I decided to introduce Ancient Greek to my students this week, as the title suggests. I’m not sure my students knew what hit them. Getting them to write their names was more than enough to fill the time (less is more), but first I had to introduce the Greek Alphabet. I did this by referencing Cyrillic, with which they were familiar given their proximity to Russia.

Maths was surprisingly useful: I introduced pi using the formula for Area. From here they seemed to know a slew of other letters, and for the rest I asked for English letters and filled in the Greek myself. From here, I moved onto writing their names, which was harder than I expected. Even their English names were tricky (‘Eva’ is a joke because there’s no ‘v’), and Chinese names were complicated. Pinyin (Chinese in Roman letters) doesn’t always follow phonetic English; for example, qī (七, ‘seven’) sounds like chee. But given they were working with a completely new alphabet (explained to them in a second language), the results were remarkably accurate with all credit to them for that.

All in all, not your typical TESOL lesson, but I think they enjoyed it – at least from the level of engagement. Of course, it might have helped that I told them if everyone tried to write their name I’d let them choose a film to watch next week. They don’t need to know that they’ll get to watch a film regardless. I get three extra days of holiday; they get two study days and then a day of intensive exams. I think they deserve one relaxing lesson.

I finally got around to picking up the tickets I need for all the day trips while Calum and I are off around China. I’d booked tickets around Hainan and a visit to Hua Shan near Xi’an, but the biggest group was 16 tickets for my family and I to visit Suzhou and Hangzhou from Shanghai. In half an hour I think I became the most hated person in Karamay. There is nothing worse than ‘that person’ who decides to buy what seems like a year’s supply of tickets in one go; worse if the only train of the day arrives soon. Despite being in the wrong queue (I think?), the ticket lady beckoned me forward but immediately regretted it when she saw my mammoth collection list. Her eyes widened. The queue collectively groaned. Apart from my name somehow appearing as ‘Chambers, Thomas James James James …’ (off the edge of the screen) I managed to pick them up. She also thought the name on my passport was Britishcitizen which didn’t help – I somehow explained this to her with my broken Chinese. The people behind me found it very funny, but sadly they neglected to offer any help.

And now, as I write, Tom and I are waiting to hear that Ben, Marina and Courtney have arrived at Karamay station so I can go meet them off the bus (the station’s out of town so they can get the shuttle bus themselves). They’ll be staying until Saturday (16th), at which point we’ll all head over to Ben and Calum’s project, Fukang. Despite travelling in separate groups, we’ll be getting trains from Ürümqi to the rest of China within an hour of each other on the 20th (Tom’s Birthday).

—TJC

Featured image: Teaching Greek.