Hong Kong Diary – Episode 1 I have now been living in Hong Kong for 2 months. The city itself is great, amazing, exciting. I love it. Takes some getting used to, though. Its a very busy city. Full of people, but pretty narrow. This leads to me frequently getting trapped behind people while walking. This happened in London too, but here its a different level. They amble. They shuffle. Dear God do they shuffle. They waddle down station stairways, phone in hand. They stand still on the escalator and government policy has changed so that standing on both sides of the escalators is actively encouraged. Madness. On the plus side, trains are dirt cheap. Basically no journey costs much more that a pound. And the Octopus Card they use here makes it incredibly easy. Planning journeys is just like in London, very easy to know where to change etc. The only difficulty for me is in remembering the names of the places in the city. For example to get to Wan Chai I get on the train towards Chai Wan. Not confusing at all. Its also hard to talk about where Ive been because the place names are, to me, gibberish. At the weekend I went to Tai Koo or was it Mei Foo? One of the most popular locations in the city is called Tsim Sha Tsui. Its pronounced Chim Sha Choy. Try remembering that. One of the joys is that if you keep calm, youre never lost in Hong Kong. Its not a big place, really. Today I didnt have any plans after I finished teaching so I just got on a tram. I didnt bother looking up where it went to. It costs $2.50 to ride a tram. Thats 21p in England. I sat on the top deck, the windows open fully down so you get a great breeze running through. Its not the fastest through the traffic, but you get a great view. When it reached the end of the line, I got off and explored a little. Wherever you end up theres always a train, bus, minibus that will get you home. My house is in Mong Kok, in the heart of Kowloon. Its very, very busy, but its like a transport hub, I can get anywhere pretty easily. I live pretty much in the red light district. Massage parlours everywhere, and apparently, the biggest gay sauna in Hong Kong is on the floor below me. The number of men I pass on the stairs whenever I leave my apartment seems to confirm this. Edit: proof - travelgayasia/venue/hutong-sauna/ Tonnes of shops around this area, and theyre mostly clumped together into categories. So if you want to buy a computer accessory you go to a mall that has 200 small independent shops that all sell computer accessories. Theres a Sneaker Street, a mall filled with photo booths for teenagers to prove they have friends in, a mall that only sells second hand mens dinner jackets and black tie, etc, etc. My block mainly sells lamps on one side, and power tools on the other. Theres a shop that sells nothing but cogs. Every different size of cog you can imagine. There are lots of restaurants around when I get hungry. Two minutes walk away is a snake restaurant, with a 3 storey snake-cage sat outside, to prove that its fresh. They have three times as many animals here than they do in the reptile house at the Hong Kong Zoological Gardens. I havent tried snake yet. Eel, jellyfish, starfish soup, even Ginseng tea, but not snake. Yet. The food is great, generally. Lots of Chinese food, Dim Sum, etc. And Japanese food for when you want a change. Im in love with xiao long bao; Shanghai dumplings filled with soup. Filled with the most delicious soup you can imagine, but so little of it there that you have to just have one more.1 My schools all provide me lunch. Usually consisting of rice, some pak choi, and a meat dish. Pork or fish mainly. Only a few times has it been something so weird that Ive been forced to feign fullness. The kitchen staff are always really nice to me. I smile a lot and play the Hugh Grant style likeable but useless character and they give me lots of lovely fresh fruit. At least I think Im just playing a character. Better than the food itself is the Chinese style of eating in large groups. Round table, shared dishes. It creates a great atmosphere that I prefer to the western way of doing things. My favourite school is the one where I eat in a group with the other teachers. Everyone laughs and talks and argues, in Cantonese of course, which I cant speak a word of. Its like a great, raucous family meal. Just someone elses family. I am working in 4 different schools from Monday to Friday, and in one of three schools, rotating, on Saturdays. All of the schools look very similar, but with slight differences in layout that often leave me feeling disorientated. The classrooms arent labelled (in English), so for the first few weeks I was just walking around the different classrooms randomly until I reached one where the local teacher seemed to be expecting me. Im a peripatetic (paralytic, pathetic?) teacher, so I rove around the school, working once with each class every day. This means less work in lesson preparation, since I repeat the material, but also means me going mental because I repeat the material. The material is very basic to begin with. The youngest children I teach, 3 years old, learn one letter and one corresponding word every week. This week is E for Egg. First I warm up by singing a song with them. For the first 2 weeks the young children would sometimes copy the actions I did to the song, but for the most part would just stare at me, on the brink of tears (them, not me). Next I will read them a story from their course book. Now I say story, but its actually just a picture. This week, a picture of an elephant in a supermarket picking up an egg with its trunk. For five minutes I have to riff about this picture, to children whos English is limited to apple, boy, cat and dog. Basically its lots of actions, miming and silly noises. Finally we play a game, to reinforce their learning of the word egg. These k1 children are very limited in what they can do. They dont walk, for example, they waddle. So the games are barely games. The older children can do more, and the lessons are more fun for me, but theres still lots of singing and dancing. Thats where the effort comes in. The job isnt hard exactly. Lesson planning time consuming but never requires ingenuity. Thinking of interesting, different, games to match the vocabulary and subject is about as mentally challenging as it gets. The difficulty lies in keeping my energy level up. To keep the kids attention you really need to be jumping, twitching, enunciating, flapping, flickering, radiating. They dont have the focus to concentrate on what youre doing or saying unless youre doing it with so much energy they cant help themselves. You sing a song about jumping, you really have to jump, properly jump, if you want them to join in enthusiastically. Theyre like a mirror, they instantly reflect back whatever energy level youre giving to them. I lost my voice last week and, my God, it was awful. The tone and volume of my voice is so important in keeping the children on task. Without stupid accents, animal impressions and a voice louder than the CD player, I was nothing. Powerless. The kids walked all over me. Unable to crush the tadpoles they became monstrous, ribbiting frogs. I feel sorry for all the teachers I had at school. I can vividly remember them, begging – begging – for the class to be kind to them when they had sore throats. And I highly doubt we were. The school I am at most often (three days per week) has over 250 children that I am working with. It will be a long time before I learn all of their names. The school gave me some cheat-sheets; mugshots of all the children. The trouble is the photos are from last year, which for 4-year old children can make a big difference. The easiest method to distinguish between children is by their hairstyle, but that can hardly be relied upon as a constant feature. 10% of the kids are wearing medical masks at any one time too, so you cant even see their face except their eyes. They wear name badges, usually but theyre one-sided so thats only a fifty-fifty chance. At the end of term I have to write reports for all the children, so no pressure to learn their names then. One thing that keeps me happy is just during the downtime, between lessons. In London, people would pretend to laugh at my jokes, you know, just to stop it from getting awkward. But here? Here, I have found my audience. The four-year-olds cant get enough of Mister Josh. I pull a stupid face, pretend something is heavy, get the words boy and girl mixed up. And they are rolling on the floor laughing.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 13:37:29 +0000
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