Home

So... I'm home, and have been for 3 weeks now, but I felt like this blog needed some kind of ending to tidy it up. I like things to be tidy and organised. I'm hoping that'll be an asset in my new life as a teacher in training but worry that it might be more of a problem when the paperwork and lesson plans and essays get on top of me and end up in a big mess.

I got rid of my bed, approximately 10 minutes before the landlord was meant to come round and check the flat and take my keys. The lady who was meant to collect it last time I wrote cancelled on me. Another man came round and looked at the bed and wardrobe then decided they weren't what he was after. The lady who did eventually take away the bed cancelled because it was raining and then had issues rearranging another collection time, but when she arrived she brought a man with her who had the whole thing dismantled in about 5 minutes (with the help of his power tools!) and carried it all away so I didn't have to assist. Which was great!

The last week in school was quite surreal, like I kept noting the date and that in 'X days and X hours' I'd be back in the UK, but the rest of my brain wasn't registering it. On our last Wednesday we were told we had to come to the lunchtime meaningful task. The whole school was there to say goodbye to us - each form class had prepared a song, a poem, a drama or a speech to say thanks. It was really lovely, although Rich and I were sat right at the front of the hall in full view of EVERYONE so I was determined not to get too emotional! Lots of the classes gave us cards or little gifts - one gave me a bag of home made cookies! Perhaps the strangest thing was going back in to school after all that on Thursday and continuing to have lessons. It seemed like a bit of an anticlimax to quietly slip out the school gate at the end of of my last actual day.

Hong Kong was a great experience. When people ask me what it's like, I never know how to reply. It's a city of contrasts ; the skyscrapers against the rugged hillsides, the smooth designer stores against the bustle of Mong Kok street markets, the huge container ships against the idyllic sandy beaches. I like to think I've captured some of that here. It's a crazy place to live but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable. If you have the money you can experience the best of it all, but you'll have to work hard for it, and I don't think I'm cut out for such a work hard, spend hard lifestyle.

I'm going to finish this with a goodbye message from one of my students...

Ms Owens

Work hard, when you go back your county, if i see you again can you speak in cantonese?

Your student

Jay

Tiring Times

Well the show is finally over. It was great fun but truly exhausting and although I miss the people already I'll need to recover before I start missing the rehearsals! On the Tuesday night after the show we had an after party in Grappa's bar, which is in the bottom of Jardine House in Central and I had so much fun chatting to people that I didn't want to leave. Hopefully I'll meet up with some of them again in the next few months.

Some of the girls from Anything Goes... and a sailor!

I've been busy at school as usual as Rich is still off with his broken jaw. I got my English Ambassador team to make egg shaped clues to post around the school for an Egg Hunt on Wednesday and watched Freaky Friday (a Disney film) at lunchtimes with some of the 2nd year girls.

Hong Kong has had 3 school children die from flu related illnesses recently, so they've stepped up precautions and lots of schools are going on holiday early. My school hasn't closed yet (we're due to finish on Thursday anyway) but the morning reading period is now dedicated to taking every students' temperature and around half of my students are sporting delightful blue face masks to protect them from everyone else's germs. It may seem a bit crazy and over the top but Hong Kong suffered hugely with SARS and in a city where everyone lives so densely packed together it's better to be safe than sorry.

On Saturday night Scott decided to have an early birthday dinner, as everyone is jetting off on their Easter holidays before his actual birthday next weekend. We went to a Chinese restaurant on the top floor of the North Point Wet Market on Java Road. The food was standard Chinese restaurant stuff but I haven't been for a big group meal in ages and it was fun to share lots of dishes and drink Tsing Tao out of bowls! It was really nice to see some Chatteris people that I hadn't caught up with in a while (due mainly to show rehearsals) and I've even got some of them on video thanks to Ken's imagination and the spinny lazy susan on our table!

Bowls of beer

Hopefully, this shows people at Scott's birthday meal!

Only a few days of school left before the Easter break, when I'm taking a whirlwind trip back to Britain to go to a PGCE interview. Feeling a bit guilty about my giant carbon footprint but looking forward to real milk and bread and cheese.

On the other hand, I've recently become really pleased with the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables you get in Hong Kong. The other week I bought 4 passionfruits, 3 mangos and a green coconut (with a straw in it to drink the milk!) for less than a fiver. It's fabulous! And this evening I went out to the market and bought 5 tomatoes, still on their vine, for less than a pound. Shopping in Tesco's just wont be the same.

Made it to March!

I haven't much time for blogging at the minute. I've been rehearsing with the Hong Kong singers 3 or 4 times a week, and as of tomorrow I'll be at City Hall every evening for 8 days straight. It's going to be exhausting but hopefully a lot of fun!



Since last time I wrote, the weather has warmed up a lot. Today it was warm enough for me to go out with a skirt and no tights on! I've not been doing much exploring though.



Me, Rachel and Scott found a new bar (well, new to me!) called Ned Kelly's last stand. It's in Tsim Sha Tsui and has a live jazz band that play every night. The bar is pretty crowded (we were there on a Friday) but the atmosphere is really fun and relaxed, which makes a change from the somewhat pretentious bars in Central where everyone seems to be trying to work out how much you spent on your outfit. The jazz band were really good too. We were dancing in our seats!

Inside Ned Kelly's... it's a bit dark but you can make out the band

At school we were getting musical too last week. We made AMAZING horns from plastic drinking straws with little funnels of paper stuck on the end. It takes a little while to get the knack of making the noise with them but once they work they're pretty loud! This week we're beginning our Easter celebrations by making little yellow pompom chicks.

Some of the girls from 1E with their horns

Celia and Jace with their pompom chicks

That's all for now folks!

Off again!

I'm off to Borneo today. Quite scared as me and Rachel have booked everything online, a little haphazardly, so it'll be interesting to see if all our plans actually work out. It seems very strange to be leaving Hong Kong for a holiday when I still quite often feel completely confused and foreign in Hong Kong!

The last week of school was quite fun. We had a Speech Competition where the kids were given a topic and then had to stand up and try to talk about it for a minute without any preparation time. The students who took part did really well so I feel like maybe me and Rich have made a small difference to their confidence, if nothing else. We also had to do our own performance in front of the school yesterday. It was Christmas Activity Day and we were asked to do half an hour on 'Introducing the Western Ways of Celebrating Christmas.' We did a little powerpoint presentation with lots of pictures of Christmas decorations and lots of talk about Christmas lunch, and then we taught them to sing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer! I'm sure the school took photos of me singing and Rich strumming his guitar like a little folk band, so I'll try and upload one after the holidays.

I don't know if I'll get a chance to get online whilst I'm travelling so for now...

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

A week in the wilderness

November weather is nice and cool, making it a very good time of year to go exploring the 80% of Hong Kong that is still an undeveloped, mountainous wilderness. However, having noticed that my blog so far is full of pictures of beaches and parks, I'll endeavour to include some pictures of buildings in this entry!

Last weekend I went on a very leisurely hike from the Wan Chai Gap to... Aberdeen! The (mainly downhill) walk went past the Aberdeen reservoirs which look very odd. You get wild, jungley greenery growing down to the sides of the reservoir, but then the water levels were quite low and the baked orange coloured rocks that line the sides of the reservoir look like they've been carefully sculpted by people. Aberdeen itself has a nice waterfront promenade to stroll along, although it's not the most peaceful stroll due to the old women offering rides on their sampans.

The waterfront at Aberdeen

Me and a reservoir

On Monday at 1pm I set off in a bus full of orange and black tracksuited teenagers to school camp. We went to Sai Kung country park, in the Eastern New Territories, where we stayed in the Lady Maclehose Holiday Village (me for 1 night and the students for 2 nights - the teachers were on a rota!). The holiday village was quite similar to the 'camp' that we stayed at when we first arrived in Hong Kong, but this time there were individual bungalows instead of blocks of dorm rooms, so we had our own teachers bungalow where we could hide from the kids. On Day 1, we went on a boat trip to see some corals. Instead of having an expensive glass bottomed boat, the students were equipped with plastic buckets that had glass plates stuck in the bottom. They pushed these against the surface of the water (leaning over the side of the boat) so they could see the seabed quite clearly. It's a great idea, but sadly the corals we were looking at were disappointingly grey and lifeless. We then returned to camp for dinner in the canteen and the poor students had to sit for 2 and a half hours watching an episode of Blue Planet (they dubbed over David Attenborough with Cantonese!), a presentation on coral environments, a video about mangroves and a presentation about creatures that live in the mangroves. I don't think the environmental instructors who were running the programme had done much work with school groups before!

The boats speed back to land

Day 2 at school camp was sunnier than Day 1. In the morning we went a wee walk beside a mangrove. The instructor kept stopping and explaining interesting things about the plants we were seeing, but the student didn't seem that interested and the explanation was in Cantonese. At the end of our walk we got to scramble on a beach that the mangrove was slowly reclaiming and look for crabs under the rocks. Then it was back to camp for lunch, which we needed as fuel for our afternoon hike. We walked up a hill and down the other side to a BEAUTIFUL, rugged, isolated beach. There were warning signs about dangerous undercurrents, but that didn't stop me and a few of the boys having a paddle!

Girls on the beach

Boys on the beach

The rest of the school week was comparably uneventful. The students were still at camp on Wednesday but I had to go in and lesson plan for 3 hours, and on Thursday we all had a day off to recover, but I didn't do anything unusual.


On Friday Cat arrived in town for the weekend. We had a nice dinner in Knutsford Terrace and then took a quick stoll along the waterfront en route back to her hotel. She's been busy with her dad's business aquaintance's family for the rest of the weekend but we'll hopefully have dinner again tomorrow before she jets off home.


Since I wasn't required to tour guide Cat around, I went off on another hike today. This one came from 'The Serious Hiker's Guide to Hong Kong' so it was a bit more strenous. We climbed up from Tai Wai MTR to Amah Rock and then on to Lion Rock, which is about 500m high and is part of the ridge that forms a natural boundary between Kowloon and the New Territories. The views on the ridge are pretty impressive - you can see the whole length of Hong Kong Island - but the haze means that cameras don't really capture it too well. We could tell it was a 'Serious' hike when the concrete path disappeared. Up near the top we had to scramble amongst the rocks. I'm hoping my legs won't ache too much tomorrow!

Elise, Scott and Sarah hold up Amah Rock

View of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island

The scary ridge.

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!)