Eat.Drink.Teach

Eat: I'm thinking about starting a second blog... a food blog. We took pictures of every single meal we had in China. Simply because the food was always good! Credit goes to all of our hosts, who took us to their favorite restaurants and let us discover real and tasty Chinese specialties. Personal favorites are the Peking duck and the spicy lobster we had in Shanghai. 

Drink: Chinese people love to drink beer and to 'gan bei', which means you have to gulp down your drink in one sip whenever someone at your table says 'ganbei'. 

Ning's favorite beer used to be Heineken, but that was before we met and before we went to a Belgian bar together....

Teach: We contacted a Chinese couch surfer in the south of China, who is an English teacher. On his profile, he asked people to come to his school and speak to his students, two hours per day. In exchange we would be given a room in his school. We thought this was a brilliant idea and we felt excited to volunteer. The students are adults, who intensively study English during a certain period of time, usually for five months and this  eight hours a day. They are from all over China and they all want to improve their English for job purposes. The first day of teaching started quite ok, Benoit and I were each given a class room and students came to us for half an hour one-on-on talk. 

When this was finished, the teacher/couch surfer came to us and apologized, saying that there were no rooms available in his school but that we could sleep in one of the living rooms, in a tent(?!). The dorms of the school were a bit out of the town, so when we arrived there, we discovered that the living room was actually some sort of dirty kitchen without furniture. We had to put up a tent in there, otherwise we would have been eaten by mosquitos, we had to share a tiny mattress and it was like 50 degrees in that place, no fan available! How we felt exploited by that Chinese man:-)

Obviously we complained, but the guy couldn't or didn't want to change anything about  our sleeping situation, so we booked a room in the hotel next door:-s

That night we were considering not going back to that school the next day (we signed up for 3 evenings of teaching) but we were so scared the man would give us a negative review on couch surfing, which would make it more difficult in the future to find hosts, so we decided to go back,haha. And after all, the students were incredibly sweet!

The second evening of teaching was just unbelievable. We were each given an entire class of about eight students and we had to talk two hours about 'feelings'.They gave us two bottles of beer, probably to make it easier to talk?? My students' English level was ok and we had quite funny conversations. But Benoit's students were complete beginners, they could barely count till ten. They didn't understand a single word he was saying, so he had to look for help and they brought someone in who could translate a little. But I think these two hours are still the longest of his life! :-) The next day, we decided to leave the town and that was the end of our teaching adventure!

Spicy lobster, so good! The boy with the glasses was our host Jiandong. He and his friend on the picture are both aircraft engineers. Very clever and very funny guys!

       The green liquid is a desert! It's a sweet, green bean soup. Sounds strange but it's surprisingly tasty!

       Noodle soup in the streets of Shanghai, still tricky to eat those with chop sticks:-)

         Our Chinese students; very adorable and enthusiastic!