Easy Money...kind of.

So the offer we had was that another school in Lingxi was making a text book, and for this textbook they had a listening section, but they heard that we had foreign teachers in our school and so decided to ask one of the teachers in our school if we would be interested, we muttered some vaguely positive things and they ended up picking us up after class today. 

The two English teachers that came to collect us were Margaret and Gau, Margaret was a young woman of around 28, Chris took an immediate liking to her but on further investigation found she was married, and also way too short for him, Gau was a man of around 40, very knowledgeable and very fond of deep and meaningful conversations, I preferred just having a laugh with Margaret.

They took us across town in a fancy new car, driven the whole way at 25kph while surrounded by traffic doing twice that, and of course with no seatbelts in the cars, it was the slowest  I have ever been driven in China! but a refreshing reminder of what English driving is like I guess. 

 

We arrived outside a nondescript house in downtown district and margaret let herself and us in to find a car parked behind the front door, the front door doubles as a roller door and the car just fit inside the house width with enough room to open the door just enough to get in without using the sun roof!

Most town houses seem to be very tall and very thing in design.

We changed into some slippers left at the bottom of the stairs (chinese houses seem to be divided that way) and then went up, and up and up and up, to the 5 floor, (out of 6 or 7). It turned out that this gorgeous house with a central spiral staircase, many floors and big well decorated rooms belonged to a music teacher in the school, and since only two people lived there the 5th floor held a small recording studio with muffled walls and a pretty serious recording setup, including a monitoring room, a decent mic, and headphones so he could talk to us while we recorded.

They wanted us to record the spoken parts of the listening test with them for the text book they had written! After making a few corrections Chris went first and I left he and Margaret in the recording room and went next door to relax and speak with Gau. After an hour or so they had reached halfway and so we decided to break for dinner.

We walked down the street and they selected a local restaurant famous for...seafood! I didn't make a scene however and decided to just grin and bear it, and try everything once! 

The waitresses were very interested in the wagalans coming into their shop (foreigners) and made excuses to come into our private room and smile at us, unfortunately my chinese isn't yet good enough to talk back in chinese, but I hope it will be.

Dinner started out with some fruit, thank god, then moved onto prawns (too difficult to shell with chopsticks), and then sea snails (eaten with a toothpick) but these were very salty, sandy and crunchy, not nice. next came some crab which was ok i guess, some beef (score!) and a fish that was actually ok, not salty of fishy really, but still stupid small bones! 

They ordered way too many dishes for us, so we didn't manage to get anywhere near finishing but had a nice chat with the two teachers.

There was one very amusing part of the meal when we were discussing some ancient chinese stories, the money king, the romance of the three countries, and two more. In China there is also a fifth book, very controversial because it is written about a courtesan in the house of an emperor and goes into quite sordid detail as to her duties and daily life. Chris had read about this fifth book but not really what it was about and so decided to ask over dinner, much the same as attempting to discuss the finer points of the Karma Sutra over a polite dinner in an Indian Restaurant, with virtual strangers! Margaret dissolved into laughter as soon as she understood what Chris was talking about, and Gau just looked puzzled and a little embarrassed about it, while i was just sniggering. Chris then tried to carry on once he realised what he had brought up and just dug his hole deeper and deeper, much to my amusement! 

They recovered from Chris's anecdotes after a while and after a while they paid the bill and we walked back up the road to the music teachers house.

In the house it was my turn to be recorded so we left Chris to relax with Gau and Margaret and I went into the sound room.

The first 20 minutes were spent endlessly rereading the same page as the teacher debugged a problem with the microphone but once that was sorted we hammered through the dialogue parts, some small tests, some English sayings etc. 

I enjoyed reading:

In a dark dark house there is a dark dark room in a dark dark room there is a dark dark... etc etc, an old poem i remember from when I was young, also the tounge twisters were pretty fun to read!

Nearing the end we got to a few songs that she asked me to read, but they sounded strange without the tune, as I tried to teach her the tune for her parts she gave in and just asked me to sing the sections, which of course I did! You are my sunshine, my only sunshine etc etc, as well as twinkle twinkle little star, so funny, margaret and I were in fits of laughter, especially when the teacher suggested we do a duet!!!

We managed to get through all the material but it took a good 2 hours to finish, and the other teacher was very tired by the end as Chris and I had only done one section each.

Having completed the book we asked for a copy, which they assured us they would provide along with the CD, and then dropped us back at the school.

A crazy but very funny evening all round! I do love china, it never is boring!