Kids and kareoke

Started our proper orientation training on Monday. We spend our mornings learning about different things we can do with the kids, then get an hour and a half (ish) to have lunch and come up with a plan for the 2 forty-five minute sessions we have to run in the afternoon. Monday afternoon was absolute carnage as we were all (about 20 teachers and over 160 teenagers) in one assembly hall trying to carry out our activities in small groups. The kids kept wandering off to join other groups and anyone more than 4 paces away from you couldn't hear what you were saying. Things got a lot better today though as we had them separated out into different classrooms. My activity for the day (with Rich, who I'll be sharing a school with, and Jennifer) was a slightly more complicated version of scrabble called 'Upwords' so our classroom was actually very calm and peaceful, good thing really as it was Rich's birthday yesterday so he was feeling a little worse for wear.

Had my first experience of Hong Kong kareoke last night. It was pretty crazy. There were at least 30 of us in a private party room with shiny metallic wallpaper and big leather couches. To begin with, people were gingerly singing into one mic at a time, but as the evening wore on and the songs got cheesier and cheesier (think Spice Girls, Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys) the group mentality took over and we were all singing along so loudly you couldn't HEAR who had the microphone.

Kareoke party

Went out to look at a few flats this afternoon in an area called Mei Foo which is slightly further out of town than here but a good stop on the KCR line that I need to take out to my school. Hong Kong flats are often kitchenless, so the first one we saw today had 1 single ring to cook on and 2 very small sinks. The room size wasn't too bad though, although maybe that's after my year of living in the box room! Both flats we saw today seemed a little expensive for what we were getting, so we're hoping the letting agency can do some bargaining with the landlord. Expect I'll probably be doing more searching though as others have seen at least 10 flats already and still not found quite what they're looking for. Wish me luck!