CTLC presents: Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

As I previously mentioned, some of us have formed a small theater troupe and have been preparing (inconsistently) since November to perform Twelfth Night.  The days have finally come!  We opened last week for a middle school to great reception, and followed up on the weekend with two public performances.  The Saturday night show was packed, the Sunday matinee a little less so, but it was a blast and people have reviewed it with enjoyment.  After several set backs, including issues with custom tailored costumes and a key actor having to drop out at the last minute, the show has gone on.  Our final performance is tonight for an English festival which will supposedly have a couple thousand people, so fingers crossed!

This was my first experience ever with acting and my character --Olivia -- was fairly central to the play.  It was a lot of fun.  Not sure, actually positive, that acting is not in my general future but I think I've held my own and as one of the directors told me, I wasn't the worst he'd ever seen.  I took that as a great compliment.

The plot line is roughly summed up as follows:  Twins, a boy and a girl, are separated in a storm at sea and think each other dead.  The girl comes on shore, for some reason dresses as a man, and is employed by a duke.  The duke is in love with the lady Olivia and sends his new assistant to try to woo her for him.  The lady dislikes the duke but takes a liking to the "boy".  To add to this, her servant is also in love with her and through a prank pulled by other characters believes she loves him to, and makes advances wearing yellow tights and inviting her to bed.  And on top of that, her uncle is a drunk and has an equally foolish friend who is also in love with Olivia.  And of course there is a fool (who in Shakespeare is always one of the most clever characters) who wanders around enabling mischief.  At the end, the brother twin shows up and it is revealed that the "boy" employed by the duke is the twin sister.  The duke and the sister are engaged, and Olivia and the twin brother are engaged.
Some pictures:

Olivia and Viola/Cesario

The suitors

The fool, the clown, and the drunk

Olivia and servants

Duke Orsino and Viola/Cesario

Malvolio's yellow stockings

Middle school audience

Beginnings of the prank on Malvolio

Furthering the prank on Malvolio

Yellow stockings?!

Fight scene between suitors

Saturday's audience

Daylight Savings...

Does not exist in China!  This means two things.  1: Remember that when trying to set up skype dates and other such rendezvous with me  2: I don't have to wake up an hour early mwahaha :P

In other news, some pictures.  Thomas and I stumbled upon a "Dutch Flower Village"  which was a very bizarre little fake town that looks like it's supposed to be an attraction but ran out of money.

Lolz.  Great name.

Complete with fake trolley.

And around our area, the creepiest manikin at the mall

China has some of the creepiest manikins. 

And tut tut looks like rain.  Guess monsoon season's back!  Only this time it's much colder.

It wasn't raining an hour before this, and it hasn't stopped all day.

 Happy DST foreign friends!

(Long) updates

Well we’ve come a long way from that first week I was inevitably late to every class because I kept getting lost in my school.  Some of the teachers still send student escorts to fetch me just in case though.  It’s hard to believe it’s been seven months in China already, but here we are in March.  So I thought I would give an update as to what my life is like.

Teaching is getting easier and harder.  Easier because I’ve gotten into the swing of things and every time is not a completely new experience for me.  I know which classes I have what days, and can even identify some of the 1,000 students by their class – which is more difficult than it sounds because there are four classes per grade.  It still takes me an hour or two to lesson plan for the grade but it’s because I’m busy finding funny pictures for the ppts rather than because I’m desperately searching all the teaching websites to find a clue as to what I’m doing.

Harder because I’ve learned enough now to know what it is I’m not great at, classroom management being number one.  Which as any real teacher will tell you is the most important thing you need to be able to do.  If I’m alone in a class of 40-50 students and they decide they want to be naughty and not work that day, I haven’t a hope to stop that.  It doesn’t sound like anyone here has phenomenal ideas as to how I would accomplish that though, so at least I know I am far from alone amongst the foreign teachers. 

I’ve also accumulated some extra students.  I started tutoring a couple first grade boys and that’s been an experience in the opposite way of what you’d think.  I’ve having much more trouble socializing with the family than teaching the boys!  Perhaps my biggest discovery so far is that the language barrier is the smallest and easiest of the barriers here.  Customs and cultural norms are much more difficult to overcome.  It still feels like the Twilight Zone because of that.  For the tutoring gig, I’ve learned that you can’t simply come for an hour or two and tutor their children.  They insist on giving me dinner (and so far I haven’t found cause to say no!) but then if I don’t eat to the point of exploding they assume I hate the food.  The first time I was there they apologized at least a thousand times for the home cooked meal, which of course had no problems, quizzed me on what foods I “actually” liked, and then took it a step further and made me a second meal after the tutoring to see if I would like that better!  No matter how many times I insisted I like the food, they would not believe me.  I felt it was ridiculous, but clearly I was making some kind of fox paws ( J ).  I just hope they weren’t actually offended!

Language barriers are definitely the least of the barriers.  Between my experiences and other colleagues’ that much is clear.  We see now why people discuss the great East-West cultural barriers.  It makes for interesting experience from a forensic point of view but is very frustrating and difficult for us living.  Everything from the above meal to the extremely sexist norms of behavior are making us more home sick!  At least our strange cultural ideas are familiar to us and more comfortable.

On a positive note, we are sensing the coming of the end of our time here and are making an effort to get more weekend trips in.  You saw our Kaiping trip a couple weeks ago, and we have more planned for the near future.

It will have to wait until after March though, because some of us are super busy putting on a play.  That’s right, we are staging Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night this month.  We’ve been working on it for a long time because of vacations and scheduling issues, but we finally get to perform.  I don’t know how happy I am about that because I have an awful lot of lines as Olivia and zero acting experience!  It’s pretty stressful, I just don’t want to embarrass myself!  Luckily very few, if any, of our audience of foreign teachers and interested Chinese would recognize a mistake in the lines.  The would be more comforting if I hadn’t been an English Lit major – the lines are the only easy part for me!  Haha.  I bet it will go well, we are excited to get it rolling.

Well, this post alone has taken over a week to write because of busy schedules and a spring cold that’s been circulating, so I will leave it here.  I’ve made the decision to not come back next year, at least not to this city or as a primary school teacher.  My return date is mid-July, and it’s sounding more and more desirable!

Miss you all, I’ll try to get more shorter posts in here as we go.

Pets

My grade 3 textbook unit on pets.  Just a funny breach of anticipation logic.

A kitten, a puppy, and a.... carrot?

Just to give you an idea...

Just to give you an idea of what it's like here.  This is a very common scene, but I hadn't gotten evidence of it because it's illegal (not to mention weird) to take a picture of kids taking a dump on the sidewalk and then having their butts wiped by their parents.
Not kidding, it's a daily view here.  Kids don't wear diapers, they wear pants with a slit up the backside so they can take a squat where ever.  That smelly thing you stepped in is more likely from a child than a dog!  Oh, China.

Picture from  http://i.imgur.com/pzRXJ.png

Kaiping Day Trip

jenniferautumnd's photostream on Flickr.

This weekend we (Christiane, Thomas, Matt and myself) got off our couches and took a day trip to Kaiping, a city that's about 3 hours away by bus. It's famous for it's buildings called Diaolous, which are essentially tiny castles slash fortified houses which were built by returning overseas Chinese who had made it big. They were greatly concerned about bandits and put much effort into these buildings for protection. The styles are unique because the overseas Chines picked up interest in architecture from around the world and integrated it with typical Chinese styles.

They are also the perfect spot to get to in case of a zombie outbreak, we've decided.

The city of Kaiping isn't great though. We had more than enough time in 6 hours too see/do everything we could. And it is not a foreigner friendly city! We had to modify our plans several times because when we got to a site, the ticket office would tell us we had to buy a ridiculously expensive ticket -- think of it this way, seeing the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi'an cost Y70, and to see these fortified houses they wanted Y100! They even told the driver we hired that it would be free if we were Chinese. ::sigh:: sometimes China's frustratingly outdated.  Needless to say, we didn't pay it.  Instead we would try to drive around and see what we could, and at one site our driver distracted the ticket ladies while we ran by like we didn't know any better!

That aside, it was a fun trip and we got to see a decent amount. Our driver was very helpful and introduced us to different spots and the regional foods.

We left at 5:30am and got back at 11:00pm, long day! But we get to check another location off our list!

More information on Kaiping:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiping

TYNKWD -- Security Guards

Things you never knew were dangerous, in this case by being simply inept and entirely useless -- security guards.
Several times we've witnessed scenes where in the US, or almost anywhere, security personnel would have immediately stepped in and taken action.  And every time we've seen Chinese security guards... do nothing.  It's amazing.  They are possibly more useless than banks that can't make change for a Y20.

Example 1.  While enjoying a latte at Starbucks, Thomas and I witnessed a young woman in a dramatic tantrum worthy of a soap opera.  While we watched, she lay down on the ground and didn't move for 10 minutes, no exaggeration.  However, there was a security guard walking around who saw it, so we assumed it must be alright.  Just when we were getting concerned it was a health issue, she stands up and starts screaming at the man she was apparently with.  Sadly, we have no idea what about and it has been the object of speculation ever since.  They went back and forth for a while, with security looking on, and then he starts to walk away.  At which point she flat out attacks him.  He stops her, they talk some more, and then they storm away.  During this entire exchange, security guards did nothing but join the gathered crowd to watch!  Mind boggling.

Example 2.  At a bar, several people had gotten entirely too drunk including a young woman.  She had been falling down and acting plastered for a while.  All of a sudden, she runs up to a man at the bar, grabs him by his hair, and drags him by the hair 10 feet across the floor.  Drunk people jump in to help, and a small fight breaks out.  During this fight, several people are hit and a large disgusting man even shoves a bystanding woman onto the floor.  A security guard comes up, tells the woman to stop, she kicks him, and he steps back and does nothing.
This fight continues as several of the involved people make for the door, and re-erupts outside the bar.  Again we aren't sure what was going on or why she was so mad at this man, sadly, but it made for an interesting show.  An hour later when we were leaving, the woman and her people were still outside blocking the exit, and just inside the doors was a circle of security guards talking with each other.  Again, doing nothing.

Example 3.  In the paper today --

 A 20-MINUTE camera video clip showing inaction by a security guard while a middle school student was attacked by a dozen other youths has drawn wide criticism from the public.

    The video clip showed the student was cornered and attacked Tuesday in front of the security office in Songquan Middle School in Luohu District. Twelve or so youths slapped, kicked and threw cigarette butts at the student, the video clip showed.

    The security guard who witnessed the incident later explained he was alone in the office while on duty and was afraid of the youths, who often hang around the school to collect Mafia-style protection fees and beat other students.

Shenzhen Daily

Many of the guards are not actual police officers.  But do they call the police?  Do they even attempt to help? Nope.

In summary, perhaps security guards are not dangerous.  In fact, they are the exact opposite -- useless.  The dangerous thing here is to be attacked in front of a security guard because they will do nothing.  "I'll call the police!" just doesn't have the same threat that way.
China, China, China... Tsk tsk.