Happy Halloween!

My apologies for the long, long time between blog posts. Since I last wrote, I took an amazing trip to Shanhaiguan, which is where the Great Wall terminates into the Yellow Sea. I’ve been writing and re-writing an account of the trip for the last month and…it’s not done yet. I’ve been picking and picking at it to get it to the point that I’m comfortable “publishing” it online, but it’s still a ways off from being something that I’m satisfied with. The trip was so fantastic and mind blowing that I want to do it justice, and just don’t feel like I’ve achieved that yet. (To tide you over you can check out all 200+ of my photos in the gallery.) To try to get through my writer’s block, here’s a little bit about the Halloween party that my office just hosted.

As I mentioned before, I work for an office that provides K-12 schools with English teachers. We also offer after-school/weekend English classes for students at our offices. We are opening a third branch of our office here in [tag]Changchun[/tag], and to celebrate we hosted a [tag]Halloween[/tag] party there for all of our after-school students.

This was the first Halloween that any of the kids had ever experienced, and they took to it like fish to pH-balanced-and-temperature-controlled water. Even though costumes are terribly difficult to find here, most had masks to wear (typically mardi gras masks, but some had robot and monster masks…there were also more than a few Santa Claus masks), and a small number had home-made costumes. Finding something that I could wear to the party was a problem, and I had to scuttle my usual costume ideas (“Superman” and “Doctor”) because of difficulty finding costuming supplies. However, I was able to scrounge up a set of Groucho Marx glasses with nose and mustache attached, so I went as “A Guy In Slacks, A Tie, And Incongruous Groucho Marks Glasses.” The glasses were certainly better than having to resort to not dressing up and claiming to be wearing a “Normal Guy” costume.

There was an enormous turnout for the party. Counting both the kids and the parents, we easily had several hundred people there. Most kids came with both their parents, so the entire event felt like a nice family affair. We started the evening outside with the [tag]Foreign Teachers[/tag] (pictured in their costumes: [L to R] Harry Potter, superhero, accident victim) telling the kids about the history of Halloween. After the fast “lesson”, the kids came inside the school to do various Halloween activities. Continue reading →

This is a (possibly painfully) long post about my teaching jobs and apartment here. I hope it’ll be of some interest to you, but who knows.

Work
I have three jobs. I work sixteen hours a week with the equivalent of high school juniors at the [tag]Changchun[/tag] Foreign Language School, a junior and senior high school with about three thousand (!) students. The school has academic buildings, dorms, and a large track the kids use during recesses. I don’t know how many of the students live in the dorms, but after (very unscientifically) polling my classes it seems that the majority of them live at home. The kids that do live in the dorms don’t like it very much – the most common complaints are about the food and the dorms being uncomfortably cold in winter.

I eat lunch in the school cafeteria every day. The quality of the food ranges from good to mediocre (a New Zelander I work with describes the food as typically “look[ing] like a dog’s breakfast”), but it’s so cheap (¥3, about US$.36) and filling that I can’t say no to it. To the left is a photo of one of our lunches. Usually they aren’t this extravagant, and I was actually lucky to get the back end of the fish – almost everyone else had been served fish heads. Continue reading →