David Cameron performing opera in Beijing...

....a double take was required...

Nearly eating sea horse with turtle, A motivation camp for Beijing students and feeling like a rockstar

I’ve done a bit of work in Beijing. Actually, I’ve done quite a bit of work in Beijing.  I teach English, both at a company, and privately, I consult for a Chinese business, I give public speaking training, and I’m helping organise a 3 day dialogue in Beijing to promote further UK-China relations. 

The most fun work I have done in Beijing, however, has to be a motivational camp aimed at Chinese high school students.  This takes a bit of explaining.  Essentially the idea is to get these kids into an intensive week-long camp, all in English, to build their confidence, their team working skills, their creative skills, their public speaking etc etc. It’s an interesting concept, and of course a great way to learn English.

But before I tell you about that, take a look at this: sea horse with turtle.  It was on the menu at a place I recently ate in Beijing.  I was so tempted to order it, and eat it, but the sea horses looked so cute!

Anyway, back to the story.  The great thing, and also the most arduous, was that as the teacher, you had to prepare all materials, class plans, games etc.  But it meant I could unleash my full creative potential on these kids.

Let’s fast forward to the end of the week.  I was, actually, very sad to leave.  There was a large crowd of (mainly girls) Chinese teenagers crying as the teachers left in the bus to return back to Beijing.  I had taught the kids some Cockney Rhyming Slang and as we left, they all started chanting “Alright Geeza!” I can’t explain how weird it is having a group of Chinese school students chanting “Alright Geeza” to you.

Rewind. Day 1.  I arrived to a large classroom in this pretty dirty school.  The routine was two (separate) groups of about 30 kids, lessons and activities from 9am to 9:30pm.  ‘Twas intense.  As an ice breaker, I decided to use, what has now become known to my friends as the “Cube Game” – see previous posts.  Those that have read the book “The Game” by Neil Strauss (basically a book teaching men how to pull women) will be familiar with the Cube Game. 

It is essentially this.  You tell the subject (in this case, the whole group of students) that you’re going to tell them about their personality, both the obvious and the hidden, and in great detail, using only the answer to 4 questions. It goes a little something like this.

“OK, clear your mind.  Deep breaths.  Your mind is completely blank.  Now, I want you to imagine you’re in a desert.  There’s nothing around you, but sand.  But in front of you, there is a Cube.  Tell me about the Cube.  How big is it?  What colour is it?  What is the surface like?”

The subject answers.

“Now, imagine, if you will, you’re inside the Cube.  There’s a window.  How big is it?  What surface is it on?  Tell me as much information as you can.”

The subject gives their description.

“And now, there’s a ladder.  Where will you place the ladder?  Is it vertical or laid down?  Which surface is it on?”

The same routine.

“And finally, there’s a horse.  Tell me about the horse.  Is it inside or outside?  How big is it? Is it facing you?  Etc”

By this time the kids looked both terrified and intrigued.

The trick of the game is to use their answers to describe their personality.  So the Cube represents them.  If they say their cube is large, you say they’re outgoing and want to be something bigger than they currently are. If they say blue, you say they’re calm.  Red, feisty.  Etc.  The window represents how they see the outside world, and how they want the world to see them.  So if it’s big, they’re open and transparent.  If it’s small, they’re private.  If it’s on the ceiling, they’re looking to the stars (i.e. a hopeful person or a dreamer).  By the way, the point about this is the description has always to draw on the positive.  The ladder represents where they want to go in life, and the journey they’ll take to get there.  Most people’s ladders are going up, sometimes directly up.  Ambition.  But sometimes the ladder is opposite to the window, which is supposed to indicate a misalignment of the image they want to project of themselves, and where they want to go in life.   The horse represents another being – i.e. a person who they’re close to, let’s say a family member, best friend or partner.  If the horse is on the outside, they don’t like letting people in too close.  If it’s bigger than them, they want protection, or a companion who is going to help them get somewhere.  If it’s facing them, they want to literally and metaphorically see “eye to eye” with said person.

OK, it’s a bit of psycho babble.  But when you ask the subject whether your interpretation of their answers is an accurate description of their personality, 9 times out of 10 the answer is usually “completely!”.  And with most of the students, it was the same.

One student asked me in Chinese if I was a magician.  I wasn’t, but it laid the foundations for the week to come.

The next day, and a couple of times after that, I did some public speaking training with the kids.  It’s public speaking training I’ve done a couple of times for corporates, and it works well with a different audience.  One of my favourite games to illustrate how important structure is to public speaking is the card trick.  10 random cards, including a joker in the middle of the pack.  Show them the cards, in order, ask them to memorise them without writing anything down.  Then give them 90 seconds to write down, in order, the cards numbers and suits.  The subjects usually remember the first 2 or 3, the last two and the joker in the middle of the pack, thus illustrating that the most important things you want to say in a speech should be at the beginning, and again at the end, and that people don’t really remember what you say in the middle, unless it’s a surprise to them.

Every lesson was started by an ice breaker game.  This was my licence to get the kids to do anything I wanted, no matter how ridiculous, in the name of education.  I had them running around making one of three animal sounds, during which they had to listen out for other students making their animal sounds and group up with them.  I had them say “I love Justin Bieber” using different emotional intonations (happy, sad, angry, lonely, to someone they don’t know).  I had the girls doing the stomp and the boys doing the clap, in time, from the beginning of the Queen song “We will rock you”.

English corner.  This is where the students can ask you any question they want, for a whole hour.  It’s an intensive hour.  Nay, it’s an excruciating grilling, as the kids will ask you ANYTHING.  “How old are you?”, “Do you have a girlfriend?”, and “How do you think the Western education system compares with the Chinese education system?” were the most common.  These were peppered with some of my favourites, including “Who is the best looking girl in the class?”, and “why is your hair like that?”

At the end of the week, the students had to prepare a play, in English, which they would write, direct and act.  This would be fun.  I thought it would make it more interesting if I gave them free rein over what they would do.

One of my two classes wanted to do a play about a school student who drank and smoked and was bad…hj yu ttyrt  ..sorry, I must have dozed off whilst writing about the “interesting” subject matter of the play.  Sufficed to say a magical cat showed him the future.  He quit the booze and the fags, came top of his class and got married to a beautiful girl, giving a cautionary speech to the audience at the end of the play about working hard at school.  Nancy Reagan would have been proud.

The other class had a great idea.  Their concept was to do a parody of the death of Bin Laden…where I played Bin Laden.  Great.  A squad of elite US seals was sent to assassinate BL.  But they were actually hopeless fools and their helicopter crashed in China (who’d have guessed!).  Oh, and two of the seals were a gay couple.  They completely failed in China, having their phones stolen, losing their money, being conned by a Beijing taxi driver and becoming beggars.  Meanwhile, Bin Laden (me, complete with turban, and fake tissue beard) is actually a booze fuelled party animal, and the US get wind of a big party he is throwing, sending another crack squad of seals (this time, proficient ones) to kill him.  But they get distracted by the women at the party, and accidentally set fire to his compound with a cigarette, thus unintentionally killing him.  Interesting Chinese perspective on the death of Bin Laden. But the audience loved it.

One night was “karaoke night”.  The teachers were encouraged to get up and sing, in front of a group of 200 Chinese high school students.  Now, I love to sing, and have been to KTV (Chinese karaoke chain) about 7 times since I’ve been in China.  But 200 people!

I decided to do a rendition of Take That’s “Back for Good”, not because I particularly like the song, but because it’s one of the few songs that I can actually sing fairly well.  But I decided to give it full whop, singing in acapella, crouching down on the floor when the song was at its maximum, singing strategically to girls in the crowd.  It went mental.  All of the students stood up, got out their seats and crowded round me as I sung, giving me hugs, and some just reaching out to touch me.  It was the first (and most likely the last) time that I felt like someone famous.  The next night I had a queue of people asking me to autograph their t-shirts, for 70 minutes.  This was getting weird.

What was more weird, however, was that all the teachers were staying, not in a hotel, not in a hostel, not in private apartments, but in a hospice.  Oh yes, a hospice.  The housing department of the company organising the camp had kindly decided to house us in a hospital complex, in the hospice building.  The one upside was that the building had been newly built, and was not currently occupied (at least we thought) by any dying Chinese people.  The beds were all electronically controlled, the toilet seats rotated (I don’t know why a toilet seat would do that) and the rooms had so many emergency alarm cords it was ridiculous. 

Anyway, back to the end, again.  As we drove away in the van to Beijing, I realised it was such a rewarding experience.  But I’m never staying in a hospice again until the day I die.  (Cue drum beat, cheesy laughter and slow clapping for the bad pun).

Boring Beijing – not so Boring; a “4D” cinema ride and a man getting ass banged by a bull getting ass banged by a cloud at the 798 art district (not my words, the words of the artist)

The following question has loomed large in my head since arriving in Beijing.  Is there more to do in this city (as someone who is used to a London lifestyle) than just party, eat and speak Chinese?  I think the answer is, maybe.

On a Sunday Summer’s day in London, or any other major international city for that matter, a discerning and well heeled (read aspiring to be well heeled) 20 something man like myself can eat and drink, yes, but art galleries are aplenty, curio shopping is widespread, a picnic in the park (read London Fields) is a nice option, a gig etc.  It’s not so much that Beijing doesn’t offer this, it’s just not in the same way.

After nearly 3 months in China now, and enough drinking and eating for a good year, I decided to make it a mission to search out other things to do.

I started with the low hanging fruit – major tourist attractions.  So far, I’ve done the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, The Temple of Heaven, Summer Palace (more on this later) and the national museum.  Lower down on my list were the Underground City, National Police Museum and the Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall.

Let’s start with the first, first.  The Underground City was ordered built by the great Chairman himself when relations between the People’s Republic (China) and the USSR soured.  This was, as our parents will remember, at a time when the world was on the precipice of nuclear war, and whilst China publicly was not threatened by the USSR (and the US’s for that matter) nuclear arsenal, privately Mao ordered vast underground tunnels and safe havens to be built below Beijing, to protect its peoples in the event of an attack.

Apparently most of this network has been rather cleverly converted into the Beijing Subway system.  God bless China.  What of it remains, has become a museum.  And so off I trotted, one sunny day, to said museum, only to discover it was closed for refurbishment for the summer. Bummer.

On to the next one (as Jay Z once said).  The Police Museum is, as you might expect, a museum which documents the creation of the Beijing police and its evolution over time, with a special focus on their role in “maintaining order” at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.  Whilst the inner geek in me wanted to see the museum, the curious foreigner in me was very interested to learn of how the museum (which incidentally is right next to one of the main government complexes in Beijing) reported on the so called “Cultural Revolution”.  As it turns out, the Beijing Police weren’t too well treat during this period, with many of their senior ranks being purged by the secret police for alleged subversion.  This was publicly reported in the museum, with a small section devoted to the bravery of the police men who were affected.  Interesting. 

I was promised, at least by my Beijing Bible (Insider’s Guide to Beijing) that I would be able to practice shooting lasers on the 4^th floor.  This was, however, disappointingly not the case.

Whilst the Beijing Planning Exhibition Centre doesn’t sound like it would rock anyone’s boat who wasn’t a bored architect, it was, surprisingly, cool.  Basically, like many things in China, whoever was in charge of this museum had the “vision” to make it into some sort of mini- theme park, complete with rides.  (Serious!).

Its purpose was really to show how great a city Beijing was, and how clever the planning authorities were in creating such a vibrant and splurging urban mass.

The central attraction has to have been the huge scale model of Beijing, showing all the buildings and developments (I even managed to spot the office where I work).  See picture.

Also of note was the “4D” ride.  A side note here.  A lot of things in China are hyped up, and “4D” (as opposed to 3D) certainly was one of them.  “4D” in this case meant 4 screens, rather than another dimension of reality.  The purpose of this ride was to illustrate to the viewer how Beijing might look in 50 years time.  Apparently, everyone would be travelling around in flying cars, as this was the “ride” element of the attraction, complete with moving seats, to simulate what it would feel like riding through futuristic Beijing in the air.  From what I’ve gathered (from the ride) the national planners want Beijing to be much bigger, and much taller.  And did I say much bigger?  Well, that’s the dream anyway.

On to more cultural elements now.  The one good thing about being an expat/ foreigner in a Chinese city like Beijing is that a lot of the cool cultural quirks and developments are basically aimed at attracting you.  One only has to scan one of the many weekly/ monthly expat focused publications to get a listing of Beijing’s happening happenings on any day of the week. And, so this I did.

The Bookworm – a nice, but overpriced bookshop come restaurant near San Li Tun - was hosting a talk by Chandran Nair.  A word on him.  This dude’s basically written a book called “Consumptionomics”, using China as a case study of how as a global economy we have become too reliant on consumption, of everything.  This is a bad thing, so the argument goes, because not only does it mean we’re more susceptible to global downturns, but it also messes with the planet’s resources.  Interesting.  Shame I arrived late to a full room and couldn’t get in.

Anyway, not one to be stopped by a pushback like this, I went to an art exhibition launch at one of Beijing’s boutique hotels – the Opposite House (apparently where Beyonce stayed – although not sure I believe this) – right after.  The gallery, which I have since been to, had a pretty cool exhibition.  Essentially, it’s a Chinese artist who’s made these giant red naked men (and boys) who rather ominously sit in the lobby of the hotel.  Pretty cool.

That night I met lots of interesting people, but it confirmed one thing for me.  Basically, the liberal middle class are the same the world over.  I had exactly the same conversations with the patrons of this event – mainly art curators and artists themselves, that I would at a middle class dinner party in London.  “Isn’t it wonderful”, “look at the aesthetics of this piece of art”, “the situation in Libya is just awful” were staple parts of the conversation.  In a way it was reassuring and a nice revisit to the familiarity of home.

The Red Gate Gallery itself has some pretty cool pieces of art.  It’s basically housed in the old watch tower of the Dongcheng area of Beijing, which is where one of the remaining stretches of the old city wall of Beijing still remains.  See pictures.

More on art now.  One of the very cool things that Beijing can boast is that is in an exclusive club of international cities which has its own art district - “798” (not some clever marketing name, but so called because it is in the 798 district of north Beijing).

I had been before, but just as most of the places were closing, so I again visited this vast sprawl of art galleries and cafes with my friend, Leon, who had come to China for 10 days to visit me. 

798 is less of an art district (there is some decent art there) now, and more of a lifestyle area.  I say this, as it probably has the highest concentration of coffee shops, bars, restaurants and fashion shops in the whole of Beijing, inching out the art as you sip on your over priced latte.  Having said that, if Chinese food isn’t to your liking, it does have some pretty good foreign food places. 


What it doesn’t have, unfortunately, is cutting edge art. Well, maybe it does. I’m a bit of a Philistine when it comes to art. But if you consider a cloud, in the shape of a dildo, ass banging a bull, who is also doing so to a man against a wall art, or a red miniature statue of Michael Jackson in the same league as Picasso, then you might like it. 

Eating Seahorses....

Did I do it........
.....no I did not.  They looked so cute.  And also - with the turtle?!