Hello whoever it is that is reading this blog:
From the comments section it seems only a few spammers from China are on the site. So I have now completed two semesters worth of teaching both Spoken English and Introductory Business at Renmin University in Beijing, China. I teach basic English to Doctoral students, which is probably the equivalent of a third-grade English class in the United States. Secondly, I teach an elective course to mostly Undergraduate Business majors that covers: Marketing, Organizational Behavior, Finance, Accounting, and Economics. Therefore, I get to at least salvage a little bit of use from the MBA Degree I recently completed at Pepperdine.
My Doctoral Students are between the ages of 25-40. For those of them who don't already have English names, I give them a list of suggestions which are equal parts ridiculous and culturally-insensitive. Most of the names I have recommended come from "bros" that I went to school with at USC, as those days of glory are still remembered fondly, even though I'm pretty sure due to over a decade of debauchery I have managed to erase a good 90% of these memories. I would bet dollars to donuts that my class is the only one on the continent where Chinese students proudly call themselves: Mauricio, Maradona, Caesar, Grouse, and the list goes on and on. Caesar Orozco you should be proud, in just one year of teaching I already have compiled five future leaders of the country who are enthusiastically calling themselves Caesar. When I say leaders of the country I am partially serious, as the university I teach at is the People's University and it is a hard-core government talent pool. I would say that 95% of my students are active party members, and many are looking to make it big in politics. Hopefully, my association with them will buy me out of any future logjams that I'm likely to find myself in if I continue living in the Orient.
My elective business course is for Undergraduates, and this last semester all of the students in my class were Freshmen who at the tender age of eighteen and nineteen were forced to deal with my reign of terror. They speak English better than some of my friends, and they eat, sleep, and drink homework. Most of them have between 25-30 hours of class a week, and spend another fifty hours doing homework. Sometimes I get up early on Saturday morning to get breakfast and will walk past the library that looks more like a line for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. I don't know what I was doing at 8AM on Saturday when I was a Freshmen at USC, but I am fairly certain that I wasn't waiting for the library to open. It has been much more rewarding to teach this elective course as these students listen to everything I saw as if I was Moses.
I have also instituted an extremely effective policy for combating tardiness...I make them sing. I have been using this incredibly hilarious technique more for my own personal amusement than anything else, as there is nothing like an embarrassed bespectacled Chinese student with a teddy-bear sweater singing "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer" (I have printed out a copy and keep it in my binder at all times). Speaking of teddy-bears, if Beijing is the worst dressed city in the world (and it is) then Renmin University is its epicenter of cross-dressing. "Teeny-Weeny" is a teddy-bear that a good half of the girls are wearing on their shirts on any given day, and this goes all the way up from Freshmen to Doctoral students. When I ask these girls why it is they love "Teeny-Weeny", there answers are always somewhere along the lines of: "every woman loves a teddy-bear." LOL
To make the dress code even more outlandish, Chinese women constantly walk around with umbrellas whenever it is even moderately warm. When I ask them why they do this they almost always say: "I don't want to be black." Which although culturally insensitive, is the way that women want to look around here, because dating back to the old days of China having lighter skin meant that you were upper-class as you didn't work in the fields. Some of my Chinese students literally have lighter skin than I do. Those women who don't wear "Teeny-Weeny" apparel are likely sporting some ridiculous American phrase in big block letters on their clothes that 9 out of 10 times does not make sense, as whoever is selling these foreign shirts must be even more of a sarcastic bastard than I am. My personal favorite is: "A surfer dreams is wet."
Now that the World Cup has begun I have started mingling more with the locals around here. Since I am abot as lazy as a crippled panda, I have found the very closest restaurant/bar on campus and made it my home away from home. I would much rather go to some of the classier spots around town, but I can walk to this place in five minutes and they reserve a table for me as I come in EVERY NIGHT. I love the World Cup, more than any other sporting event, and add a little bit of gambling and you have absolute magic. The "Water Stone Cafe" got themselves a slide projector; rearranged the seating chart; and now it is the place to be. Out of a good 50-100 people on any night, I am by far the loudest, most annoying, and whitest. To be as politically incorrect as humanly possible, I have chosen to root like crazy against all teams from the continent of Asia. South Koreans, North Koreans, and Japanese, all would love nothing more than to take a baseball bat to my watermelon-sized head...and I don't disagree with them for feeling the way that they do...it's a total dick move.
Nevertheless, the South Africans most definitely hate me the most. During the first match I chose to root for Mexico against South Africa, even though there was a posse of heavily-muscled Africans who let it be known that they were not a fan of my antics. After a little bit of liquid courage I became louder, and progressively more annoying, and as my friend Blake Dirickson would say I was "that guy". When Mexico finally did score I was so excited that I did some sort of a dancing jig that I combined with a fist pump, and after getting yelled at by the Africans I blasted them with the double-barrel middle finger salute. Fortunately, I managed to get out of the bar alive, but I have followed up these antics with subsequent debacles of American travel lore that give our kind a bad reputation in virtually every country we Americans step foot in. However, due to the fact that I am a paying customer and the staff that works there actually like me (I can be charming on very occasional occasions), when I walk into the bar now: a cold beer is poured for me and placed at my table without a word; a bevy of bespectacled, albino-skinned, vampire-fanged Chinese women smile and wave at me; and different crews of Africans, Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese all point and stare as if they have just locked eyes with Lucifer himself. Damn it feels good to be a gangster.
Anyways, that's it for now. I gotta finish grading Final Exams and then submit grades by tomorrow. I hate grading papers worse than, well I can't think of anything worse but I'm sure that there is something worse. Hope all is well back in the States and that USA takes down Algeria in there next World Cup. Tonight is Portugal vs. North Korea, and even though I have a date with a voluptuous Russian girl named Liliya who I managed to convince that the Waterstone Cafe is a wonderful establishment; I still plan on antagonizing all supporters of North Korea and probably everyone else.
go get em' Portugal,
"That Guy"
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