Fairy

you can click on any of the images on this blog to get a better view. These one's were taken by Winston.

The Little girl in the pictures is Fairy ( her self given English name). Fairy was the first person to talk to me at the English corner. We have sort of bonded since then. Fairy has about the best English I have ever heard from a Chinese person and she is 11! She also speaks Japanese! She plays four instruments. She has just returned from Beijing where she competed in a English competition and came in 2nd place in her age group ( out of the whole country!) She is not my student, but we talk every sunday at the corner( i did help her tidy up her speach for the competition, but she had very few errors). I am very fond of her and amazed at intelligence! She is also very much a regular kid. Sometimes, at the corner ( which is really zhong shan square), Chinese people think that she is not chinese because she speaks English so well.

It's starting to get cold here, so the English corner was a bit lame today. However, i had fun as always. Two weeks ago, i was still sweating, and now my hoody is kind of not enough for the weather.

Good bus example today. I got on the five after the English corner. Downtown has the stop where the five ends/begins and is one of the few places where the Chinese line up. So i get in line, which is massive. I dread this ride because the five tends to be extra crowded. Two fives come and I think that it won't be that bad. There is a Small metal frame that forms the Que line. Now, for some reason, many chinese won't break that line. They will break any other line, usually. They will jump in front of you at McDonald's. They will break traffic. but many of them will not break a line that has the metal que thing. If they do, they will only do it when the line stops( the non- que breakers will stop when the seats are full, which is ridiculous to me because they will pack a totally full bus any other time. So i get on the first bus, and get one of the last seats, although there was some lady racing on my hip trying to push me out of the way to get a seat, she got one, i don't know why they do that--old ladies and men really like to push people out of the way here. So the querers stop soon, and then people who don't care about the line will come on. Well, i was pretty lucky to get a seat. The next bus won't board until the first one leaves. Well, people just kept coming on. It was crazy; about the fullest bus I have ever been on; not a inch of wasted space, people pressed up against the door. The thing that i found insane is that was a totally empty bus behind us that would board as soon as ours left! I don't understand why all those people did not just wait! The only thing i can think of is that they are just very impatient. Oh well, Chinese buses...

Back to school tommorrow. Will write about teaching soon