Today was the hour and a half lessons again which I hate. I’d rather do more shorter lessons that the kids are more focused for. The other problem was that as it was ‘grand opening day’ we had to do the lesson at Cheery’s Garden. This meant that two out of three students were late and people kept peeking in to the room and disturbing us. I did my old favourite recovered last night of Simon and Garfunkel’s At The Zoo with questions and games and a comprehension. I wasn’t sure if the level was too high for a couple of 8 yr olds but they lapped it up even knowing some of the vocab already. Dino is unable to concentrate on anything and putting us in a room where the table was designed for hot pot – so has hobs built in to it – was a terrible idea as he kept fiddling and with all the instructions in Chinese I couldn’t tell if we were going to be boiled or not.
After that loads of people turned up for the opening. A few of them even spoke English, but I felt like a prize poodle and the principal kept getting people and saying ‘speak’ to me. Her English is far better than that and it really doesn’t help an introduction to be so curt and information free. I wolfed down my rather pants lunch (I got nuts which they usually leave out, the greens were bad today, one of the dishes was cucumber strips which is meant to be a starter, the soup had bones floating in it which I luckily noticed before trying some, so the only bit worth eating was the mushrooms! Doh) and then I legged it. I did feel a bit bad as there was a lot of networking to be done, but no-one really spoke English or had time to talk to me so I went back to the school to hunt down some reading books for the next class.