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| A birthday cake pour moi! Xie-xie, my dears |
Poor air quality can be so poetic!
Last week was a little dramatic so the chips post will have to wait.
1. I forced a child to eat vegetables.
These kids do not eat vegetables – only meat. Since part of our role is to encourage a healthy lifestyle, we took some time as a class to extract as many tasty veggie ideas from these kids as we could. Every suggestion we made was met with looks of disgust from the students. Pretty sure it’s more the idea of vegetables that disgusts them than the actual vegetables. But like… these kids are 13 and 15 – they’re too old for this utter abhorrence of anything healthy. After a solid 20 minutes, our list consisted of bamboo shoots and potatoes. What a list. We’re still working on it.
We asked if they wanted to live healthily and everyone answered “yes”. Then we asked if they think vegetables are healthy and they all responded “yes”. Finally, we asked if therefore we should eat more vegetables… and there was silence. Until the relatively quiet older girl spoke up, “Vegetables aren’t healthy if you eat 5 tonnes of them though”. Touche, my dear, touche. We’ll try not to go that far.
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| We organized a student scavenger hunt where one of the requirements was taking a photo smiling with a cabbage... it was beautifully hilarious |
At dinner, we put a small pile of greens on everyone’s plate. One boy tried to hide them under a pile of finished chicken wings. One nudge of my chopsticks unearthed the sad, neglected pile of greens. Guiltily, he looked at me pleadingly. I shook my head and raised my arm to block the kitchen exit. In one swoop, he dumped the whole pile in his mouth, wincing and gagging all the way. He left the kitchen with half of it sticking out of his mouth and chewing very… very slowly. It took several more moments for him to swallow.
Is this what parenting feels like? Why are kids so weird?
2. Body adjustments are the worst.
Indigestion as a result of a new diet is shitty enough, but pair that with menstrual cramps and a self-imposed heat stroke. I’d wake up freezing in the winter cold but my head feverish (our low-power heater sat directly above my head), with my uterus clamming up and my ass burning. That Saturday I literally did not leave my bed.
Ayi, essentially our hired grandmother, came into Melissa and my room regularly, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me. After I gestured to my groin and deliberately groaned loudly, she nodded vigorously and left the room. She came back with a mysterious black drink and Melissa, who translated that it was some sort of Chinese medicine.
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| VERY gingery, VERY sugary, VERY black, VERY mysterious |
I don’t know how effective the mysterious black drink was, but it was sure exciting. Luckily, these things pass and sleeping directions can be changed.
Fun fact: all the dust in the air coagulates in your eyes here, resulting in gooey “sleep” build-up in your eyes several times per day, rather than just in the morning. Also, tears are not completely liquid. They’re sticky and thicker than regular tears, leaving a strange sticky residue on your skin.
3. Hella pressure
For several days, the amount of pressure on me was a little ridiculous and I didn’t handle it well – I essentially stopped eating for a while. In charge of scheduling the teaching team yet having little-to-no material prepared among the teaching team (and thus little to schedule) but needing 8 hours per day of material, with one fellow teacher refusing to help or teach as well as encouraging the kids to be super unmanageable, I got a little stressed out. Overall teacher morale was low, expectations on us were rising, rules were not being enforced, and we had zero solid plans for the next 8 months. Having fallen into the role of “head teacher” by default of being the only one taking the job seriously, I started internally freaking out.
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| Not as stressful when it's just one student - more of a conversation. |
Either away, I’m eating again and Ayi looks very pleased with this.
4. Abandoned buildings
Yesterday, the three of us teachers took a long-needed breath of semi-fresh air and left “campus” for half the day. Trying to find a library, we ended up in this massive semi-abandoned “Science and Technology Library” with three floors of unlocked offices and a rooftop balcony. It was built in an extremely modern, circular style, with a giant indoor “courtyard” in the middle and a high glass ceiling. Wandering through the dust-covered conference rooms, copier rooms, and ping pong tables, the building felt like an eerie mesh of the past and present. We eventually found the front door again, where a security guard suddenly appeared and proceeded to shoo us out.
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| Very round, bright, and "futuristic"... yet not a soul in sight |
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| More mysteriously abandoned building from the future... |
We finally took a subway to the Shanghai Library (aka the largest library I’ve ever been in). While we did visit the “Chinese Ancient Books” section, which was interesting, we also arrived half an hour before it closed.
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| You can only see half of the library in this photo - the other half is to the right and just as tall as this part. Huuuuge bloody library |
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| Apparently this is ancient Chinese writing |
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| A statue of some Chinese scholar in the snow? |
A plus side of the excursion: I finally tried a “tea egg”. These hard-boiled eggs are soaked in some type of tea and sold on the street for about 30 cents. It sort of just tasted like… an egg. With a tiny bit of tea flavour on the outside. A little plain, but definitely worth the whole 30 cents.
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| Tea eggs in the street |
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| I think cabbages are flowers here? Literally everywhere |
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| This photo is so embarrassing that I had to post it. I went to a cafe to write, only to notice after ordering how hipster and posh and gag-worthy it all looked. It was too basic to NOT photograph |
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5. Making children exercise
But they’re still great. Our dedicated, hard-working, philosophical 15-year-old girl and 2 sassy, lazy-ass 13-year-old boys.
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| A preferable form of exercise... get them all on skates! |
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| Found in a random store... very curious about how this works |
Currently on a quest to find some sort of alternative, comfortable, relaxed café or lounge. In a city this big, surely there has to be somewhere that doesn’t revolve around money, consumerism, fast fashion, designers, and everything else I loathe. Sometimes I forget the sheer size of this city – I cross a 12-lane highway just to get to the subway almost every day. Of 24 million individual human beings, I am certain some have the same interests as me – I just have to find them and figure out where they congregate.
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| Every day, mate, every day |
Quote of the Week:
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Upon telling the boys to stop talking during a test, one responds “We don’t talk; we just discuss.” We’re still unsure what he was trying to say.
