Something I found quite interesting while marking the previous week’s work was my students’ lack of ability with the past tense. Granted, it is difficult, as each English verb more or less has to be learnt – there doesn’t seem to be an obvious pattern as to whether the past tense is formed with a vowel shift, –ed/-ied or even no change at all – but I was assured by other teachers that it ought to be easy, and they had definitely learnt all of the most common verb forms.

To test this with them, I tried playing a game called Past Tense Bingo. I made them give me verbs in English then played bingo with the words written on the board, but where they had to tell me the past tense form of the verb they chose. It nearly worked. They clearly found it mind-numbingly easy which rather raised the question: why, when faced with constructing their own sentences using exactly the same verbs, could only a few from each class form verbs in the past tense?

We also played a variation of the Japanese word game Shiritori, where each person takes it in turns to say a word, and each word has to start with the last letter of the previous word. In the end I made it harder by giving them a start and finish point (so they have to make it from ‘entrance’ to ‘flying’, for example), gradually giving harder and harder words until, in teams, they were trying to find words ending in ‘z’ (their target words were things like ‘zero’, ‘zoo’, ‘zebra’, or ‘zodiac’). All credit to them, some of them managed it. It’s just that ‘jazz’ isn’t much better a target word to aim for than ‘zinc’.

Towards the end of the week I started planning a weekend visit to see Kieran up in Fuhai. I got as far as buying the tickets there and back, but on Thursday evening I went to bed with a splitting headache and my whole body was sore. Friday morning was even worse, and I had to call in sick. A day of sleeping and eating later, I realised that I wasn’t going to be going anywhere. At one point a couple of men called around asking for our resident’s permits and passport numbers and the like. I stood there in my pyjamas glowering at them and making little attempt to understand until they went away.

That weekend, instead of catching up with Kieran (and visiting Altay) I did very little. The other expats we’d had a meal with the previous week were going to Essen Restaurant on Saturday night to try the latest addition to Daniel’s menu (Daniel being the German owner): burgers. And despite how I was feeling, very good they were too! Tom and I also made pancakes (the English/French variety, also known as ‘crêpes’), and using the leftovers on Sunday I tried experimenting with the batter and created French Toast Pancake Bread which actually worked rather well.

—TJC

Featured image: Paris’ home cooking, including Yili horses and Xinjiang camel.