My Studen't Test Results

This is a test I gave my stuents. The answers for the second and third answers visible in the picture are my favorite. 

"What doest WASP stand for?" "World American Super Protestant." I marked that wrong. 

"What is a televangelist?" I can't make out the answer, its either "A tool" or "A fool." So I marked it wrong, and then had second thoughts and decided I would accept either of those answers.

An Anecdote About a Funeral

It is the fashion here to have some local players come and sing an opera to entertain funeral guests after someone in your family dies. Recently, some people have decided that the opera is boring, and it costs 10,000-20,000 RMB per night, so they just get dancers to entertain the guests. To make it more entertaining they get the dancers to wear very revealing clothing. My mother in law told me they wear belly shirts and short skirts. Then my wife tells me a couple days ago before people complained about indecency the dancing girls were just wearing pasties on their nipples and thongs. And then mother in law chimes in that they were pulling down the thongs at intervals to make it more entertaining. Then she goes on to tell about how the neighbor's son who is a little slow and really fat got up and started dancing on the stage too. Everyone was entertained because his ass was so big and shaking about so pleasingly. This young fatty couldn't hear his mother yelling at him to get down because the music was deafening, so the mother had to get a long bamboo pole at hit him until he got down.

Rude Banner

This could only be funny to someone who has studied Chinese. It is slang for a very naughty word, even though the point of the banner was originally to attempt to encourage all of the residents not to throw their garbage around.

What is a Televangelist?

Please click on this picture to see the full size version.
One of my test questions was 'what's a televangelist?' The student gave a very satisfactory answer. I at first marked it wrong, but then decided to give full credit as it was certainly true, if not precisely the answer I was looking for. Some of the other answers are worth noting as well.

Back to School

I finished my first day of classes today. Only 2 hours on Mondays, and I have Fridays off. I teach a total of 14 hours a week which is two hours less than last semester. Many Chinese professors teach 12 hours or less, which is about the same as the class load for teachers at the University I graduated from. Last semester one of the foreign teachers was teaching 22 hours a week. But she had previously taught 40 hours of English a week at a job in Singapore. Most of my students are Sophomores this year. They are the same students from last semester. I also have two classes of Juniors. I am teaching Culture of Great Britain this semester, and maybe of other English speaking countries if I run out of things to say about Britain. Most of my friends laugh at me when I say I am going to teach British culture. They may be right to scoff, but I plan to enjoy teaching this subject this semester, and maybe even learn something myself.

I have posted some pictures of the Campus. The first picture is the rock on which the name of the College I teach at is carved. Its called Ou River College. The Ou River is one of the main geographic features of Wenzhou. The second picture is an administration building with lots of offices of important people of Wenzhou University. The small round building in the foreground is marked as housing the University Museam, but I cannot corroborate that as I have never been in to see. I mostly posted these photos because I haven't posted any of the University yet, and these aren't bad considering I took them with my cellphone camera.

Olympics

Who says the olympics shouldn't take place in China. Olympics in China is fun, here are some examples.

Adjectives: French swimmer Bernard is described as "The Brute-sized Frenchman" in the Chinese Media.

The other thing I will mention briefly is the olympic hostesses which were celebrated with the headline Perfect hostesses outclass sexy cheerleaders by the Chinese English language daily.

Being a hostess is not easy, below I have copied some requirements mentioned in the above article.

"Hostess candidates ... aged 18 to 24, between 1.68 and 1.78 metres in height (5 ft 5 ins and 5 ft 8 ins), with a "ruddy and shiny complexion", "elastic skin" and "a plump but not fat body".

"Their faces needed to meet standards including the ratio between the "width of the nose and the length of the face" and "width of the mouth and width between the pupils", with eyes three-tenths the length of the face."

The last thing I would like to mention is a resounding victory of Chinese Pigdin English (Charmingly called 'Chinglish') signs and menus, etc. These have been the victim of a campaign for their total destruction, but in a masterstroke Reuters article the author states "Texas-based Global Language Monitor (GLM), which analyses word usage trends, said Beijing was fighting a losing battle and should celebrate "this delightful mixture of Chinese and English"."

Thank God the Olympics isn't all about sports and obnoxious 'olympic spirit'.

Irrigation

China is famous worldwide for her early development of complex irrigation technology. For example Dujiangyan in Sichuan province in the area recently hit by the huge earthquake and also in Xinjiang province there are amazing underground irrigation tunnels, perhaps not made by Chinese originally, but within the country of China today, so we won't split hairs to use an expression from the vernacular. Modern irrigation techniques are not so amazing as those of the days of our forefathers, but do go a long way in the labor-saving department. A couple of days ago I took this picture of the local landscape engineer at his craft. Notice the large section of cast iron pipe protruding from the bow of the boat.

And sure enough the next day I woke to a couple of rice paddies on what heretofore had been dry ground.