It has been a long time since I had some free time for myself. Now I can write about what happened to me so far in China.
Getting to Daqing:
To get to Daqing, I had to fly to Beijing from Montreal, connecting in Toronto, then I had to grab another plane from Beijing to Daqing. The flight from Montreal to Toronto took about an hour, from there to Beijing it took another 13 hours, then from Beijing to Daqing I had to fly for another hour. This means that coming here takes 15 hours by plane if you don't take into account delays and all the time it takes to check-in.
Unfortunately, my flight from Beijing had been cancelled due to a snowstorm in Daqing. I was left in an airport where almost no one speaks English well enough to inform me about my flight and what to do next. I could not find a public phone even though they had pre-paid phone cards selling machines everywhere. I managed to get into a net café at the airport to contact my employer by email and he had Chinese Southern Airlines give me a free room at an hotel. From that point I had to follow people I could not understand to some place in a city I know nothing about.
When I arrived at the hotel, I informed the clerk (who spoke English) that I was sent from the airport by CSA and that my room was paid for by them. She told me no she did not know what I was talking about. It took her 10 minutes to figure out that the reservation had been made under the name of the manager on duty at the airport and she gave me my card key to my room. I had to give my passport to the receptionist in order for them to give me my room. This also happened at the net café. I got free meals, got my passport back at 3PM and was given a free ride back to the airport at 4PM the following day.
Getting to the plane was fairly easy and I had no problem at all. I left Daqing's airport at around 7:30PM. My employer's assistant brought me to my apartment. It is big and it is furnished. The following day I was brought to the main office to sign my contract and I was given some help and shown where to shop.
Training:
The next day I started my training. The teaching philosophy of this school gives training a very specific direction. I won't go into the details of training, but it was mainly:
-An elimination process (for Chinese candidates - They only keep the best);
-Learning patterns and activities to use for specific content types;
-Learning efficient ways to do rote-learning and drilling;
-A chance for them to see if we feel at ease in front of a class.
Training was mainly easy although I had some trouble with anything that required quick memorization. I have a good head, but memorization is not my cup of tea. At the end of my training I was given my teaching schedule for the following week.
Snow:
In Canada, when it snows we use heavy machinery and salt to clear roads. In China, they don't use any salt at all: They break everything by hand using shoves and pick everything up using said shovels. They clear all the roads this way, including highways. They do have some machines that will go on the biggest arteries to brush the streets and remove leftovers or some others that will break the ice, but the picking up and clearing phase is entirely done by hand.
Harbin:
On Monday (our day off), I went to Harbin with another foreigner and our boss' assistant. We went by train. The ride was nice and smooth and I took many pictures. Harbin is a big city close to Russia. It even was occupied by Russian forced in the past.We visited underground stores and I bought a shirt.
Work:
The training I went through made teaching here seem much more complicated than it really is. Although the average schedule is light (I have an average of 14 hours/week to teach and some have about 20), the way it is scheduled is what makes it aggravating for some.
I work at a private English school. We teach English as a foreign language only. From Tuesday to Friday, students come to our classes for two hours after their regular school day. This means we will teach only up to 8 hours from Tuesday to Friday inclusively. This means that if you have a 20 hours schedule, you will teaching 12 hours during the weekend. Unfortunately, your schedule is also not planned by taking into account that splitting your hours evenly on weekends would be a good idea. This means you could end up teaching 2 hours on Saturday and 10 on Sunday.
Teaching only 2 hours in the evening sounds very good, and it really is not bad at all. It certainly beats work schedules I had before. The only caveat is that we have to prepare our classes at school because we are not allowed to bring the material or any textbook back home. English schools are everywhere in China right now and very little schools actually provide material, textbooks or any training. By not allowing teachers to bring the material with them, they make sure they can keep their advantage over their competitors. Given the situation here, I can't really blame them for this. Also, because you only have your "plans" from your Chinese co-teachers pretty late most of the time, you can't just sit down one day and plan the entire week in advance and be done with it. We also have "office hours". It basically is 4 hours we have to be at our assigned school to work on our plans for the weekend classes.
In the following updates I will go deeper on the teaching philosophy here and how I see it as a professional ESL teacher.
Food:
Food in China is all over the place. It is very inexpensive to eat here and you can find almost anything you want if you don't mind paying a little bit more. Of course, Western food such as hamburgers, pizza and hot-dogs are very difficult to find here but mostly doable in a big city.
You can have prepared noodles with meatballs for about 6 yuans (a bit less than a dollar right now) or have a meal at KFC for about 30-40 yuans.
When you eat something that does not have noodles in it , it means you are probably eating chicken. KFC and imitators are everywhere. Even McDonald (a lot less popular here than back home) has half of its menu made up of chicken burgers.
Most of the food you will find here is spicy. If you do happen to find Western brands here, it will most certainly not taste the same, and probably not to the best. For example, McDonald tastes the same except the cheese tastes more like Kraft cheese and the taste of ketchup is stronger. I buy skittles here. They are the same except they are harder to chew and they taste a bit different.
Getting around:
Bus: Bus rides are very cheap. It costs 2 yuans for a ride (about 30 cents) and they have a very good coverage here. Finding the right bus is difficult though because they don't have a bus routes map anywhere.
Taxi: Taking a taxi is also not expensive (unless, like me, you have to take one or a bus everyday in which case you're better off taking a bus and to save money on the long run). Getting into the taxi costs 5 yuans (about 70 cents) and you get 4 kilometers for that. Then they charge from 1.2 to 1.6 yuans per kilometer. They don't charge for time so you can stay in a cab during a traffic jam and not worry about the price going up.
This is all for now.
Take care.
-Yan
*I'll add pictures to this post as soon as I can.
