And the winner is...
on Tina's Journal (China), 05/Dec/2009 03:28, 34 days ago
So, yesterday evening I was one of the judges in a competition for the students in the English Department. There were 21 contestants and each one had to talk for 3 minutes about something cultural either 'Western' or Chinese. They were randomly given topics and had 10 minutes to prepare their speech. When they finished their speech then were then asked a question from one of the teachers about etiquette. To be honest, the questions were terrible and based on etiquette read about in text books which I could not relate too. For example, one question was "When introducing people what order do you do this in?"  or"How do you shake hands with a lady?"For the latter question they were looking for answers such asdo not have a sweaty palm!!There was a question about table manners. This I thought was a relevant question because some of the experiences I have had here would go down very bad back home! I think one of the worst was last week when I was having dinner with the teachers, headmaster and Education Bureau in a school I was visiting. We were sitting around the table and one male teacher just kept clearing his throat and spitting straight down in front of himself at the table, he didn't turn away or anything and I was almost facing him. Every now and again I would look at him just at the wrong moment. It is common for people to spit their food out on the floor, bones of chicken and fish, which is bad enough, but this was just worse. Sorry to diverge away, but that just came back to me! Back to the competition... Once they had answered the question they then had to give a performance of some kind. I have attached a photo of one guy doing a Micheal Jackson dance which was great and one girl playing the flute. The winner is our friend King in the picture with the Dean of the English Department, Miss Fu. King is actually a student in the art department but has very good English. For his performance, he painted a quick picture in Rolf Harris style and unfortunately I didn't get a photo of it. The top six winners will now enter a regional competition in Kunming. Lets hope King wins. He speaks English so naturally and he's very open minded. He's not afraid to speak his mind and talks about any subject, which unfortunately is not the case for many other people you speak to here!