EIL Intercultural Learning

I'm now into my seventh week in Shanghai and I'm well and truly settled in to my life here - I still have three weeks of my placement left, but I already find myself getting sad at the thoughts of leaving the city!

Since my last post I have finished teaching in the Creativity Kindergarten. For my final two weeks there I had some extra classes as a few of the other volunteers had finished up their programmes. Even though I had only been with my original classes for two weeks I had got to know what would work with them and what wouldn't in terms of songs and games. Having got into a routine with them, it was strange to start from scratch with new students who were used to different teachers. Just because something works with one class doesn't mean it will with another! I had one song for teaching the body parts that my other classes loved. I used to finish every lesson by playing it, but in one of my new classes it was met with blank faces and complete indifference. Despite my best efforts to make it seem fun (ie. by making a complete fool of myself, much to the enjoyment of the other teachers), it was a complete flop and I had to move onto something else pretty quickly. This was a bit of a learning curve, but it kept me on my toes!  

For my final week in Creativity there was a lot of confusion among the volunteers as they place seemed to be in total chaos. There was furniture being moved around the place at a great rate and classes turning up in the strangest of rooms all around the school. Eventually we found out that because the kindergarten doesn't close for the summer, the students just move up a grade overnight, rather than after their summer break. The kindergarten stays open all the time and parents just take their children out for holidays as they want.

Since last week I have been teaching in Min Hang Kindergarten at a summer camp. Like Creativity, this kindergarten doesn't close for the summer either, but here they run what they call a 'summer camp' for the students who will be leaving the kindergarten to start primary school in September. However, it's not quite the same as our idea of a summer camp! It's designed to help the students make the transition to 'big school' so they have a proper classroom setup and more structured lessons. In Creativity the children sat on little chairs in a semi-circle and I sat with them, but at the camp they sit at desks and I stand up at the whiteboard. I also teach from a book and have to follow a stricter curriculum. Whereas I had been teaching three and four year-olds up to now, these students are six so they have a lot more English already. I was really impressed on the first day when they were all able to write their own names in English with no hesitation. They can understand a lot more which makes it easier for me as there are no Chinese teachers in the room to help me anymore!  

There are twenty students at the camp and I share the work with one other volunteer from France. We spend two hours with the children every morning, dividing the time between an English lesson and one other activity, such as music or art. This week in the music and art classes we have been preparing for French Day which is coming up on the 14th of July for Bastille Day. We have been teaching a French song that the children will perform on the day and drawing pictures of the Eiffel Tower and baguettes. Every Thursday in Min Hang the kids have a waterfight. Unsurprisingly all the students just gang up and go straight after us - we weren't prepared for it last week, but we won't be making the same mistake again!

We have also begun preparing for a joint Irish-Norwegian Day on the 23rd of July. We are planning to paint the children's faces with shamrocks and make flags. Kelly (the other EIL Ireland volunteer) will be teaching some Irish dancing steps for what is likely to be a pretty hilarious game of musical chairs. They will also be playing 'Giant's Causeway hopscotch' and will finish up with a carton of milk and a piece or brown bread with jam!

Even though Shanghai is such an international city, where we live is a little out of the centre and we haven't seen any other Westerners in the area at all - we used to get a lot of strange looks, but I think people have got used to us over time. And we have also got used to strangers eager to show off their English shouting 'Hello, how are you?' at us in the street! We have found a few restaurants in the area (all of which coincidentally have pictures on the menus) where the staff know us and what we like to eat. We have found one restaurant down the street serving 'Western' food which to us is what a Chinese restaurant in Europe must be like to Chinese people - they get some things right, but not many. They have some interesting dishes like fruit pizza, snails and pasta with squid and no matter what you order you get ketchup with it! 

Two weeks ago I finally got around to visiting the Expo - I had been avoiding it because of the crowds and queing, but I knew I couldn't come to Shanghai for this long and not visit it! There are about half a million people attending each day and it can take up to four hours to get into the most popular pavilons. In the end it wasn't too bad - if you show your passport at the door, you can skip the queue at your own pavilion. I was with a group from all over Europe so we got to skip a few queues thankfully. The Irish pavilion is a bit disappointing compared to many others - it looks like Newgrange with a glass box on top - but it was nice to see cartons of Premier Dairies and Barry's tea this far from home! It's impossible to visit the Chinese pavilion because so many people want to visit it that you have to book your spot and it's currently booked up until a few months after the Expo finishes.

A couple of weeks ago a group of volunteers went to Suzhou, a city about an hour away from Shanghai by train. Even though everyone has their seats booked there is still a mad dash for the train once the gates open, as if people's lives depended on getting on first or something! It was pretty funny to watch, yet we still found ourselves getting caught up in it, afraid that there was something everyone else knew that we didn't. Getting out of the city has become a lot more difficult though as the weather heats up into the summer - millions of people want to get out of the city for the weekends, but there are only so many trains and buses. We have tried a few times to organise trips but it's so difficult as you can only buy tickets in the station or from travel agents ten days before and they're all snapped up pretty quickly. 

As I head into my final few weeks here, I've started planning my travels for when I finish my programme. I've booked a week-long trip to Tibet with one other volunteer which I'm really looking forward to. The trip includes one night in a tent near Everest Base Camp and a train journey back to Shanghai (which takes 48 hours!) across the permafrost. After this I'm hoping to spend a few days in Beijing, visit the Terracotta Army in Xian and then spend a few days in Hong Kong and Macau before returning to Shanghai to fly home at the end of August. I wish I could go to some places a bit more off the beaten track but I don't have the time - you could spend a lifetime travelling in China and still only touch the surface.