The other day I had to wipe my computer, which is great to do to get rid of all those digital skeletons in your closet, but completely awful to do in China because I can’t get any windows updates.
But seeing as Microsoft swears to blow up any computer using a pirated copy of windows (look here), it can be understandable that the great powers of be in China has decided to prevent users in China from updating Windows.
Okay,
Five weeks in the fall semester, just 11 more to go!!!
Today was a surprisingly nice day in Linyi. Well as far as the weather was concerned. As you can see in the above pictures: the left photo was taken today, the right one was taken on any other day! No photoshop was used! I’m fucking serious!
Picture of some children during recess across the Uni
We got paid last Friday and not surprisingly, no one got paid for the English intensive training that we did three weeks back. Everyone here is just taking the wait and see approach, which is one of the two options you can take in terms of facing payment issues in China. The other one is confrontation, which is a crapshoot from what I understand. You might piss your boss off in vain, and I don’t think anyone is ready to do that yet.
My classes suck again this year. I don’t really blame the students though. They don’t want to learn, and I get paid either way. I refuse to go crazy because of them. Too bad for them, I really don’t have media rooms this year, so we can’t watch movies.
Seriously thinking about moving to another city in China, but it was hard enough for me just to get this job! “I’m sorry, you just don’t look white enough!” I got that response a few times when applying for jobs last year. Oh well!!
Looks like the GFW has managed to block most free proxies this past week. I’ve tried for the last 2 days, and couldn’t manage to find one that works.
I might have to bite the bullet and actually pay for an internet service, like a VPN. Bah, who am I kidding? I hate facebook.
I think the GFW (Great Firewall) is getting smarter.
Normally I’d use a web-proxy to circumvent said firewall that blocks popular websites like youtube or facebook, but a funny thing has been happening: Whenever I try to connect to either of those websites with a proxy, I can’t, then I can’t connect to the proxy. Even weirder, when I try to connect to a normal website that isn’t blocked (like yahoo.com) with the proxy, it’s all right. It’s WEIRD!
It seems like the new teachers here are frustrated with the quality of the students that we all are having. The non-English majors here can’t speak English worth shit.
Maybe it’s because they don’t care, or the crappy quality of education, but let’s put that thought aside.
The fact of the matter is that this city we’re in is only about 20 years old. In fact, China only started teaching English in school as a compulsory course only after the fall of the Soviet Union. So you have all these Chinese teachers learning to speak English blindly by using IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).
When I go to bigger cities in China, the quality of English speakers is hell of a lot better. Maybe with time, this place might get better.
Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to convince myself.
Have a colorful life…
Week one was fucking exhausting, week 2 towards adventure…..! Yeah right.
Anyhoo, when this is over, maybe I’ll buy that $60 dollar dime bag I was offered the other night at the whore houses. Fucking pimps, always trying to gouge me when they find out I’m American.
While on my way back here in Linyi onThursday, I didn’t know when the school term would start for us or what classes we’d be getting. Some say that the term starts on the 14th, others say the 21st. Then you got the real crazy folks that think it’s gonna start on the 8th of October. Whatever the case may be, the teachers here won’t be notified until the night before our classes start because THIS IS CHINA (henceforth shall be referred as T.i.C.)
Oh, like things couldn’t get more interesting, yesterday morning the foreign teachers of the Uni (myself included) were informed of a meeting that we have to attend in the afternoon. That’s notification five hours before the thing started, which is pretty good notice as far as Chinese Uni’s are concerned.
So we get there at 2:00 and waited around for half an hour before the head honcho showed up. Again, pretty good for China. Felix, our boss, shows up. Felix is a gay man who may or may not realize it, while everyone else does. Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, but the fact that everyone hates him plus he’s getting married to a woman makes it the funnier.
He shows up with 30 20-page packages. Oh, a bad omen for things to come. Worse case scenario, I thought that the term was going to start tomorrow, but apparently my spidey sense wasn’t aiming high enough.
What’s the prognosis doctor? Well, Felix goes on to explain is that the University is starting a new program with the incoming freshman. In lieu of their normal class activities, the freshman will be participating in an eight hour a day two-week intensive English training course starting tomorrow. Great. I thought as I’m zoning away, playing Teeter on my G1. Good for them.
He goes on to say that we will be teaching them…WTF? Thanks buddy, you finally got my attention at this stupid meeting.
My initial reaction is: what is this dude smoking and where can I get some? Because normally a university teacher here in good ‘ol Linyi Normal University (hopefully someone will google this article and think twice before coming here) are contracted to teach 16 hours in a week and not in two days.
So over the course of this two week program, we’ll be teaching an extra 48 hours than what is stipulated in the contract. He assures us that we’ll be compensated for our extra time, and honestly I won’t be holding my breath. Not like it fucking matters. This dog aint gonna roll over this shit for an extra treat.
Anyways, we got these packets containing so called ‘motivational essays’ that is supposed to fill up one of the eight hours a day, and are supposed to get more materials to teach later. Can I get a drum roll, please? Here’s the shocker–it’s the end of day one of the program, and WE STILL HAVE NOT RECEIVED ANYTHING ELSE. However, thinking positively, which is the only way to survive in this place, we’re lucky to receive what we got.
The plot gets even more complicated because each individual department is supposed to have their own methods on how to split up the classrooms. Suppose there are 210 freshman and 3 teachers. They might split those classes up to 70 per a teacher, they might not. Furthermore, the teachers might be switching between classes from day to day or they might not as it really depended on the individual departments, the stars in the sky, and how firm their last bowel movement was. Sounds complicated? Hardly. Well, not here in China.
A teacher had the galls to ask him, “Why weren’t we notified about this earlier?” Felix’s reply, “I actually did not know about this until last night.” Yeah fucking right–well, he may be telling the truth as T.i.C.
We were also assigned some Chinese co-teachers that will be helping us through this program. They know as much as anyone else, which is unfortunately jack shit. I’m assigned to the I.T. department, along with two other teachers. There are 513 freshman in the department, so the other two foreign teachers in my department and myself will be teaching roughly 170 students a day. Yay…
The English and Co-teachers and myself are whisked away to the I.T. department where we sit on the round table of the elders, so are arguing about how the different classes should be split up, because anything that is simple to do is not worth doing as T.i.C. About after 10 minutes of sitting in a room uncomfortably listening to 12 people jabber on in Chinese and not understanding 99% of it , we ask if there’s any point for us to be there while they discuss this mundane point, we got to leave.
As of this writing, it is the end of day one. Did the students know about this training program before it happened? Yes, they were notified on Sunday just like the rest of us apparently.
After a lot of bullshitting and 15 minute breaks every hour, I got through it. Luckily my room is a multimedia room, so we get to play movies or music. John Hughes marathon tomorrow, anyone? I should start with Ferris Bueller and go from there.
1 day down, 9 more to go.
Sometimes in my crazy mind I like to compare apples to oranges. Take for instance Marijuana and China.
Much like the THC saturated goodness that is MJ, having it for the first few times could be the most exciting time of your life. You get relaxed, have fun, and just not care about the silly small stuff.
But eventually when you’re smoking the ganja, you’ll be feeling fine one moment, when it just suddenly hits you.
You know, that feeling of the abyss just sucking the life out of you from the inside?
Well, that’s China for you in a nutshell. I’ll be back there in a few days. Yay!!!
Until this blog gets better, well relatively speaking.
Going back to China September 9th
Working in a kitchen again means that you have to label and date everything that’s in the walk-in refrigerator. The other day someone wrapped up half a cantaloupe in plastic wrap and labeled it so that the top of the first “a” was ever so missing enough so it looked like ‘cuntaloupe.’
Not surprisingly, I got blamed for it. I suppose you only need to write cum-in once before you become the prime suspect for inappropriate behavior.
