Mid Autumn Festival

Tuesday was my birthday, and also the day of Mid Autumn Festival which is apparently the 2nd largest event in the Chinese calendar. People get together with their families and have nice meals and then stay up all night playing with lanterns and watching the full moon. It's all something to do with a man who was given potion that would make him fly by a god, but then his wife stole it whilst he was out one day and then she flew to the moon and couldn't come back. Apparently she has a jade rabbit to keep her company up there.

Rabbit lantern display

I got quite a few cards in the post, in fact some women sharing the lift with me commented that I had a lot of post, which lead to a few minutes of English conversation with my neighbours, although they live in Block B not Block A so we went our different directions after the first lift.

I went down to Victoria Park, which is on Hong Kong island, to check out the lanterns displays. The park was full of people milling around. There were lots of children and adults with lanterns, some of which were traditional and papery looking and made in the shape of fish, whilst others were more like inflatable toys with tiny torches in the middle. I even saw one little boy with a Buzz Lightyear lantern. There were lots of signs saying that lanterns with candles inside were forbidden.

A lantern tower in Victoria Park

Lantern bamboo screen

Hanging lanterns

The most exciting thing about Mid Autumn Festival, other than the pretty lighting, is that everyone gets the day after off work to recover from staying up staring at the moon all night. I wasn't exactly staring at the moon, but we did hit Central for some birthday celebrations! The Wednesday holiday was thus spent doing not very much at all.

It was back to school on Thursday, where this week I've been doing a lesson on Acceptance Speeches for Awards Ceremonies. We acted a scene from Harry Potter in last week's classes and the kids voted on which student was the Best Harry, Best Ron etc, so this week they prepared speeches and made paper plate awards and then we held an awards ceremony and I announced the results. It was great fun, even the fifth time round!

Houston collecting his Best Harry award

Carmen gives her Best Hermione acceptance speech

Tonight was parents night, so I had to stay in school until 9pm (that's a 13 hour day at work!). Rich and I appeared to be there just so the parents could smile and stare at us, as the actual presentation to the parents was all in Cantonese. The teachers sat next to me kept translating bits though, and seeing all the parents of the children I teach reminded me that I've actually got the potential to have a big impact on all of their lives. Not in a scary way, more in a motivational way that makes me want to get all our lunchtime and after school activities up and running, and spend less time doing lesson plans in the staffroom and more time out in the playground chatting with the students.

Jude and Fiona (friends from my uni course) have arrived for a few days stopover en route to New Zealand. They're too jet lagged for socialising tonight but we're hopefully going to do touristy things all weekend.

Home comforts

I'm writing this from the comfort of my own flat - I spent much of last Saturday out laptop shopping and then on Wednesday we got internet installed in out flat. Hong Kong is pretty good at technology - my laptop (after a great amount of trailing round Hong Kong) came from a 3 storey computer centre just 5 minutes walk away from our flat, and we arranged out internet at a stall on a street running paralled to ours. We spoke to a man at about 5pm, and by 9 o'clock they'd come round and we were online!

It's a good thing really because things at school have been getting more hectic and I haven't had time to spare for faffing around on the internet. Lessons are going alright, although it's amazing the different reactions you get when you teach the same class to 5 different sets of students. Rich and I had to do a lunchtime Meaningful Task on Thursday, which was a little like an assembly. We had the whole school (only actually about 200 kids) in the hall and played Who Wants to be a Millionaire with them using the powerpoint and the giant screen they have. It was a little bit like being back at PGL as we tried to keep them all involved by getting them to cheer for their teams and shout out the answers. I got to have a microphone!

I haven't been doing too much exploring this recently. Last Saturday was spent laptop shopping, and then on Sunday a group of us went for dim sum and I went a wander round the Flower Market which is quite near my flat. The Flower Market is a bit like an extended version of a garden centre. It's a long road of individual flower and houseplant shops, with stalls out in front so that you walk along a narrow path of pavement between the plants. They have not so exotic flowers like roses all carefully wrapped up and then amazing looking lillies and things which are just left out in the open air. I plan to go back and invest in a wee plant for the flat at some point.

I got a bit more adventurous with my market shopping this week and bought one of the amazing pink dragonfruits. They look a LOT more exciting than they taste.

Pink dragonfruit

Inside the dragonfruit

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!)

Touristic reports from a cybercafe

I'm writing to you today from a cyber cafe on my new street. It's full of people playing role player games so I'm surrounded by the sounds of electronic fights, gunshots and frantic clicking of mouses. It's all rather a contrast to the library where everyone on the computers diligently wears their headphones and taps away in silence.

Officially moved out of the youth hostel yesterday and into the flat. It is still very bare and empty, but the mattresses arrived today (hurrah!) so at least now I have something to sleep on, and I've been out to purchase a kettle and mugs for essential cups of tea. I'm surviving on peppermint tea at the minute cause there's no fridge to keep milk in.

Had a lovely weekend last weekend. On the Friday night the Chatteris crew hit Lan Kwai Fong (imagine Ibiza/Corfu/18-20s holiday but with expats of a variety of ages and flashing neon signs in Chinese) to celebrate surviving another week in this crazy city. In Hong Kong the pubs seem to never close and when I got a taxi home at 4 in the morning we actually got stuck in a TRAFFIC jam!

Penelope, Kristy, Amy and Sat on D'Aguillar St near Lan Kwai Fong

Saturday was a bit more relaxed - a few of us went to visit the Man Mo temple on Hong Kong island. It's a temple to the gods of war and literature (I think) and is renowned for the amazing incense coils that hang from it's ceiling. When we arrived the sun was filtering through some slits up near the room and making fantastic sunlit stripes through the incense smoke. Picture perfect camera opportunity but you'll have to wait for the photos (though I believe there are some in the China edition of Lonely Planet if you want a sneak peak). The temple was full of richly decorated shrines and people lighting candles and incense sticks and leaving offerings of fruit and (strangely) takeaway food, but after about 5 minutes the smoke from the incense starts to REALLY hit your eyes and you have to retreat to the street outside.

Incense coils in the Man Mo temple

Sunday I managed to meet up with Georgia (a friend from my Uganda trip) who'd been train-ing her way through Asia. We went on the Star Ferry which is number one on every tourist checklist of Hong Kong. It's very strange to be on a decidedly tourist-y boat and yet have cargo ships going past you. Georgia and I also found our way to Kowloon Park, which is a huge park and apparently has a swimming pool in it that we didn't find. We spent a while sitting in the shade by a duck pond catching up on gossip but decided to move on after a second group of people asked to take photographs with us! I'm used to the kids in Romania last summer constantly asking to take photos, and expected the kids at school here might want to do the same thing, but to be asked to be in photos with complete strangers on a random Sunday afternoon in a city as multi-cultural as Hong Kong was a very strange experience.

The famous Star Ferry

Georgia on the Mid-levels Escalators

Starting school on Monday, but no teaching this week as it's reserved for more orientation. We get to shadow the teachers for a day or two and have to have meetings with the principal and things. Rich and I were taken to school yesterday (Thurs) for an initial meeting with everyone. The meeting was fine and the school staff are really lovely, but finding our way back became a bit of a mission! We waited about 20 minutes for the right bus to come along, and then Rich started just asking each bus if it went to Mong Kok. Eventually one driver took pity on us and told us to come onboard and change on to a 68 later. However, he didn't tell us exactly where to get off so Rich and I found ourselves whizzing down a motorway to an uncertain destination. Luckily, the bus actually went to Tsuen Wan, which I knew was the end of the red MTR (underground) line, so we managed to find our way home eventually. Not to sure how we're going to get back though!

Off to search for a fridge now, and possibly Ikea again as a bit of scouting around has confirmed that it's pretty much the cheapest place to buy home furnishings in Hong Kong.

Bye for now!