School starts

I taught my first lessons today! They went reasonably well, although I had a minor panic when I realised (5 minutes before my lesson started ) that one of the classrooms had no computer in it to show my prepared images on. As the whole lesson was based on using the images to encourage the students to speak, the pictures were pretty essential. Luckily I have a few scenic prints of my Botswana trip last summer that I used for the group work, but in order to have a large enough picture to do a class example I had to get artistic with my whiteboard markers! The students were asked to come up with words to describe the pictures. One of them described my whiteboard doodle as 'beautiful' whilst others came up with 'funny' and 'ugly'. At least I provoked a response!

Last week was a bit slow and aimless as we were expected to do our 8 hours in school each day but not entirely sure what to do to fill the time. In a normal week we have plenty of lessons and after school activities to get planning for but last week we didn't exactly know when our lessons would be or if there were specific topics to plan lessons on. It all got sorted out by the end of the week and Friday afternoon was very productive as me and Rich rapidly tried to sort out everything for our 9 o'clock monday lessons. We also went out with the other English teachers for dim sum on Friday (the traditional Hong Kong experience). It was really nice to chat to them in a more relaxed atmosphere than the office like staffroom, though they did giggle a bit at my chopstick skills.

Dim sum with the English teachers:

Priscilla, Peggy, Nicole, Carrie, Carrie, Me and Rich

The flat is looking a bit more like a home now. A sofa, comfy chair, coffee table and fridge arrived over the course of last week, although still no sign of my bed because Ikea have found a fault with their cheapest line of single beds (though not the double sized version that my flatmate Tom ordered!) and are getting rid of all their current stock and then (hopefully) getting new ones in at the end of the month. I've got my mattress to sleep on till then and the next bed up in about twice the price so I'm off to Ikea tonight to try and get a definite date for delivery. The fridge was the definite highlight of the week because now I can have tea with milk and no sugar (although the milk is UHT).

Went to visit the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens over the weekend with Blair and Rehana (2 Americans from my group). The gardens are right in the heart of Central which is pretty much the financial district, so you get strange angular views of skyscrapers above the palm trees and animal cages. There's a few aviaries full of brightly coloured birds, monkeys and lemurs (though most of them were sleeping at 3 in the afternoon), tortoises, 2 chinese alligators, a greenhouse full of orchids and lots of mosquitoes (not in any cages but I seemed to collect a lot of bites yesterday!). It was nice to see some natural sights as a break from the neon lights of Mong Kok. The zoo also has a Burmese Python in it's reptile house which is about as fat as my thigh and looks extremely long. It was an odd sensation to see a scary looking snake and then read on the information board that it's "common in Hong Kong"!

Animals at the zoo (Blair and Rehana!)