Had a very crazy lesson this Thursday past. Last period I have grade 3, class 2. They are not a good class and I have 10 of them. Anyway, I turned my back for one minute and two boys were on top of one another, one tickling him or hurting him (couldn’t be sure) and I caught them and gave them a row. Then the boy being tickled, Michael, went berserk and started chasing the boy doing the tickling, Jimmy( or Jeemee as he puts it, he looks like a little thug), and was throwing chairs at him. I grabbed Michael and put my arms round him to stop him throwing stuff but he started to pull my fingers back and then grabbed my shirt. All my buttons came undone. I’ve no idea how, but I was standing in front of this naughty class with my bra on show and my shirt wide open! They all though it was hilarious, I did the buttons up, then Michael just went back to being berserk, and Jimmy continued fleeing from him. That class is going to be the end of me!

I’ve picked up, mostly, just useful phrases , what Fi and I call Taxi Chinese, and that does us fine. We haven’t watched any TV for the last two months as we have no ariel, we just watch our 40p DVD’s. Westerners are viewed in mixed ways, I dont really want to go into it too much for fear of treading on toes, but the feeling I have picked up is that they think we have a lot of money (in many cases, compared to most Chinese, we do) but, in Shanghai, foreigners and Chinese live very similarly as it is very cosmopolitan.