Read it and enjoy…

Hey fam,
Sounds like there’s a lot of action in the dog sector of the Edwards home. That’s her way of saying she loves you. Or her way of trying to kill you. Hard to say. One way or another, maybe it’s time to think about doing a little training, now that I am out of the country and it cannot physically be my responsibility.

Well I am settling in nicely. Two nights ago I moved in with my home-stay family, which is basically composed of a fourteen-year-old boy, because his mother is in the US and his father works very late each night. It’s great though. The kid is really nice (this morning he drew me a detailed map of the area and the bus stops so I could find my way to work). Something really funny happened yesterday morning, my first morning at the house. Actually, at the time, it was not funny. It was terrible, an act of desperation. But in retrospect it is very funny. To give you some background, the night before, I crashed early, and Stephen (the kid) mentioned that the door to my room was kind of broken. This posed something of a problem when I woke up the next morning with an urgent desire to urinate. I tried the door, and it was stuck. I pulled hard; I tried force and finnese, and still it would not budge. I really had to piss. I had consumed a lot of water the night before because staying hydrated is important for staying healthy, and it came back to bite me in the ass, or peehole. Anyways, I looked around the room and had no option but to pee in my water bottle. Ten minutes later, I had to pee just as bad, but the water bottle was full, and the only recepticle in sight was a nice ornamental Chinese vase. I pissed in it, and then ten minutes later I pissed in the other vase. I feel really bad about pissing in their vases, but I had no choice. Once I figured out how to open the door (with adroit implementation of credit card), I rinsed them out and returned them to their previous locations.

I am really doing great here. I scored big time with the homestay family. I don’t have to pay them anything. The kid is a really smart overachiever, and his father thinks my teaching him a little English is more than sufficient compensation for my stay. Tonight I finally met the father and he took me and Stephen out to a nice meal, and then to a high class bathouse, or as I like to call it, “house full of small asian penises”. It was really nice. I soaked for a while and then some dude scrubbed off my dead skin with a towel and in the process was-shall we say- less than careful about avoiding my genitalia. He skimmed my balls like a hundred times. Made me a little uncomfortable, but the experience was overall very relaxing. The three of us will go every Saturday.

At dinner I offered to pay the check, and the father nearly killed me. He was like, no no no no! The family is really great. Tomorrow they’re taking me to a big festival at the nearby Olympic park, where there will be music and a fashion show. Apparently the tickets are very expensive and hard to come by, but they won’t allow me to pay for myself.

I’ve figured out how to take buses to work, with the help of Stephen. It is about a fifteen minute bus ride, which costs a whopping sum of one yuan (about fifteen cents). At this rate (buying meals for 12 yuan, buses for one yuan, etc.) I think I’ll be broke pretty soon.

I’ve worked for two days now. I’m slowly getting the hang of it. It is all one-on-one tutoring, which is nice because you can tailor the lesson to the ability level of the student, which ranges from primitive in the cute little five-year-olds to damn-near fluent in the ultra-overachieving eighteen-year-olds. I was wrong; I won’t really be teaching adults. It’s mainly middle school and highschool students. Each student has a different textbook (arranged by difficulty level, from 1 to 6) that he or she is learning from, and I teach according to his or her desire, whether it be reading comprehension, pronunciation, writing, or “free talk”. With some students, mostly boys, teaching is a breeze, because they are eager to talk and I don’t have to rack my brains for topics of basic conversation, but with the shy students, who are mostly girls, it becomes rather difficult to keep a conversation going at their level of fluency.

I am learning a few tricks of the trade, and I have begun a teacher’s notebook to jot down ideas and the like.

The other teachers are really cool. I’d say about a third of them are American, and the others are English, Irish, Scottish, and African, but the school thinks they are American (to comply with the “American Language School” theme) and I honestly don’t think they can differentiate between the accents. It’s funny, throughout the school there are maps of America and American flags. It makes me feel at home.

I have to work quite a bit, and weekends are far from a respite. Weekends are when you work long hours, becasue that’s when the students are not in school and have time to further cram their schedules with structured learning and avoid enjoying their fleeting childhood or adolescence. These kids work like dogs. Like working dogs. Like the hardest workers of the working dogs.

So on the weekends, because I am “full time”, I will work between nine and eleven classes ( the maximum), so from 8:30 in the morning until 6:30 in the evening, roughly. During the week, no classes start before 2:30, and I will have four or five each weekday.I will be working 20-25 hours Monday-Friday and about 20 hours over the weekend, so forty hour weeks, maybe even forty five.  My free time is every weekday morning, and nights, if I want to go out and party it up with, say, the crazy Zimbabwean guy named Walter with whom I am becoming acquainted. He swears an enormous amount, and most of the Chinese people, even at the school, either don’t know the swear words or don’t care. The result is very funny. He’ll go up to one of the chinese guys who works there, (Golden Bridge, for example) and say “Bridge, fix my computer, you chinese f**k! What the f**k do you think you’re doing, you asian a*hole?”

Anyways, I am getting carried away with this email. There is internet here at my house, and sometimes at school (when the network is not down, which it often is). Next time I go online I will try to skype you guys. Love you all very very much

Dana