Saturday 11th January, 2014                     1730

Lazy or busy, you decide.

This week I finished my exams (a week later than I had planned due to external meddling) and on Tuesday I arrived at my classroom to find it full of strange students and another teacher - THEY were taking an exam in MY room. No, I didn’t go on a rampage, I simply made my views known - not the students or the teacher’s fault, they had been allocated the room because guess what? The foreign teachers ALWAYS finish their exams early! Oh yes, they forgot they screwed that one up. I was seething. I wanted to emulate Jesus in the temple with the money lenders.

I ended up scouring the entire block for an empty room in which to conduct my own tests and when I finished I went immediately to see the department secretary. I had a solid day of exams coming up yesterday and if they thought I was going to spend it like a homeless tramp begging for shelter they had another think coming. I was assured my classrooms would be free yesterday (and they were) but I had not realised the students never had any exams yesterday otherwise it may very well have been a different story. Next term I don’t care what they say, I will schedule my exams as normal and if they want me to teach lessons afterwards then fine, we will go to my designated room and if it is occupied by others taking tests I will simply send my class home. If there’s one thing I detest it’s people tinkering with perfectly good systems and then inconveniencing everyone involved because they should have left well alone. Not playing that game again.

On Thursday I took Joanna for a local meal to say goodbye for the spring festival - she went home yesterday - and I managed to reduce her to tears. No, I wasn’t being nasty it was immaturity shining through and hopefully one day she will be old enough to understand that just because the Chinese are mainly docile in their acceptance of injustices, Westerners often aren’t. No matter.  

Last night I was made a very happy man indeed. Qing called me, not to give me an exact date for her coming to visit but to give me news of it. I had thought that I would be lucky if she stayed for two nights seeing as she earns good money and will want to go and visit her grandmother etc but no - and hopefully this is not a Chinese promise - she said she may well stay a week or even ten days. I told her she can stay forever of course, but I think she will come for a while as she stated I would have to do some cooking. I hope I have to, there are only two restaurants I want to show her anyway and knocking up a lasagne or pizza is considerably cheaper than either of them! I may even try hitherto untried dishes (a pie with pastry - never made pastry in my life - for instance) and I will be happy just to have her here. Mind you, she may be coming simply because she knows I always keep my place warm in winter! She commented on that last year when she stayed.

This morning I got up at six. An hour too early as it transpired but with memories of the last time I wanted to take a weekend number seven bus and the disaster still fresh I decided to play it safe. I had my winter visit to the little school for the pronunciation testing and had invited one of my class monitors, Amy, along to be bored for a couple of hours and be treated to a free lunch after. She wants to be a teacher herself so actually for her it was quite good to see that yes, some primary school kids can actually behave. As always Helen’s classes were a delight and as always we went to lunch at a spit and sawdust restaurant, this one a stones throw from her place. The food was fine and afterwards we played the Landlord and Farmer card game. Amy was concerned over my skill at the game beforehand seeing as they decided to make it a little interesting with money becoming involved. Initially they wanted to wager 1 yuan a game, but 10p? I suggested 5 yuan and after the first game guess who was 15 yuan down! However, I am happy to report that by the time we left I was 5 yuan in pocket. Not only that, my spring festival envelope contained almost enough to treat all the students who helped me move to a dinner, something I hope to do on Tuesday or Wednesday.

The current weather is miserable, low single figures by day and hovering around freezing by night, not that bad but it is accompanied by constant slight rain. I am hoping said wet stuff clears tomorrow as after Lucy comes to clean I want to go shopping to start stocking my freezer for the break - not to mention the very welcome extra mouth I look forward to filling for as long as she wants. And next week I shall have to tackle the new extremely complicated forms we have been given for our exam results. No longer is it possible simply to award 78%, we have to break it down into ten categories. All bullshit of course - I have their marks and will simply work backwards to make the rest fit. Admin seem incapable of understanding that oral exams are fundamentally by their nature completely different to written ones. Ho hum……