Sanya Hainan Island

After spending a few years is the polluted overcrowded city of Zhengzhou in Henan province it's time to move on. I've gained many things during my time here but the best thing that happened to me was getting married.  Although the Chinese do try their best to suck the romance out of the marriage business, it's been great so far.  The marriage process seems to be done a bit backwards as we have already registered our marriage but our big wedding ceremony,honeymoon is still to come.

      After securing a new teaching job with a university, my wife and I will reside in the stunningly beautiful Island of Hainan.  Hainan is a tropical island with a climate similar to Thailand's, so it's relatively hot and sunny all year round.  Hainan also has been known for the occasional typhoon but hey, no place is perfect.

Bad words

I never thought i'd run into this problem as i never intended to teach any profanities, but i found that more often than not students would mispronounce a word and would end up saying something they shouldn't. In this situation i felt that i couldn't ignore it, so i subtly corrected them whenever they said something naughty. Although sometimes they say something hilarious. A few examples below;
Intended word. Word said.
Beach. Bitch.
Virginia. Vagina.
Fork. Fuck.
Here is my favourite:
Me: what do you want to be when you grow up?
Student: a cunt. (Accountant)
Me: what does your mother do?
Student: she is a cunt. (she is an accountant)

Names

In china, its quite popular to give yourself an English name

I even gave myself a chinese name
'Xiaobai'. Meaning 'Small White'

Chinese people can use any english word they like, how cool is that to choose your own name, now im sure if we could choose our own names we would choose something cool or meaningful i.e a word that means 'beautiful' 'shy' 'strong' e.t.c. But from what i can tell, some chinese folk seem to use random english words for their name, here's a few kids i know who's names range from the norm to bizarre.
David
Susan
Sky
Cherry
Kitty
Snow
Sweetie
Yoyo
Clap
Spoon
Cinderella
One student asked me to give her an english name, as a joke i said Pocahontas but she loved it and it stuck. :3

My guardian angel

After a week of 'training' and having learnt sod all i was starting to get a bit worried. Enter Jack, the coolest guy ever and the man who saved my arse. I bumped into him by chance on my way home and we instantly clicked, he gave me super advice and a little training which helped a lot. Jack is the schools best teacher and at the time he was the only teacher teaching the advanced classes. A week later and it's teaching time....oh shit! I can safely say without jacks help i probably would have stood frozen for the entire hour while all these tiny eyes stared back at me. Thankfully i managed to muster up an introduction and from there it went pretty smoothly. Phew. Although to this day i don't claim to be a super teacher or anything but at least I'm not totally clueless anymore, and you definitely get a feel for the class the more you do it. Mind you there are some days where you get classes who have had too much sugar and are bouncing off the walls, or some kids who are pushed by their parents to learn english and thus have no desire to listen to you. But all in all the kids are great and such fun to teach too :)

Training

Training didn't go so well at first, in fact it was non-existent. Basically they have one chinese teacher in charge of the foreign teachers...Christina. Now she is a nice enough girl but i could not understand a word she was saying to me and incidentally vice versa. I asked PJ if he had this problem with her and he told me that the communication gets better after a while but in the beginning he used Chinese to speak to her. Great, that's a skill I'm still far away from obtaining. Christina would push me into other teachers classes so that i could watch. Unfortunately I'm not the kind of person who learns by watching but by doing, i tried to make the best of this time, taking notes and trying to pick up some kind of teaching method. But in truth, i was hopelessly and utterly lost. I had the same expression on my face as Boo Boo (see picture)

Orientation

We arrived in Dalian on the evening of December 6th. Tina and i were picked up at the airport by the schools manager Sarah, at this point i was a little nervous but i quickly forgot about my nerves as we stepped outside....as it was, fucking freezing lol. She put us up in a hotel for the night and asked me drop by the school for my orientation tomorrow, tidy. The next day i met PJ, a really nice guy from Africa along with the rest of the chinese teachers. I soon learned that i was the only teacher with a white face here, not that it mattered though. The rest of the day went pretty smoothly, i was shown around, familiarised myself with some of their books and went home.

6 months in...

Finally getting the hang of the great firewall of china, thus it's time i revived this blog. A lot has happened in the past few months so i'll break it up into different posts.