maisy doats and dozy doats

Date: Fri, 11 May 2001
From: Ceels
Subject: maisy doats and dozy doats

I am not in the mood for emails. I was when I left the school, but now I am hot, dusty, and full of cigarette smoke.

So here are a few notes

*If you work on a platform, make sure all four legs of the chair are on the platform before you sit down.

*Never sit on the duster

*Never lean on the blackboard

*The highest art of teaching is not wiggling your bottom while writing on the blackboard.

I am having an internal dilemma (it's my indecisivitis again). It turns out that finding an apartment is a nightmare. You can live in a foreigner's apartment block (costs more than my monthly salary will be), or you can live illegally in a Chinese apartment block (and the PSB are cracking down on this, and I don't want to get kicked out of China, because I want to come back and teach in Tibet one day).

And then there are my students. I love them. How am I going to leave them? In the first two weeks they were just a 920 person strong, faceless form of torture. In the third and fourth weeks, I began to notice a difference between classes. Then I started to remember names and the classes had individuals. Now, (apart from two classes I choose not to think about) there are 920 littlepeople I love to distraction.

Still, there is something fishy about this school. There is this big satellite dish, but it's not for picking up TV. And last night at 11pm all the lights were on in all the classrooms on the third floor, and all the tellies were tuned in to the same thing (a blue screen with a swoosh) and there were no people (I watched). There is also what looks to be marijuana growing outside the refectory at the boarding school. And there is a little microphone, top and centre, of every blackboard (I only just noticed, I don't like to ask) and there's other stuff too.

*They have the same grass in Beijing as they do in Grasmere.

I found out that the reason the students think that I am beautiful is because I am so pale. But I think that with people telling me I am beautiful every day, I am actually getting prettier.

Well I have to go now, I have to go and buy a Snickers (the Snickers here are made in Ballarat and so taste 'normal', along with soda crackers they form a staple part of my diet).

Oh, and, I have fallen in love. The man selling spicy kebabs at the night market at Wangfujing told me I have a face like an angel from heaven, at least I think so, he might have been saying I am ugly enough to make birds fall from the sky. I just gazed at him in adoration as he whispered sweet nothings in a language I don't understand.

love you
ceels