What is past is prologue

I am now already almost three weeks in China, time travels fast - very fast! The past week has been my first full working week. What can I say? It was exhausting, exhilarating (to a certain degree), but most of all Interesting (with capital I)!

The most beautiful thing is that every day I learn and see something new! Yesterday we (the younger foreign teachers) visited Suzhou (苏州), a city to the West from Wuxi. It is famous for its silk, pretty gardens and impressive history. Unfortunately like other cities in Eastern China, Suzhou has started to commodify its antiques and now commercialised most of its ancient history. Commercialism has reached the inner- city and wasted most of the city's beauty. It is sometimes strange to walk in a country, which gave birth to Confucius, but now seems so obsessed with money and status. It must be a difficult to reestablish harmony in a kingdom, which was once so powerful and balanced, but now seems to suffer from the diseases of ultra “laissez fairism”. I am happy not to have to perform the great tasks that still lie ahead of the Chinese State! Those duties I leave to my student!

My students are very different than I initially expected; they all come from rich families and are a tad spoiled. However, they are great fun (most of them at least! =)), enthusiastic and sometimes brilliant! I have two classes. The first one (the nicest once) consists of mainly girls, which tend to be better students than boys in China (WHICH IS NOT TRUE IN THE WEST!). The second one is more diverse (i.e. about 50% girls and 50% boys) and is in fact a bit bigger (27 students compared to 20 students in the first class). I teach them both 9 hours per week, which is thus 18 hours in total. Really a lot of hard work as they are not so talkative, which is why I have to do most of the talking (boring!).

I have not started to train my Chinese yet! The first week was really exhausting. The preparing of the different exams and homework assignments took so much time that I saw myself forced to cut down on the things I initially came for (learning Chinese and getting familiar with China!). The coming week I plan to do it differently and hope to have more time for myself. I also hope that I can start my Chinese lessons soon. Actually I am very much looking forward to start, as the Chinese characters are truly beautiful and pose a serious challenge!

Anyways I have to go now, still a whoooole lot of grading/ marking and assessing to do!

I hope you are all doing fine!!! Keep me informed and thanks for the many sweet comments and emails!

Marijn

Ps. Sorry, I did not have time to reply to all of your emails yet... I will do so this week (hopefully...). I am really busy, the job takes a lot more time than expected...