Friday 9th September

Today is National teacher day and we were met at the gate by security holding a red flower for each of us. I then spent the morning photocopying and putting books into alphabetical order in the library, and then finishing the reading assessments for grade 1A, so boring! The lesson I had before lunch was getting grade 1A used to writing. I was going round the class and one of the little boy’s was writing about his new cat and as he was telling me about him told me that he has named his new cat “Pippa” not sure whether that is a compliment or not? Although this is the same little boy that drew me a picture a few days ago so I am going to pretend that it is! I carried on round the class and another little boy was writing about a monster, I asked him what his writing said and he told me “I like big scary monsters that eat Miss Pippa” oh right, err thanks for that.

Lunch was horrendous again so I have come to an agreement with one of the other girls, if I buy the bread and peanut butter, she will make me sandwiches everyday! I just can’t stomach the pig trotter “soup” basically, just water with pigs trotters in. Yuck!

An apartment crawl had been organised for the evening (sort of like a bar crawl, but with apartments) a good way to get to know the other teachers outside of school and also to see where the other teachers lived and who lives near who. I had put my apartment down as one of the stops (stop number 6 to be exact) and there were 7 stops in total with over 30 teachers taking part. It was a fun night and nice to see how homely some of the other teachers had made their apartments. When it got to my stop it was midnight and all was going well until 12.45am when a security guard turned up at my door saying something in Chinese which I’m guessing meant keep the noise down. At that point we all left and were on our way to the next stop when a police van pulled up outside my apartment, I just pretended I didn’t live there and carried on walking! Apparently it happens a lot, the Chinese won’t ask you to keep the noise down, they just call the police! We got to our next stop and were there for roughly 45minutes when the police turned up again and we all had to leave. It was a fun night though and nice to get to know the other teachers outside of work.