This blog post starts and finishes with lessons of a cultural nature. Bonfire Night was fun: I turned it into a game of True or False by telling the Gunpowder Plot through statements such as, ‘In 1605, someone tried to blow up parliament’ with a picture of Big Ben and vocabulary. I got them to make True/False flashcards. It led onto how the conspirators were executed (I did not expect to teach my students, ‘Hanged, Drawn and Quartered,’ but there we go) and finished with them making up their own questions. It usually devolved into, ‘He is [a] pig! *points at classmate*’, but they seemed to have fun.

Tom and I were given Friday afternoon off, so we got a bus to Kuitun followed by a train to Ürümqi with the girls. The taxi driver didn’t know where to take us, so he dropped us somewhere in Bagang (a suburb of Ürümqi). We managed to make it Calum and Mac’s apartment without too many fights and let ourselves in, as their door is shut in the evening, after which it cannot be opened from the inside.

Their apartment is great – like ours it is clearly lived-in, so it has character. We were horrified to discover that they have a cleaner, who only stops short at ironing their clothes. Envy definitely had nothing to do with our disgust. That said, it could be a great place for Christmas. We also figured out how to leave at night: the door was just stiff, not locked.

Calum and Ben came over the next day. We looked around the park (Becca and I lost the others, but we got there in the end, using fiendish logic, flawless planning and when those failed, a phone call) and finished the afternoon with a steak-bake tour of Bagang. Steak-bakes, or samsas (烤包子) are Uighur pastries filled with meat, not unlike steak-and-kidney pies. The evening was topped off with Murder-in-the-Dark.

We headed back on Sunday via Burger King and some shopping. Becca and I were on the train together as far as Kuitun. By Karamay I was chatting to a group including teachers and a restaurant owner. They even gave me a lift home from the station, although the woman whose brother was giving the lift had offered it to so many people, there wasn’t space for her, so she had to get a taxi. That’s Chinese hospitality for you: inviting yourself out of your own lift home is very polite, not a blunder.

Monday saw me start my Remembrance Day lessons. By unfortunate coincidence, 11/11 in China is also Single Dog Day (for guys who don’t have girlfriends). As with many similar things in the West, it is also known for vast online discounts. Neither of which have any relation to the Armistice. My aim, then, was to get across that we were remembering tragedy on such a large scale. In a country of such size, the magnitude of the World Wars was unlikely to get the point across, but looking at percentages it became much more damning. My students knew little about World War One, so we watched a video about London Remembrance, and finished the lesson by giving everyone some coloured paper, and getting them to make poppies. I had to explain their significance, as the only meaning of ‘poppy’ here is the plant used to make opium. When I said the word, students started miming smoking or injections into their arms; not exactly the tone I was going for.

Whether my students engaged completely with the subject matter or not, they seemed to understand the ideas I was putting across and enjoy the exercises this week. And as with everything here, both in and out of the classroom, I too learnt a great deal about the country I’m living in, and cultures that reside within it.

—TJC

Featured image: Century Park’s Autumn colours (Bagang is not picturesque ☕).