Wednesday 28th May, 2014                    1230

If I recall correctly Sunday was a dismal day on which I did nothing but one class at the small school. In addition I was invited to judge an English recital contest in the evening and for reasons known only to the organisers they invited Ollivier to be a judge as well! It turned out to be a combination of students reciting either English or Chinese and patently we couldn’t award marks for the Chinese bits and to be honest the organising was haphazard, to use a kind term. They had printed up small pieces of paper which split down the points to be awarded for the different criteria they were looking for in the contestants but thoughtfully had only produced them in Chinese! Needless to say, the pair of us simply entered the total score on the reverse of the forms.

So far this week it has been a bit warm, hovering around 30-34C. Perfect for the bike as even if I am returning from town in the evening I don’t need to take a jacket in case. This coming weekend is dragon boat festival. We are off Saturday, Sunday and Monday but have to make up classes we would normally do on Mondays.

I carefully prepared my exam dates to take into account the holiday, duly informed the students and rearranged the Monday classes to start their exams this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon. However, last night Kevin came to me and pointed out I had made a huge cock up. I have made the rare errors of believing a student who told me their other exams start on the 16th and compounded it by misreading the school calendar. In my defence, not only is it in Chinese but the first month is September on it and the last is June. Ergo I am starting a week too early. Ooops. Hopefully the powers won’t notice and anyway I will give one final lesson to four of my classes afterwards - the other two classes are big ones so I have given myself the luxury of being able to not rush their tests. That is something I will certainly consider with any future large classes.

On Monday Kevin, Vivi, Ollivier and I all demolished the second lasagne I froze from last Tuesday, although the portions were taken to their respective rooms for consumption. Next Tuesday we are having another bash and the menu will be a salad starter, toad in the hole plus mousse au chocolat. The toad should be a success as Ollivier will prepare the batter and I will do the rest. He has just had a trial run at making Yorkshire pudding and the result is pretty good. I have two packs of bangers left so we will combine that with mustard mash, onion gravy and (at Kevin’s request) baked beans. The latter seems a strange choice but what the hell. It will the last of the current academic year and in a month or so Ollivier will go to Shandong province, then France, while Kevin will go to Hong Kong, Macao, the Philippines and England, not necessarily in that order. He and our local hero have been invited to some event in HK and Macao connected with the national speaking competition at which our lad put this school on the academic map of China and was quite rightly lauded by the school. He has in fact since been accepted for a place in the prestigious Shanghai maritime university, no doubt aided a fair bit by his success in Beijing. Not that he’s going to sea, I believe he wants to be a lawyer.

Thursday 29th         1930

Sorry about that folks, I had fully intended to blog last night but whilst down having a beer with Olivier in the early evening yesterday (and coincidentally immediately after I had bemoaned the fact I hadn’t had any translating to do lately) the phone rang. Four files to translate/tidy and as always not long to do it in. They wanted it done before 0900 today. Bang went anything else other than feeding the pets and myself (with an Aussie pasty) so I am finishing off this evening.

Remember above I explained my screw up with dates? Well Amy told me after her test this afternoon that next week is the first of the government inspections (there will be three of them within the next twelve months) to see if we qualify for full status. Considering my plans are/were to be carrying out exams I was thrown into confusion. Which week was it (week 16) and what if they chose my room to inspect? As it happens my submitted teaching plan for next week states “free discussion” so instead of starting the Friday classes (half my weekly workload) on testing I may instead show their film that week instead of after I have finished. I mean, the teaching plan was submitted long before I was given a multimedia classroom! The last thing I want to do is jeopardise the bid for promotion but I think in the unlikely event my class will be chosen to inspect, I will justify it.

My new consignment of bagels and cream cheese arrived this evening COD. Imagine my consternation when presented with two parcels and asked to fork out 470y when I was expecting two hundred and something. No bugger in there at the time spoke English but it ended up with someone opening the boxes and showing me the contents. The two boxes were because the order wouldn’t fit into one and the error was realised, meaning I paid 235y and not exactly twice that as the silly girl had suggested. However, although I have a dozen bagels (one of the poppy seed ones is destined for Yvonne’s gullet tomorrow) I only have one block of cream cheese. I am sure there was one block in each box - which they kindly reduced to one by getting rid of the polystyrene containers - and I returned to see if they had forgotten to put it in. No evidence of it so just now I emailed the firm hoping to get a free replacement sent out. It’s only 26y but I do need it.

At five this evening I was interviewed for the university online newspaper. Apparently they have to interview one teacher a month and as one of the “reporters” is one of my students she chose me for this month after I showed her class my video the multimedia dept made of me. Ollivier will probably be next month’s pinup! The trouble is, it’s in Chinese and not only do I not know what they will say but I don’t know the website address to check!  

Still, a three day weekend to look forward to and although I’m not going anywhere it will be nice to relax.