Wildlife Count: Many wonderful lizards; a jolly frog; a giant cockroach; a threatening looking wasp thing; a beautiful and massive moth; many many many mosquitoes. I hate them! Only the mosquitoes, the rest of the animals are awesome in their own special ways, even the papa cockroach! Jo does not agree. She was the one to find it just chillin' in the bathroom, and alerted the rest of the flat with a scream. When King came to the rescue he attempted to chase it down but those things are fast. After a few attempts to stamp it to death and shouts of "Don't kill it!" from Jo it disappeared, never to be seen again... yet. But Jo is still living in the fear of when it might show its face again.
On Tuesday we started giving the adult lessons. We weren't sure how many people would come but there was a very goot turnout, so on Wednesday we split the class into two levels. Jo took the upper class, where they are able to talk about job interviews and CVs. My class is wonderful, we are learning "hello" and "goodbye" and making simple offers and requests. I spent much of the lesson teaching them how to say Thursday. They are all very enthusiastic and I hope my teaching skills are at least good enough for them to improve a little bit while we are here.
After class on Wednesday evening, King took us to meet some of the Malaysians of the community at a Chinese beer shop/bar thingy-ma-place. They were very welcoming and seemed very appreciative of what we are doing here. The people here are so warm hearted that they make us endless offers, such as "you are welcome to stay with my sister-in-law in Borneo" and "my wife and children will take you swimming".... "give me a tinkle if you ever need anything, I will sort it out for you." Definitely something we are not used to at home. After getting to know these people a little bit, King took us to visit the flat of some of the refugees. They run a little shop selling Burmese snacks and food from their flat. They laid out various things for us to try, such as a salad of dried nuts, lentils, sesame seeds and peas, with wet tea leaves. The bitter taste of the tea leaves is intended to balance out the saltiness of the salad. It was like nothing I've tasted but I think it was quite nice. Jo kindly said it was very tasty but I'm not sure they believed her on judging her facial expressions. We stayed in the flat talking to the girl there for a long time, and left at about 1.30 am, still needing to plan tomorrow's lesson at this point, oh dear! Late night ahead.
Yesterday (Friday) was yet again activity day, so naturally my morning consisted of playing three games of Scrabble. Lucky I like Scrabble. Jo's class had the pleasure of watching Toy Story 3 and then learning learning some fabulous songs. We about music class after school but the teacher didn't turn up this week. Nevertheless we stayed behind to have a practise, I'm starting to remember some of the songs I know on guitar and Jo's drumming skills are near expert. After that we came back to the flat to chill for a while. Later, we were excited to cook dinner because we have now been provided with a tin opener from Pastor Henry. We can open our tuna! But, unfortunately this proved to be harder than we expected. This is no normal can opener. After googling how to use it the tuna still refused to let us in. After half an hour of carving around the outside of the can and prising open with a fork, we finally made contact with the contents. And was it worth it? Oh yes. After a week of tofu, tuna is like the food of heaven.
After dinner we went for a walk to Tescos, to get some money, and then past the beer shop where we found King and our new friends from Wednesday evening. We joined them for a few beers and I discovered that I now have people to practise my Mandarin on. And discovered that my memory of languages comes to me more willingly after a beer or two. We then visited the flat of Simon and Bibiana, two children from my class A at school. We met their dad, Bruno, who is paralysed and has to stay in the flat all the time. He was such a nice man and seemed so happy to meet us. We promised that we would come and visit him often. We showed Simon and Bibi our houses on google maps, and some sights of London. They provided us with a dish of tomato, onion and beef, very delicious, then listened to some of their favourite music including One Direction, Katy Perry and Justin Bieber. Bruno was also a fan, such a cool dad! By 2am everyone was tired so we thanked them and went home to sleep.
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