Thrown in the Deep End.

Wednesday 12th September 2012

Today we had to take a test to see if we could make it onto CIC Camp as a facilitator. I don't really know when it changed from TIP to CIC! Georgia and I figured we could blag it, and just used our designated practice time to have a little chat  and explore the experiment centre instead.

In the afternoon, we had the test. We basically had to pick one thing to facilitate as a pair. Georgia and I decided to do 'blow wind blow' as I had facilitated it before, and it is easy to do! 

After everyone had finished, we found out that eight of us will be going on camp, whilst the other four stay behind in the city. The four not going on CIC camp this time round were Emma, Alex, Ollie and Dan. Emma and Alex were completely relieved, Dan was completely nonchalant, and Ollie was rather annoyed. I still don't know why Ollie wasn't picked, as he was one of the more confident members of the group, and he was good at 'facilitating',. 

Most of us then went to a steak house in the shopping centre with the aquarium.  It worked out to be the equivalent of £5.80 for a decent cut of steak and chips! Normally, I would go for my steak to be medium rare - medium. They didn't give us a choice here. It came out rare. At first, I wasn't too sure, don't really like the look of blood on my food, but now I have tasted it, I have never gone back!

We decided to go to Walmart for some last minute bits before going back to the apartment. We were in there for quite a while, so long that we must have coincided with closing time as the lights started to go off. We panicked and ran outside! 

Thursday 13th September 2012

This morning Georgia and I went to the market to go shopping. I thought we went to the same place as last time, but we must have come in at a different angle and we ended up in a completely different place, this time with a load more clothes stalls! This was definitely more up our street. We didn't buy anything, as we were just trying to navigate our way around the market, and pinpoint areas of interest.

After leaving the market, we went to CC Experience Centre to find we actually need to go straight to the Qinyin branch. Communication isn't CC English school's strong part. After we got there, we were told to have a rest before going into classes, and this time we were not to be in partners, we were flying solo!

Thinking it would be like the other classes we have been in, I felt quite confident that it would be good. However, when I got into the class I just got told I would be leading  the class. I can't speak mandarin. How on earth was I suppose to teach children when I can't speak their native language! Thankfully, I managed to blag it, by starting with a game, and then using the textbook activities to guide me along. Improvisation was key!

We then had another rest before going into another classroom. Luckily, this teacher was way more prepared and she had already planned out her lesson for me to teach. I familiarised myself with their routine before going into the classroom, and this made me feel a lot more comfortable in a teacher's role. 

We had a 'traditional Chinese tea', I'm pretty sure they just call everything 'traditional' to make it more appealing to us. This was a lot more appetising than KFC. Although, you have to watch out for some of the more spicier dishes! They are definitely more generous with spice in China than they are in England!

In my final class of the day, I actually did what we had been told we were going to be doing before we came to China. I assisted the teacher. The only thing she made me do by myself was teach head, shoulders knees and toes. All the students were really responsive to me, despite the fact they could only speak limited English and I couldn't speak any Chinese/ I love how excited they all get when we go into a classroom with them. It's so weird to think that most of the students in that classroom as never met a 'westerner' in real life before.

Ollie also hijacked my iPad at some point today. I'm ending this on one of his delightful selfies. Enjoy. 

More Team Building.

Wednesday 5th September 2012

Today I was told I had to wake up early. Early for me is when I have to get up for work at 6am, I do not appreciate that time in the morning. At all. So it was a lovely surprise when my chum got me up at 8am. We had to go the police station to apply for my temporary residence permit and it turns out I didn't need the pictures that were taken yesterday. Thank goodness we didn't pay for them!

However, when I got to the CC experiment centre, I found out that pretty much everyone else had to use their pictures so that was quite worrying! I was just hoping that we had all applied for the same thing, it would be rather awkward if we didn't. 

We split up into two teams again, this time I was with Georgia, Matt, James, Josh and Ollie, when he eventually turned up an hour and a half late. We walked to another branch of the CC english school and went to a classroom with 6 other teachers. We had another morning of getting to know each other style games. At first we played charades which is definitely hilarious to play with the teachers.

Then we had to pick a folded piece of paper with something to do with our childhood on it. Typically I was picked to go first and ended up with having to teach my favourite song from my childhood. Twinkle twinkle little star was the first one that I could think of so I taught that pretty well if I do say so myself, obviously working at a nursery has helped me exceed expectations, the teachers were loving it! Georgia had to say her favourite subject and she said art as a joke! So I shouted out for her to draw something to which she went bright red and looked completely horrified! It was hilarious. Anyone that knows Georgia knows how awful she is at drawing. Bless. She ended up drawing a few faces and we pretended that that sort of art that got the best grades. The worrying thing was that they actually believed us.

Then some random teacher said her favourite subject was music, so she sang Adele-Someone like you! And then she pulled Ollie up to sing to Justin Bieber - Baby luckily he's a good sport and went along with it. 

Then guess where we went for lunch... KFC again! Georgia had had KFC for breakfast again, so we were all dropping hints that we liked pizza hut or traditional Chinese food. They completely ignored all hints that were made. The KFC was the biggest one we had been in so far, and we had our first experience of some random Chinese people that we didn't know taking photos of us. Now that was surreal. It was almost like we were famous. I've just realised I don't think I've mentioned that in GuiYang, it was very rare to find any other race other than Chinese. The majority of the Chinese citizens had never seen a white person in real life before.

Then we went to Hebin park, although we weren't allowed on the rides which was a shame. with about 40 other teachers! I was surprised that a school could have this many teachers! We did some more team building games not surprisingly, and we eventually ended up having a massive game of football which was good fun. The best game we played was where we had to pass balloons to each other just using our legs. Now, I was well practiced at this game, probably because I have been involved in Girl Guiding thanks to my mum for as long as I can remember. The teachers weren't. Their reactions to it were very amusing!

Another highlight was James attempting to teach a few of the teachers to do the worm. Lets just say that this didn't go well. At all.

The bus back to CC English experiment centre was crazy. It was ridiculously full. This was my first experience of being completely crammed in the buses. It wasn't ideal! Looking back now, it was totally unnecessary as the park is less than ten minutes away from the school by foot. I think they just presume all English people are lazy and need to get transport.

T.I.P Training.

Tuesday 4th September 2012

Today we had our first T.I.P training and, to be honest, I don't  think our trainers know that most of us have little to no teaching experience! My experience has basically consisted of volunteering at brownies and 'mentoring' in a few classes at school. Not really enough to dive straight in! We are going to be what's known as 'facilitators', which is basically an assistant to the main trainers, to 22-40 year old CC English school teachers on the T.I.P training camp in a couple of weeks time. Slightly different to teaching 5-18 year olds like we had been told! 

We had orientation in the morning , which was basically a load of boring speeches which I only filtered in various bits of information which could possibly be useful. To get our 'motivation' a trainer named Stephen 'taught' us the macarena, but, not surprisingly, we all already knew it so it just turned into one crazy group dance! 

Our first task was to teach the trainers an English song; Josh was picked to teach them but we all joined in to help him! We chose head, shoulders, knees and toes as it was the easiest choice! After this, the trainers taught us how to teach it properly, apparently we weren't good enough. Not that we were surprised. After this we taught them hangman and duck, duck goose. 

Then, we were taught the Chinese version of 'Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?' which unfortunately included forfeits if you were caught with the cookie. Luckily I didn't lose, the Chinese seem to have an obsession with public humiliation and making us sing and dance. We couldn't very well refuse, we were getting paid after all! We then had a brief word before having KFC again for lunch. We definitely regret complaining about having the same Chinese meals for lunch everyday... this was turning into super size me! Especially for poor Georgia who was having it for breakfast and dinner as well! 

I then went with Georgia and Natasha, one of our mentors, to the hospital to get her stitches out. Her head is fine now, just a bit sore now and again but thats understandable! They put some sort of liquid on it that made it look like it was bleeding again. I'm definitely sure everyone wants to see a tasty picture of that... although it doesn't look as bad in the photo as it did in real life!

Then we went to a shop to get our photos taken 'professionally', as we are applying for a temporary residence permit and it needs to be taken to the police station along with my passport. Georgia and I got there before everyone else, so we had our photos taken before everyone else could come along and see how hideous they were! The photographer edited out our nice tans, making us look very white.

When we got back to the cc experiment centre, we split up into two teams, the fruit (Emma, Ollie, Ben, Dan, Josh and James) and the animals (Georgia, Alex, Hamish, Sam, Matt and I) to play team games. First Sam and Hamish played password; where one person has to guess the word and the other has to give them verbal clues, but are given a list of words they are not allowed to use. Then Alex and Matt played a similar game but they had to guess English sayings, but I don't think they were, as Sam had never even heard of them and thats saying something as he is the group genius! 

Unfortunately, they didn't have a game for Georgia and I, so we were nominated for being a facilitator by presenting the everyday procedure as follows:

1.Greeting

2.Tell the teachers what the ABC's are (Attack your limitations, Build your confidence and Commit yourself) 

3.Ask them to say the English only chant

4.Announce the c.i.c rules

5.Daily announcements

6.Results

7.English only updates

8.Encourage them to keep speaking english and not mandarin

Despite James obviously giving a better performance, the trainers gave me and Georgia more points! We then had a short break with some beverages and well sort after WiFi access.

The teachers then decided to mix things up a bit and swap the teams around. I was with Sam, Ollie and Josh. Each team had a character with a list of qualities and were asked to act them out. Our team got Sophie, a rich girl who was looking to Marry a suitable bachelor. We decided on Ollie as Sophie and I was Sophie's best friend. The other two teams had Ethan and Derek and had to win Sophie's affection. Ollie was given team points for best actor and I was given team points for best actress! SO in other words we were the least terrible. Seriously its like being on drama camp or something. But I didn't even care as my team won! Naturally, there had to be a forfeit, and it was for the other team to give us a massage. The forfeit was for the fruit to give the animals a massage... this didn't happen.

Ollie getting into character.

Meeting the Host Families.

Saturday 1st September 2012

After we checked out of our hotels this morning, we went straight to the CC English school experiment centre branch for our 'Welcoming Ceremony'. This ceremony was filmed and played on GuiYang TV... some of us even had interviews! I wasn't one of the chosen ones though. I lost count of the copious amounts of speeches, basically all saying how everyone is really grateful for us to be here and it will be such a beneficial experience for both the school and the twelve of us.

After the speeches, it was time for the 'entertainment' section. The first half consisted of Chinese entertainment. A young Chinese girl performed a Chinese minority dance, not that we were told which minority it was. She had dressed up in traditional clothing, and shoes with little bells on. It was very sweet. I would also like to note that she was a lot better at dancing than I could ever hope to be.

Unfortunately, after the dance had finished, it was our turn to give entertainment. None of us were prepared for this. None of us enjoy giving a performance. None of us if I'm being brutally honest can sing particularly well. Yet, we were told we had to sing a song associated with England. We had no idea what to do, so eventually we just decided on Hey Jude as it seemed like an easy choice! Luckily, the music in the background was quite loud so our voices were over powered! 

To make matters worse, Mr Smith was giving us a look as if to say that we weren't being entertaining enough and we needed to up the game. Georgia and I took this to heart and starting waving our arms and jumping. Everyone else just stood still. We must've looked ridiculous. 

After the entertainment, it was time to meet the host families.Thankfully, the family I was to go home with were really nice! Lory is 12 years old and she goes to CC English school, it was just her and her parents. We took to referring to the parents as 'Chum' and 'Chad' as it was a lot easier to say than their Chinese names I still don't know how to pronounce their names let alone spell them. Lory was the only one in the family who spoke English, so that proved to be very awkward when it came to communication! Luckily she was more than happy to translate.

We then all left pretty abruptly, which left no time to say goodbye really and then took a taxi back to their apartment via Dico's. For those of you who don't know what Dico's is, it's very similar to KFC only spicier. Luckily, they have a picture menu so I just had to hope for the best and order something that looked relatively edible.

Their apartment was on the 6th floor, and there was no lift so it was a it of a work out to get there. It was much nicer than I expected it to be! It was very spacious and had a merge of modern and traditional Chinese decorations. Here are some photos of the apartment, although I've just realised they do not do it justice at all, and the quality is pretty awful so I do apologise!

  

Dining area, living area, my bedroom and the view from my bedroom respectively.

Pretty much as soon as I got all my stuff sorted, and had the tour of the apartment I was asked if I wanted a rest, so I thought why not. That's when it really hit me. I was on my own. I could barely communicate with my 'chamily' and I had no way of contacting the others, let alone my real family and friends back home. They didn't have wifi, so I couldn't use iMessage or FaceTime on my iPad and we hadn't sorted out our sim cards yet so we couldn't even text each there.

This evening, my host family were having a party for a family friend and some of his friends as they had got into a prestigious college. The restaurant was absolutely packed. Lory and I bonded by playing I spy and Where's Wally on my chum's iPhone. It is so weird sitting in a room where everyone is speaking a different language to you, it was almost alienating. The food was incredible though. It was like a banquet. I had so many duck pancakes and also quite a few local GuiYang dishes that were amazing.

We then went to Walmart, which happened to be across the road from the fancy restaurant we went to. They took me around the imported food areas and also literally got me anything I looked at or said that I thought I liked. They were completely going out my way to make me feel comfortable. It's so sweet, and I was completely grateful for everything they did.