Today I had older children; they come from the local schools to improve their English with a real English person! They were about 8 – 10 years old so the lesson had to be a lot more structured than with the younger kids. I still rode the E bike to work but something had gone wrong with putting it on charge last night so the battery was almost flat by the time I arrived. It took several staff members and some frantic calls home to work out that the battery could be remove and charged in my classroom – there was no outside electricity point and there are no shoes in the school so I didn’t think wheeling my moped in was going to be allowed!
We quickly went though the alphabet and then I had prepared a couple of worksheets on body parts. We looked at writing and reading them and a game of mixed up letters that unscrambled made up body parts, this was quite a hit and proved to be at a good level. We checked out writing capital and little letters and finished off with a game that I made in England where I draw a noughts and crosses board but each square has a word/picture in it and you can only put your nought or cross in a space if you can also read/spell what is there. The children were on the whole well behaved but I think that the girl, Kitty, finds English very hard to concentrate on as she kept trying to sneak off and play with the baby toys. The lessons on a Saturday are an hour an a half so it is quite a long time to concentrate, even my older students at CRC had a 10 minute break in their 2 hour lessons.
At lunch time Kelly let me know we weren’t going away for Valentine’s Day. We had planned to go to a traditional Chinese water village but it was a long way to go because I didn’t finish until 3.00 and the weather was bad. I had wanted to go out at lunch time and buy Vincent a special present for Valentine’s Day, but as the bike had no charge I just went with the principle to Cheery’s Garden again for some lunch then had to buy him a present in the hypermarket opposite. I found a really nice ancient looking Chinese picture for our wall and what I thought was a cool card. When I got back to the restaurant though Cheery told me it as just an envelope and it was for a wedding, you are meant to put money in it and give it to the bride/groom! Oh well it looked nice. Lunch at Cheery’s is getting better each time. This time she had some ‘dofu’ (tofu) in soy sauce included in teh various dishes that come for the veggie lunch. It was really nice, plus I even don’t mind some of the mushrooms now, maybe I’m even starting to like them, but only he really thin white ones that come in a cluster, I still don’t want the ones that are brown and yukky looking 
There were only two bys in the afternoon class and they were both quite young so we began by reading two books and answering questions on them, then the principal got back and gave them their text books so we got on with the first story about Bibbs the cat jumping which was ok but they didn’t seem too happy with it, maybe I will make my own stories next time!
When I got home I was able to give Vincent his present and he gave me a silver necklace with a real Suzhou pearl on it. It was beautiful! We went out for dinner gain as Paul wanted the house to have a special dinner with Kelly. This time we went to a Korean restaurant just opposite the Cantonese one.
We had ‘vegetarian’ and ‘no meat’ written on a piece of paper and kept pointing to it as we ordered in the hope we would get the right food. In the end we got sweet and sour cabbage, that was really tasty, shredded potato, that wasn’t, chilli fried dofu, which was unbelievable – a whole plate of chillies, about 60, with some dofu cubes hidden inside it was so hot, and the last thing we got was taro rolls. Actually we got the taro rolls after the cabbage so we assumed they were a savoury dish and began to tuck in to find out that they tasted just like doughnuts! Taro is a plant and they just roll it up and fry it with some sesame seeds on each end, yummy!
We were a bit late going to see the band as we had so much to eat but when we got there they began their second set. The keyboard player was amazing but sadly the rest of the band were not that good. They played all covers of classics like ‘knocking on heavens door’ and they all did ok but the levels were rubbish and no-one was really the singer, they just seemed to take it in turns. None of it was bad though and we had a good night, except that Vincent didn’t get to play pool. The Chinese don’t really queue and the concept of writing up names on the chalk board then playing winner stays on is just as good as their queuing for anything else – they push in left right and centre!
We got home quite late so decided to have a lie in and a lazy Sunday before work again on Monday.