The End

I’m stressed out about potentially getting kicked out of China. No job yet and my visa is up on January 20th. Ugh ugh ugh ugh. Ok moving on.

I have three days of classes this week, then a couple of days off for New Years (which I will be celebrating in Shanghai), then its exam week and my time in Zhangjiagang is over. As my time is winding down, I’m getting a little nostalgic. One big change that I will have to adjust to in Shanghai is the commute. To work, to bars, to anywhere. That city is ginormous. The problem with finding a job is that I want to live in a specific, central part of town, and I don’t want to spend three hours of my day commuting to and from work. I want to have a centrally located apartment that Steph and I can entertain (throw borrels) in. Here in ZJG nothing is further than a 25 minute bike ride away. And my classes are a five minute walk through campus. I’m also going to miss the EF teachers, but they say they’ll come visit.

I’ll also miss my kids. Even though there are 600 of them, I still can recognize all of them and know the names of a bunch. My favorite student is Angela. She is my fangirl and she is hilarious. When she sees me on campus she screams “RACHEL! Look at me! Look at me!!!!!” And when I do, she just waves and smiles a huge smile. I want to show you a picture of how adorable she is, but my camera broke and I have no idea how to get it fixed.

Last week was the last real class I’ll have with some of my students because of the New Year’s holiday and at the end of class they all rushed me with paper and pen in hand for my contact info like I was famous. I really hope that I get some adolescent Chinese pen pals out of this experience but I sort of doubt it.

The day before Christmas the school put on a big production and I had to sing a Christmas song with the other English teachers. I found out what the song was a few hours before the performance and I totally didn’t know the words so I just smiled and moved my mouth a little while staring into the crowd of maybe a thousand Chinese students all looking up at me. They had all dragged their chairs-with-attached-desks out onto the big plaza in front of the school. That’s pretty impressive considering some of their classrooms are 6 floors up.

The best part of the show was this one dance that all of the biggest troublemaker boys (read: favorites) that I teach performed. It was like the dance in Napoleon Dynamite only a million times better. There are a limited amount of silly dance moves that we Americans are familiar with: the robot, the vogue, the worm, etc. This dance introduced me to an entirely different set of hilarious dance moves. I talked to my students afterwards because I really wanted to learn the dance. Lucky for me, there is a video online. Sadly, these kids didn’t come up with the routine themselves. A group of postal workers in some random city did! Here is a link so you can all learn the dance at home and we can break out into a spontaneous choreographed dance at the next wedding/Bar Mitzvah/street fight we go to like I’ve always wanted (I secretly wish real life was a musical).

After the show, the kids all had “Christmas parties” in each of their classrooms. They performed plays, watched movies, sang karaoke, and got hopped up on sugar. The other teachers and I all went around to our classrooms to wish them Merry Christmas and say hello. The kids were so sweet when I came in and so happy to see me. They gave me little presents like stuffed animals and a ton of candy--most of which I gave back to them the next couple of days as prizes for the games we played.

The backup plan if I don't find a job that will get me a work visa is to fly to Hong Kong and purchase a tourist visa. That will buy some more time for me to get a work visa which I'll need if I want to go to Tibet which I really want to be able to do.

Happy New Years everyone! I'm looking forward to 2009.

Rachel