Talk show hosts, prostitutes and karaoke

Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Today we had a pretty long day. We had to be at New Oriental at 9am for a teaching methodology presentation, but the person that was supposed to teach it, her flash drive broke and it was cancelled. We ended up watching a video about the course that we will be teaching called New Interchange English. The video featured teaches of English from around the world and how they teach each aspect of the course. Then we had box lunch and we met with all of our co-teachers (the Chinese teachers). I liked the box lunch; it is much better than a box lunch that you would get in the US. We had some potatoes, pork and vegetables, fish, an egg and some rice. During lunch the Chinese co-teachers explained to us how we should prepare for the course and what our role was in the classes. They explained it like we are talk show hosts and together we entertain the students to get them to practice and learn English. We had a little time so my roommate Tim and I went to the mall so that I could find an electric shaver since the ones I brought from home did not work in the Chinese outlets. I was upset that I had to buy a shaver because I knew that it would take up a lot of the money that I had. I was able to find a reasonably priced one, although I am sure it is not as good as the more expensive ones, but I had to do what I had to do. After lunch we went to a lecture by a man about his experience teaching English. He had some very good methods, but I think that you have to find your own teaching style; you cannot be someone that you are not. The room was filled with teachers from New Oriental; it was like 200 teachers in there. I did not realize that they had so many teachers. Most of the teachers are Chinese teachers though and they teach children. After the lecture we all walked over to a restaurant Chu Zhaowang) for dinner. We walked through the “hood” part of Wuchang. It was very different from the area that we work in. It is like New York, in that, you can be walking from one neighborhood to the next and it can change totally. They showed us the red light district and explained to us how to tell if a beauty salon is an actual beauty salon or a place where you can buy girls. It was so interesting to see these places and the girls inside looked very young, it’s amazing to go different places and some things are universal, like prostitution. The restaurant that we went to was very nice. We had many delicious dishes. I tried almost all of the dishes, I even tried eel—it tasted kind of like chicken. After dinner we went to karaoke. The Chinese love karaoke. This karaoke place was huge and it was very elegant, I could tell that it was pretty expensive because the service was excellent. We ended up doing karaoke and dancing for like five hours. What is interesting to me about the Chinese is that their singing voice is very different from their talking voice. When they started singing, it was like a soft, sweet melodic voice, it was pretty cool.