The week's recap:
1) My students are planning a video for Lady Gaga's new song, which doesn't have a video yet! I got to feel like their cool American teacher for a hot second. And then the news came out that the video is coming out on Monday. Hm, bad timing. Could you delay that until Week 3 of the Chinese spring semester, Lady Gaga? That would be much appreciated. In any case, the main highlight was going through some important vocabulary words with them: gay, straight, bi, lesbian, transgendered. They giggled, some of them may have been shocked, some didn't know what 3/5 of the words meant, some were excited to be know-it-alls. And I think most of them absorbed my little talk about "respecting different opinions"...so I'll consider that a win.
2) Now that I have printed out over 250 Lady Gaga lyric sheets on my dime, I tried to strike a deal with the copy shop owner. He wasn't having it. Because the toner was low, or something of that nature, I asked for a discount.
Him: 8 kuai is all I can do for you.
Me: But that's just 0.40 off! Can we do 7.50?
Him: Ha, forget it. 0.40 is already a lot!
Me: (resorting to a different tactic) I will be printing a lot this semester, since I'm a teacher. Could I have a special price?
Him: (some story about some other teacher who has 3 classes, 40 students each)
Me: I have 250 students.
Him: (continuing to tell the story while fiddling with his World of Warcraft interface)
[Copy shop owners, of course, don't actually make any copies. They sit around playing WoW and smoking cigarettes, while their employees sigh and take a break from their online chatting to "serve" you using a machine they don't really know how to operate.]
Me: 不太明白. I don't really understand.
I gave up and went ahead and paid my 8 kuai.
Me: Okay, well we'll keep talking.
Him: Sure thing.
Well, at least I tried. I feel like the level of respect for me in the place just got nudged up a teensy bit since I did the ultra-Chinese thing of asking for a discount on the kind of thing that just proves how much of a penny-pincher I am.
3) I am taking Elementary Russian..in Chinese...with 3 of my freshman oral students, Horse, Niki, and Tiffany. Yup, it happened. We'll see how long I can do 3 hours of night class a week. We spent the first 45 minutes of class learning to write the Russian alphabet in cursive. (Did I really sit through that?) Then it quickly went over my head, since I missed the first class. How did I find out about this? Horse was studying the Russian alphabet at the beginning of class today. I accosted him, and now here I am.
It's good to be back in Dalian!
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