Some edge

We have had all four of our ears lowered recently. Natalie even got a fringe! OOoooo... There were some slight dramas and miscommunications (I think I was instructing Nat's stylist to "please cut her head shorter with some edge"), but it all worked out in the end.


Ok, ok, so we haven't been up that Pearl Tower thingo yet. But we did check out the tomb of Xu Guangqi, local Catholic legend. Click the image below to see a few more pictures of the surrounding park.


Thanks to dear Cass for providing us with a huge box of Easter goodies. Do you think we can last another two weeks...? Shanghai's oldest cathedral is just around the corner, so perhaps we'll get right into the spirit of it and check out the local mass.


Natalie took the camera to work and took a few shots of the school.


Pu Ming Primary is a relatively new school in the outer urban district on the eastern bank of Shanghai's Huangpu river. In the 1980's, it was a marshy bog that supplied the city's wet markets with fresh veg. 15 years and billions of yuan later, BAM - "Pu Dong New Area" had appeared. It's hard to capture the soullessness properly within little snaps, so you'll have to wait until your postcards arrive...

People's Tongue

We're both beginning to settle into our new routines here. I'm out the door early in the morning to learn The People's Tongue at uni, allowing Natalie a nice sleep-in before her midday start at Pu Ming Primary.
My classmates are an amiable bunch, and I'm glad I ended up with an enthusiastic text teacher (laoshi) to boot. We call her Yuan Laoshi, and she attacks each obscure grammatical conundrum we throw her way with great skill and relish. She also thinks the Beijing accent is a load of old twaddle, and drops in snarky comments about it. Rather a contrast to our speech laoshi, an undergrad who toes the official line with disconcerting precision.
The class is small and highly varied in background, as Nat has mentioned. Nuir is Bangladeshi and has been helping me with some tricky words. Tobias is a chatty german fella who is very proud of the work group he has assembled - a bright Japanese lass, a sultry Italian and himself. He calls it the Axis of Evil.
The few Australians have clumped together. I've been chatting with a guy called Scott who is teaching English to kids after class and looking forward to becoming an expat very soon. He said he'd like to stay in China forever, even though the kids at his school call him pigu laoshi (arse teacher).

Semester Start

James has now started uni, with classes starting at 8.45 every weekday morning. Luckily this means that he gets to finish at 12. It seems to be a very cosmopolitan class, with students hailing from the US, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, India, Pakistan, Australia and Russia. The language spoken in class by the lecturer is fairly dense and difficult to understand, but the textbook is a bit more familiar. The uni is fairly close, it takes less than half an hour on the bus to get there. James is pretty happy that there are little street vendors out the front of the uni so that he ca pick up a fresh omelette or some dumplings for breakfast in the mornings.
I started teaching last week. My class has a bit of a different make-up to Jamie's. It consists of 6 and 7 year old Chinese children. The ones from Shanghai have a much higher level of English than the kids who have come from the country. They are pretty sweet little things. One said to me 'Teacher, you are very, very beautiful'. Ahh, it's good to have admirers! I am teaching four classes of grade one four days a week. I am really glad I signed a part time contract instead of a full time one as it sometimes takes me ages to plan lessons. Actually, that was probably because the kids still haven't got their textbooks and I didn't get my flashcards until the end of the week, so I ended up drawing pictures of kites and soccer balls and bikes until all hours. It takes me about an hour and 20 minutes to get there on the train and bus, but I'm happy that I only have one year level to teach, so I can prepare the same lessons for them all! Also, I'm pretty lucky to get posted only at one school; some of the other teachers have to travel to two or three different schools every week. I was really nervous on my first day, and the week has had its ups and downs, but I think it's slowly getting better. This weekend we're both taking it easy, watching movies and eating lots of yummy food. We're finding more and more restaurants that we like. We haven't been cooking much at all, actually, which has been a nice change!
We're off to see more of the city now!
Bye bye! Zai Jian!