Majong with the taaitaai's

I'm taking 12 hours of Cantonese this semester. My Cantonese class is composed of 5 Japanese women, one Korean woman, one Thai woman and one Korean man. Almost all of the women are in Hong Kong because their boyfriend/fiance/husband is from Hong Kong or works in Hong Kong. Often if your husband has a work visa, you are not allowed to work in Hong Kong, so these women are taking Cantonese since they can't work. Some of them speak a bit of English, but we converse in Cantonese, so my details on them are a bit sketchy. I affectionately refer to them as the taaitaai's (ladies or married women in Cantonese). They are all between 25 and 35 and like hanging out together since they don't know that many people in Hong Kong. So I'm on a mission to make friends with the taaitaai's.
One of my Cantonese teachers invited my class to an evening of majong and dinner last night. So we met in the Fo Tan train station and headed to a nice Chinese restaurant. We had a private room reserved. Mr. Lee explained the basics of majong and we played a couple of rounds. I struggled a bit since I can't read the traditional characters for numbers, but it was lots of fun. We then had a delicious dinner. The low point in the evening was when the waiter brought me a fork. Ouch. In case I had forgotten that I was the only white person in the room.
I've found that any time I attempt Cantonese I get complimented on how good my Cantonese is. Since my Cantonese is quite bad, I accept these somewhat insincere compliments as kind encouragement. If I weren't white, I doubt people would be so complimentary, but I'll take it with a grain of salt and appreciate the encouragement. I was particularly surprised that the women in my class would also feel the need to tell me that my Cantonese was good. After all, they sit in class with me, they've heard my tones (or lack thereof). I think being white automatically means that I get more credit for learning Cantonese than I possibly deserve. I guess when people stop telling me how good my canto is, I'll know it's finally passable.

Lanterns

I managed to resist the urge to buy a Hello Kitty lantern or a somewhat scary tank lantern:



I bought a fish lantern to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival:

Isn't he cute? I'm not sure what the antennae are all about . . . But fish are supposed to be lucky. Sweet.

Mid-Autumn Festival

Since I got the day off for the holiday, I decided to find out what Mid-Autumn Festival was really all about. Rachel and I went to Victoria Park to see people "enjoying the moon." This involved huge lantern installations, a fire dragon made out of incense and many families sitting out on the lawn, light candles and eating mooncakes. Mooncakes, the special food of the holiday, are heavy, sweet pastries with egg yokes inside. Since not very many people actually like traditional mooncakes, there are also new, trendy mooncakes, like snowy mooncakes, ice cream mooncakes, even Starbucks mooncakes (although grape and coffee flavor doesn't sound that good either). Mooncakes are quite expensive, despite no one really liking the normal kind.
It rained off and on all night, which greatly delayed the fire dragon but made the park much less crowded that it would have been. Here are a few pictures of the festivities:

Staying clean and healthy in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is the cleanest city I've ever been to. It's truly amazing how clean everything is. And the people of Hong Kong are proud of it! A stereotype I've heard a couple of times is that Hong Kong people won't go to the Mainland because it's too dirty (and too dangerous!). The place where the cleanliness reaches its height is the KCR train I take to go downtown. There's no eating or drinking allowed on the train OR in the station once you've passed through the gates. It's spectacularly clean. I love the penguin-themed signs reminding riders not to eat on the train:



Maybe because the city is so clean, there is also an obsession with staying clean to stay healthy. It's probably partly a result of SARS, but the urge to kill germs is very present in Hong Kong. In public places, such as malls, there are hand santizer dispensers. Often at a restaurant they will give you boiling water and a bowl to rise your chopsticks, plate and bowl. They also give you different colored chopsticks to use as "public chopsticks," so that the chopsticks that go into your mouth never touch other people's food. There are signs all over the university reminding us all to wash our hands and wear masks if we have respiratory symptoms.

Week 1: I made it!

I did indeed survive my first week of teaching. In fact, I more than survived, I enjoyed it. Teaching feels a lot like performing in a play. I feel like I walk into a classroom and become Martha the Teacher. She's nice, but not too nice. She's also desperately trying to remember everyone's name!
I am teaching two classes. The first is a writing course for first-year English majors. It focuses on writing "the college essay" (which I learned as the dreaded five-paragraph essay) but also includes lots of practice of oral English. I have met this class twice and they wrote short autobiographies for me. Judging from this initial contact, there's a wide range of English abilities in my class, but they all seem quite bright. They are also really excited and nervous and dealing with all of the freshman year craziness.
My second course in Business English for second year English majors. It's three hours long, starting a 8:30, on Friday morning. If that's not enough to make my kids dislike the class, I don't know what is. Plus they are second-years, so they're a bit more jaded and a bit less easy to handle (they're still Hong Kong students, though, so discipline problems will be subtle rather than overt). But they like the class because it's about using English as a practical skill. Cantonese is their language of identity, English is a tool to get them where they want to go.
I have lots to learn about teaching, but it feels good to get under way.