Looking forwards to February

Well January is turning out to be a less than exciting month. With February offering us the chance to have an entire months holiday, everyone has organised to leave Shijiazhuang. Brock, Becky, Meredith and Hilary are all leaving for Thailand; Charlie is travelling around China, meeting up with his girlfriend in Shanghai – for Valentines Day (how romantic); and I booked the first flight back to England. This has meant though that we are all now looking forwards to February, rather than enjoying January as much as we might have otherwise.

This also means that daily life in Shijiazhuang is more repetitive than ever, with nothing of any interest to you occurring. China never fails to offer at least something to amuse me, every once and a while. This week for my lesson, I downloaded (Charlie downloaded and I stole) numerous pictures of different places to visit in England. Most were of London, but I did my best to promote the North! One picture in particular was of a London bus, a picture I managed to talk about for a surprisingly long time. On Monday, after I finished talking about the bus, I was attacked –verbally.

The Chinese students are taught to speak English phonetically, thus they pronounce ‘bus’ as ‘bas’ – how Hyacinth Bucket might pronounce it. The students decided enough was enough, and they were going to correct my pronunciation. ‘Its not bus, its bas’ the little buggers shouted. I fought back. I wrote ‘bass – bas – bus’ on the board, informing them that the first word is the name of a fish. I then got the whole class to read the words out loud – and yup, they were exactly the same. So I asked them if when they visit London, they really wanted to have a ride on a fish? But this was lost on them. So we left it at that, both believing the other to be wrong. I have made a promise to myself though, from now on I am going to try and get them to say ‘Shut’ as much as possible, even try for ‘I shut it myself’. Ah the fun.