentences or hold a conversation. Its not their fault. They just haven’t really practiced oral English, or had an opportunity to practice. This graduate English class made that clear. The class consisted of the teacher reading the text in English out loud. Then translating it into Chinese sentence by sentence, or calling on a student to translate it. So the students contact with English was simply reading by themselves and hearing their teacher read it. They didn’t actually say the English words or even have to try and understand them because the teacher or one of the students from the front of the class gave them the translation immediately after the English. Out of the 50 or so in the class, about 5 had to translate sentences and they were all in the first 2 of 10 rows. Pretty low chance of being called on, especially in the back. The story of the day was about a male ballot (pronounced like voting ballot) dancer and his cocaine overdose. A rather inappropriate and out of place story, I thought. Drugs are nowhere near a national topic here. There seldom spoken about and no one has done them or knows what they are. The translation for cocaine was simply ‘drug’ and snorting cocaine was simply ‘do drugs’.

Yummy things consumed this week.

煎饼果子,jian bing guozi, pretty common and eaten quite often by me. Consists of a very thin pancake made from only flour and water on a 2ft diameter iron griddle. Filled with fried egg, hot chili, cilantro, onions, hotdogs bits, hashbrowns and some fried bread chips. Delicious.

烤地瓜 roast whole sweet potato. Need not mention more. Served out of oil drum roaster.

包子 steamed buns filled with sauerkraut.

春饼 spring rolls, although not the deep fried things. These are Chinese burritos. Plate size thin pancakes again made from watery flour mixture. Then filled with an assortment of stirfry dishes like carrots and beef, sweet hot pork, tree ear fungus and egg.

I sent off a whole bundle of holiday cards last week. They should be arriving at various locations within three weeks time! If you have reason to believe you will not receive a card (ie I don’t have your address) send it to me and I will mail you a postcard during our little epic adventure coming up in Jan, feb, and march.

Attention Zhuhai!

珠海珠海！你是一个经常读者。我不想让你害怕了，但是如果您想，请给我发送一个电子邮件，让我知道你是谁。