Ouch my face!

I have got myself a teaching job, which was fairly straightforward. All I had to do was turn up to the interview and speak English. They then presented me with the contract, which was a little scary, but I decided that the contract probably wasn’t very binding so it’d be ok. Like most of my speculations about China this is based on absolutely no information.

The job is great however the hours are terrible. I work 3pm-8.30pm Wed-Fri and then 8.30am-7.30pm Sat and 8.30am-6.00pm Sun. I teach one class on Thursday evenings and then do a load of demos to try and encourage perspective students to sign up. The kids are aged between 3 and 12. I have discovered that children will do anything for stars even though they don’t actually mean anything.

Now I’ve been there three weeks and it is the summer holidays the head master decides the whole company is going on a team-building trip. So they pack 100 employees from all of the different branches of Best Learning (the company I work for) off to Ye San Po. Ye San Po is 4 hours from Beijing and is in the mountains and consists of one street with a few newsagents and a load of rubbish. Everything that could be seen in the distance looked great though.

The first team building exercise was a cheap version of the TV programme Total Wipeout (an obstacle course made from floats in water). It started with the travelator (think gladiators, or if that means nothing to you think a conveyer belt which is going in the opposite direction to the one you want to run in). After this you do some leaping from float to unstable float. Then there are some spinning floats that you jump from and you grab a bar, which you then glide down. From the float you land on you walk along a tight rope style float and then run across some rollers and end it all by leaping onto a rope net and climbing to the top of a small tower. Where you turn around and face your cheering adoring audience.

I was somewhat worried about having a go. I knew deep down I should just do it or I’d regret it and after almost everyone else had done it and a fair amount of peer pressure. Sentiments such as you only live once and you might never get the chance again were directed my way and I thought fuck it! So I gathered my team around me and told them if I fell off the travelator more than 3 times I was giving up. A lot of people had been falling here since it was pretty wet. The man with the microphone that was commentating asked me if I had something to say and I explained I would be falling in a lot. I got into position. I prepared myself to run fast. I took the first step. I immediately slipped and attempted to break my fall with my face.

I learned an important lesson this day - breaking your fall with your face leads to concussion. Also it causes your face to swell up like a melon. I was rescued from the water by two of my co-workers. Everyone was concerned and chose to surround me and express their concern in both Chinese and English and all at once with lots of gesticulation or by holding hands over open mouths and directing their shocked eyes first at me, then at each other. Obviously all of this was very comforting. I was given a cold drink and some cold spray to put on the wound. One of the foreign teachers was worried I might have broken my cheekbone so I was whisked off to the local hospital. The doctor had a prod and decided to give me an X-ray.

After it was concluded I had not broken anything I was given 3 different lots of pills to take - 2 of each, 3 times a day and some stuff to rub in. One set of pills for pain, one in a miscellaneous paper bag with no label on and one set for my heart. I decided not to take them.

The rest of the day was spent eating and watching karaoke. There was an attempt at a fire however it was very small and didn’t last long.  Although I would say the team building exercise was rather pointless I feel that my injury did bring the team closer together. We ended the night playing a card game called killer, eating Chua (meat on sticks) and drinking beer.

Day two was supposed to consist of a cruise however it turned out that cruise actually meant rafting. And obviously I’d decided to wear a nice dress for the cruise only to have to buy some shorts and persuade one of the boys to take off their T-shirt so I could wear it. A kind lady saw me getting undressed in the queue and blocked me from view with her umbrella just before I exposed myself. I then handed her my dress as I was pretty sure she was the tour guide from our bus. 

We get in our raft and then proceed to paddle down the shallowest river ever until we all get a bit stuck and a digger comes along and using it’s digger arm thing pushes people out of the really shallow water into the marginally less shallow water. We eventually make it to a fake cave, which is full of fake clay stalactites. We did not gaze in owe at the unnatural wonders instead we pushed off of them with our paddles in order to manoeuvre through the fake cave.

We end the trip in the dirtiest river imaginable and feeling quite disgusting head back to the hotel to shower, eat and leave. So people, the next time you’re feeling swore about the extensive health and safety regulations at work think of my bruised and swollen face and be thankful you don’t work in China.