The past few weeks

Well it's been a busy few weeks here in HK. School has been keeping me VERY busy. It's actually quite stressful standing up in front of 40 kids 4 times a day, delivering a lesson for 40 mins!! I've calculated that I see over 200 kids a week! No wonder I'm struggling to remember names. I have had a few more classics though. I have a chicken wing, johnson's baby, doctor and crazy! I can hardly bring myself to call their names out in class. My favourite though is chicken wing... classic! So in the past few weeks i've been stressing about teaching quite a lot. I have S3's that are just totally mad, there is actually no way to control them, believe me I've tried. I had to get one class to come and see me at breaktime last week to tell them off because they'd been so badly behaved in my class. I hate doing it cos ultimately I want them to enjoy my classes and have fun so it sucks to be shouting ALL the time. I have that new teacher thing of having a permanent sore throat from all the shouting i've been doing. When I come home I'll prob deafen you all with my booming voice! :) It was national day at the start of October which meant we had a long weekend, yay! We hired a boat and watched the fireworks from the boat in the harbour, the view was amazing, just what you'd expect from Hong Kong. Then last Friday it was the Mid Autumn Festival. They celebrate by eating mooncakes, disgusting creations made from pastry, lotus paste and salted duck eggs! They also have ice-cream mooncakes which seem like an altogether better idea! It's a celebration of the full moon so there is also a lot of moonwatching and lantern displays. We all went to victoria park on hk island to look at the 'world of lanterns' which was pretty cool. we also saw some Chinese Opera and traditional dancers. Chatteris work with local university students helping run their english club so i've joined in with that. It's called big mouth corner and basically once a week we go to poly u university and chat to the students... and we get paid! They also ran a cantonese class for us which was really fun. I can now say a few phrases really badly! Every word they have has six tones, giving it six different meanings depending on how you say it... so i've discovered that when i say 9 i am actually saying penis!! Hence I'm never saying 9 ;) It can also mean dog and plastic so all round i think it's best avoided! So anyway am keeping pretty busy. I also have to start training kids for the annual speak festival in November. Basically, all the schools in HK enter kids and its a big deal. I have four soloists and a class of 40 for the choral speaking comp... no pressure then! I don't really have a scoob what's going on... will keep you posted. That's all for now