Day Five and Six. Meeting our buddies and students. 4th and 5th of July.

This morning after our first major drinking session I was feeling a little dusty. Only to be made worse by the fact that I had seemed to have fallen into my old pattern of drunken overseas sleepwalking. I never have sleep walked at home, to my knowledge and I am pretty sure my parents would have informed me if I had. But it seems I make it a habit of walking out of my hotel rooms in foreign countries and locking myself out. The first time this occurred I was in Barcelona, Spain. We had all had a massive night with litre jugs of Sangria, beer, cocktails, shots and after retiring to my six person dorm room and passing out in my top bunk I come to a number of hours later wondering around the 5^th floor of the hostel in my pyjamas sans glasses. Second time was in Nice, France a few days later, similar situation had a lot of booze gone back to my hotel went to sleep and an hour later my friend wakes up to me knocking on the door to let me back into the room. I like to think I wake up needing the bathroom and just walk out of the room but really who knows. So back to present day I wondered around the hotel for a while, confused as to why I had my bag with me and my glasses this time as well as a shirt over my pajamas trying to figure out a way back into my room. It took all my self control not to grab my face and scream 'I did it again', like Macauley Culkin in Home Alone. After roaming the halls aimlessly and violently knocking on Elise’s door she finally let me in and I crashed in her room until it was a more reasonable time to go to reception.

Breakfast at the uni hotel of course consisted of rice, noodles and pork buns so all us teachers sought out the closest thing to a greasy burger which was in the form of a deep fried bread stick, kinda like a croissant. Feeling the effects of the amount of beer drank and the humidity I indulged in approximately 7 of these gloriously greasy things something I would regret the following day.

We were off this morning to meet our buddies and have a look around the university. We caught a mini bus to the college and low and behold they have a banner hung up across the front to welcome us. We then went inside to meet our buddies. My buddies name was Jessie, an English name she chose herself. She was the same age as me, with another year of studies to go also. But that is where our similarities stopped. She was a lovely person and such a great help to me on my trip. After our brief introduction we were taken to the first room we would teach in the following day and to our surprise there was a class in there and they were expecting to be wowed by the Aussies. A little taken back and a little hung-over we resorted to singing to them the vegemite song and Men at Work’s ‘I come from a land down under’. I wanted to rap but thought maybe that’s something for the next day. After the impromptu song and dance they wanted to hear all about our lives in Australia. What we ate, what we wore, what we did on weekends, how our schooling life was, what we drove. They were lovely students but were quite shy. Hope that our lessons would be easier.

After that tough crowd we headed back to the dorms to get ready for the welcome dinner we were to attend that evening. Our buddies were to attend and we were told that a number of the Chinese students were going to perform for us. There was such a great mass of food and of talents, we had boys hip hop dancing, who could pop and lock amazingly, we had opera singers, dancers, people playing instruments over all they completely wowed us and we felt as if we should return the favor and perform for them so we got up and did a shocking rendition of ‘I still call Australia Home’. 

The following day, our first day of teaching I woke up feeling quite ill. Probably a combination of the food, the beer and the breadsticks I had ingested the following day so was not in the cheeriest of moods to greet my classes. Our aim was to improve the students english through learning, singing and interpreting Australian classic songs. Unfortunately the students were not as enthused as we thought. The first two lessons were kinda a hit and miss, while we devised ways to engage the students as what we planned was not going to work. At one stage, despite my horrid stomach ailments I found my class flat-lining and I was beginning to get disheartened. So I had to bring back the smiles so I pulled out the classes leader, the typical handsome popular boy and made him do interpretive dance to Youthu Yindi's Aboriginal hit 'Treaty'. The smiles returned to their faces and I felt as if I was succeeding again, even if it was not helping with their English skills what so ever.