November 27, 2004
It’s Saturday and my weekend begins. I have 3 classes to teach today from 1:30 until 9 pm. Tomorrow I teach from 9-6. These are our busiest days because the kids take classes on the weekends apart from their regular Monday to Friday school.

Well, my 2 days off (Thursday and Friday) were quite eventful! This first week has gone by so fast! Kim started at 9 this morning so I have the apartment to myself. She is going to wash the floors this evening so I volunteered to clean the bathroom. The whole room turns into the shower and everything gets wet when we shower, so it needs a good cleaning at least once a week. Yesterday while planning my lessons I did 2 loads of wash. We have a little spin/washer but no dryer (ugh!). So everything gets hung up on a bar running across the kitchen turning it into a typical Chinese laundry. Everyone in this city hangs their washing out on their balconies. I don’t see the point in hanging clean clothes out to get dirty again with the pollution! Kim says they will take 2-3 days to dry. Don't they know someone invented an electrical dryer about 50 years ago?Hmmm………..one of those things I will have to get used to….welcome to China!

My classes went well today. I was taking over for Ashley (from Toronto) who is on vacation. He was supposed to fly up to Beijing to meet his father but the flight got cancelled because of a plane crash in Eastern China. They grounded all the planes of the same make – turns out all these planes were made in Canada. I guess they were pretty old. So he finally made it out a day later on another airline.
I had 3 classes of kids aged 10-16. I like that age group. They are not too rambuctuous and will listen although I had one kid named Kevin who would not shut up in Chinese. I think he was the class clown. I asked him if he knew what a zipper was and demonstrated on his jacket. I told him I was going to put one across his mouth! After that whenever he talked I turned to him and made the action of a zipper. It work for a little while…………

I made it through all three classes with a ‘little help from my friends’ as the Beatle’s song goes. When I realized at break that I had covered everything I needed some fillers for the rest of the class. Kim & Steve gave me some good ideas. We even made a Word Search on the computer in 5 minutes! Great website!

I was pooped when the day was over and had to work on lesson plans for the next day. Kim & I stopped for supper at Milo’s Coffee House which is really nice and modern and I ordered pizza. It was ok but very hot and spicy. Seems everyone eats out a lot and no one cooks at home. Because we have one meal at school each day it makes it easier to just snack at home and go out. Kim and I have adopted the policy that one of us does dishes when we run out of coffee mugs. Gee, that sounds familiar. That’s when I used to do dishes in Windsor!