Parge Green

After a week of being in Nanjing, I finally have the time, energy, and focus to update my blog. I arrived at the airport last Thursday evening hoping that someone would be at the airport to pick me up to save me the lone taxi ride and worry over if the driver understood where I was going. I had no reason to fear, from the baggage claim I could see the bobbing heads of both Ryan and Neil. It turned out that Neil had not gotten Ryan's email saying he could pick me up so both of them showed up independently. Ryan though showed up with an escort from his school who not only helped with my bags and drove us but also took us out to dinner! Dinner was interesting and a little overwhelming - an entire chicken was cut up and boiling in a pot in front of us, head, legs, and all.
After dinner, we arrived at the dorm building that Ryan, Katie, and I are all living in and attempted to register for my room, which I had been assured by the university was already reserved. The desk attendants, with what is apparently classic Chinese stubbornness, insisted that there was no reservation under my name. We were tired and confused, so I spent the night in Ryan's room, where my two bags took up most of the available floor space.
The next morning I went to meet my boss in the English department at the University. She gave me my schedule and made some phone calls about my room. Everyone she called again insisted that everything was in place and that I did indeed have a reservation. Later back at the registration desk, one of the more helpful desk attendants looked around a bit and found a reservation for Parge Green, my new alias.
So, with key card in hand I began to settled in to my new life in Nanjing.
I started teaching Monday at the University and am very pleased with my students, who have a lot to learn and aren't incredibly self-motivated but are interesting and nice people. The best English name by far is Messy, although one of Neil's student's tops that with the name Grubby.
On Monday, one of the teachers at Ryan's school called Ryan to ask if I had a job yet because the other campus of Ryan's school was in need of some teachers. Ryan and I headed over there on Tuesday morning to see if we could arrange something, unwittingly heading into a strange Canadian fiasco of a school day. The school, it turned out, was not looking for year-long English teachers, but bodies to fill in for several Canadian teachers who had been hired, but due to visa problems haven't yet arrived in China. The school itself is associated with a Canadian University in Toronto and has a Canadian curriculum. I did not know all of this as I walked into the office where I was asked to teach five class that afternoon, all about Canada. Although I have been to BC for various vacations in my life, I have very little formal knowledge about Canada, but this of course was no problem on this desperate day for this school. I had a few hours before classes started and so I browsed wikipedia and then proceeded to teach five classes of high schoolers with beginning English skills, about the 10 provinces, 3 territories, and multiculturism of Canada. Luckily, in flying through Vancouver to Beijing, I ended up with some Canadian coins which I used to show the students a picture of Queen Elizabeth II and a beaver.