Sunday night!!!!!! (Marcus)

Yay, favourite night of the week - back to work tomorrow, etc etc.

Actually tonight has been a good night. I am feeling much better after what was a really really hard week. I cannot recall ever having felt so sick and for so long in one hit. While I am not 100% and still have a cough, my breathing feels mostly back to normal and my energy is coming back again. In fact we even walked down the road and ate dinner out tonight. I just couldn't let poor Court go out on her own again to gather food for dinner and then cook it, because I was too sick to do anything about it.

I am actually kind of looking forward to getting back into teaching. It feels like I have been out of it much longer than a week - perhaps due to the Thurs/Fri long weekend last week. I actually feel that I miss my students. Some I am really looking forward to seeing again, whilst others, not so much.

I plan on laying down some 'Class Rules' to my younger students tomorrow. Some of them are confusing my playing games and having fun with them with being able to just talk all class and call out answers and other miscellaneous crap whenever they wish. That stops tomorrow. Last week I was actually quite pissy in class as I did not have the vocal strength to shout loud enough for silence - and crapped on they did in the meantime. I got in the face of a few of the students, but didn't sound so menacing with my coughy husk of a voice. Tomorrow my voice won't be much better, but I am going to go through a few rules and spell a few things out.

1. No talking when the teacher is talking
2. No talking when other students are talking
3. If you wish to answer a question, put your hand up and wait to be picked.

If you follow rules 1-3, your class will experience happiness, fun and games when time permits.

If you choose to ignore rules 1-3, I will kick your fucking ass out of the class as I only take so much you little bitches!!@%^$(!

Then I will thank them for being my students and wish them a nice class, yadda yadda.

Nah I don't plan on being the bad guy, I like these kids very much, but I do need to stamp this out before it snowballs.

We already know they can be super obedient - you should see how quiet they are for their Chinese teachers. They look forward to our classes every week as it's so different for them to actually be interacting so vigorously with their teacher, let alone a foreign teacher - massive novelty right there.

On a different note, one thing I have noticed that since returning from Suzhou last weekend, the whole campus looks so much greener. All of the tree's outside our apartment have burst into pink flower. The grass looks thicker - greener. Some of the trees lining the lake that were bare are now covered in leaves. As we walked back from dinner, we stopped on the zigzag bridge and just looked out across the lake for a few moments. There were water movement sounds everywhere from the hundreds of fish, but we could only see them every now and then. It was calm, and it was extremely pleasant. The grounds look really really nice right now, like they're turning into some kind of finely crafted botanical garden. The next time its sunny we will head out and take some photographs, as the cloudy/smoggy weather of late doesn't really do justice to the deep greens and contrasting bright pink/white/yellows of the flowers.

Actually the last day we set out to take some photos in the sun was the day of the camera dropping incident, so yeah.

Final note of the night - at the restaurant - the local Coffee shop restaurant(which suffers from an enormous identity crisis - calling it a coffee shop just isn't right) - Courtney decided to order one of the whacky translated name teas with her meal.

The name of the tea - no shit, was Fumigated clothes fruit tea.

What...the...F*@K!!!

Seriously - when you guess most translations into chinglish, you can somehow see how they got there. When you put a word into babelfish.altavista.com and translate it there and back again, it often makes sense. Something like Beefsteak with Iron almost undoubtedly means it will come on one of those sizzling metal plates(well the image in the menu suggests that anyway). Rice with frog is Rice with, well yeah, a frog. But fumigated clothes fruit tea...FUMIGATED CLOTHES? What the HELL could that possibly come from? I swear, ten points and a pick of the boxes for anyone who knows.

The tea itself wasn't so exciting. Just orange with a familiar fruity kind of smell - like pot pouri almost. I couldn't place it, nor did I overly care for it - certainly a bit of a let down with a name like Fumigated Clothes Fruit Tea anyhow.

Goodnight