Almost done!

With less than a week to go before I graduate from my TEFL training
program, I still have no clear idea where I'll be working. But
China's a teacher's market, and there are lots of cool possibilities.
Right now I'm thinking that I'll probably teach at a
college/university somewhere, although I might do a language
institute. I'm also hoping to find somewhere that isn't a big city
(although by Chinese standards a city with a downtown population of
700,000 is small, so I don't know quite what that'll mean) without bad
pollution. It shouldn't be a problem to find decent hours (<20/week),
free accomodations, visa assistance, some sort of insurance, and a
wage that will allow me to save some on top of paying off my student
loans, so it's more a matter of finding someplace with an environment
(both in and out of work) that I like. Also, it seems probable that I
won't be actually able to start a full-time job until the end of
February, after the Spring Festival (Lunar New Year), when the spring
semester begins. Which should give me time to explore the country,
checking out the most interesting job opportunities I come across.

So it's nearly Christmas again. Hard to miss, even here. The KFCs
have holiday decorations up. Christmas trees show up here and there.
It's talked about on the news. People in classes ask about it. It's
not yet reached the Japan ridiculousness benchmark, but I can see it
getting there in a few more years.

This evening I was, well, we all were, but I was the only one
free/interested, invited to a Christmas party at the GET English
Academy, one of the private English schools in Suzhou. And it was a
lot of fun! Very bizarre, but a lot of fun. The party itself really
had almost nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas. There was a
Christmas tree somewhere, some Santa hats around, and some
gift/prize-giving, but that was about it.

I'd gone over with Mr. Pan, who is the office manager at our school
and also teaches the Chinese class (of which I am now the only
student, which is so nice), and at first was a little worried about
maybe having to do something, teach some sort of lesson, I don't know.

This was because late last week there'd been an invitation for us to
participate in "English Corner" at another English school, which
turned out to be Shannon and I, as the only two who went to that, each
getting put in with a teacherless class and more or less asked to
teach them stuff, talk with them in English, whatever for two hours.
It was okay that we hadn't planned a lesson, and it wasn't a terrible
experience, but nor is it one I'd like to repeat.

But none of that this time, just a lot of free food, none of which was
remotely Christmas-themed, but most of which was pretty good. It
turns out that this is the school where Erica, who went to the Boland
School 2 months ago and with whom we've hung out with several times
since we've been here, teaches, so we saw her there, which was good
because Chinese people tend to be at least as shy as I am about
introducing themselves to complete strangers.

After a while of milling about, after everyone had gotten enough to
eat, the events began. There were a number of door prizes issued,
maybe 10, with the drawing spread out through the other events. Both
Mr. Pan's and my numbers were called, and we were given wrapped
presents. Mine turned out to be a photo album, and I don't yet know
what his was. There were also several people who sang songs, usually
backed up by VCD karaoke. Most of them were in English, none had
anything to do with Christmas, unless you count the fact that a couple
were love songs.

There was also a sort of partner limbo race, where two people had to
balance a (pink, almost a Christmas color) balloon between their
backs, and race against another pair under a tape held about chest
high, around a chair, and back under the tape to the starting place
without dropping the balloon. At some urging from Mr. Pan I
volunteered to do it. My partner and I made it without dropping the
balloon, although we didn't win. But as we were going under the tape
I saw that they'd raised our side of it significantly, to make up for
the fact that chest height on the Chinese (mostly girls) who'd been
doing it up until then was about stomach height on me. I could have
made it, but just as well that I didn't have to. My partner was a
little taller than average too, and he might have had more trouble
with that.

The other thing was a little Name That Tune/Mock the Foreigners game.
It was funny. Four of the five native English speakers ended up
getting called up to do it. A Chinese song was put on the CD player,
we had to listen and try to sing along and everyone else tried to
figure out what it was. It would have been embarrassing if I'd cared.
It's just that it's extremely hard to listen to the lyrics, the tune,
and yourself, all at the same time. When it was my turn I tried to
sing along simultaneously with the CD, which sometimes worked, but, I
think, also meant a lot of mistakes. Although Mr. Pan later told me I
produced two comprehensible phrases in Chinese, which I hadn't even
realized I'd done. The owner of the school also told me I sang well,
which I almost believed, until he said the same thing to Erica. And
not that she was absolutely terrible, she probably, like all of us,
could have done much better if she'd known the songs at all, but yeah,
it wasn't singing so much as saying the occasional phrase she caught.
At least, for fairness's sake they reversed it for a few songs and
invited Chinese volunteers to try to sing songs in English. Funny
thing about that was that the songs were pretty much all oldies so,
while Erica and I sort of recognized words and tunes, it was the
students who actually knew the titles of the songs.

Overall a fun time, and it seemed like a good, pleasant, fun work
environment. Unfortunately, besides being in Suzhou, which is all
right, but isn't really either a culturally or geographically
intriguing place, the school sets odd hours for its teachers and
requires them to teach 30 hours a week, and 40 hours required at the
classroom, with those extra 10 hours to be used for lesson planning.
Which, until we all get better isn't really enough. Basically, it's
got a lot of the problems that people who get TEFL degrees should be
able to avoid.

Erica's there because she's Korean-American and suffers from the dread
Asian Face disease, which effectively cripples her marketability. She
produced an excellent extemporaneous comedic monologue on the subject
a few weeks ago. And it makes a sad sort of sense, because most
Chinese English teachers are significantly less than proficient
speakers, which means that anyone going somewhere and paying to learn
English is likely to think that someone employing an Asian-looking
teacher is not going to be providing high-quality education.

It's extremely late now, so I'm not going to write much more. I'm
working on getting pictures uploaded, and all the most recent ones
should be available in the next couple days. Wasn't really able to
write last week because the way the teaching schedule worked out I had
two days in a row, which was difficult. But now I'm free until the
last day, next Tuesday, so I'm doing some catch-up in my semi-free
time. Still, I can't stay up to make sure all the pictures get
uploaded tonight.

The last of the pictures are the ones from our trip out to West Hill
Island in Taihu Lake. It was a very cool trip. Fog everywhere over
the water, felt like we were in a fantasy land, cut off from reality.
It got me thinking about a reworking of King Arthur and Avalon set in
medieval China. It also got me thinking about how much longer,
psychologically, short distances are, how you travel so much further
from city to village than from city to city, and how big this
prefecture must have seemed before cars and long bridges showed up.

I'll try to add captions to the Taihu pictures, like always there's
plenty to be said about them. But I'll worry about getting them up
first.