Work (+) Environment

A few more photos taken in and around the Waldorf campus, all of a still life-y nature. I may post photos of my kids, their classmates, and their stories at some point later on, but for now, you can get some idea of the vibe of the place. On sunny days at the school, I sometimes get the feeling that I'm working inside a painting by Matisse... (though a bit noisier, I might add.)

 

Home away from home

Most of my time this last fall, at least from around 8:30 to 4:30 or 5:00 Monday to Friday, plus some evening meetings and weekend events, has been spent at the Chengdu Waldorf School, where I now work teaching English. The kids all go to school there as well, which has been an interesting new part of our experience.

Here are a few pictures of life in and around the school. Because this blog is published using Blogspot, a technology blocked in China, I don't think that very many people involved with the school will be reading this, but still, I'd like to respect everyone's privacy as much as possible.

What that means in real terms is that even though my teaching and life at the school takes up the lion's share of my time, I don't forsee writing a huge amount of posts about it. Not because of any great secrets, but because anything that I would manage to write would be a very incomplete picture. And, because the school is the first Waldorf School in China and gets a fair amount of attention from all sorts of people, I'd hate to give anyone the wrong impression about it from a simple photo or a paragraph or two.

Still, it is a really nice place to work! Here are just a few pictures to give a very small taste of the school, and what our day to day routine has been like for the last five months or so.


I mean seriously, how many schools have their own bamboo groves that their students can wander through?


Or sandpits just filled with big piles of bricks that kids can build with?


If you've ever been in China with kids, you'll know that swingsets for kids are few and far between.


There's Ysa outside her kindergarten class, making something to eat out of sand. One thing that I will say about the school, we've had to wash the kids' winter coats quite often this year.

Have Boa, Will Travel

Then there's this truck, which appeared parked by the side of the road one morning. By the afternoon, it was gone. Really wish I could have seen the show, wherever it was...

More of the neighborhood

A few random people shots taken while out and about doing errands close to our house...

The more things change, the more they stay the same

What would this blog be without a photo or two of a construction site every now and then? Well, dear readers, I'm happy not to disappoint.



In yesterday's post, you may have noticed this shot of the vacant lot just across the street from our apartment compound. That was in September. By November, construction had risen above the foundation by a story or two, and this is what it looked like in mid-January:



Makes me wish on one had that my apartment faced the site so that I could take a time-lapse photo of the building every day as it zooms up; but it makes me very glad that I am far enough away not to get much of the construction noise.

Getting to work

One good way to restart a narrative, at least if I remember the writing classes that I took a long while back, is to start with the setting. And what better setting than our walk to school every weekday?


Yes, I know it's terribly cliched to start with your main character wake up and look out the window. So sue me. Besides, this picture represents a special occasion. See those buildings under construction way off in the background? Not usually visible. Ditto on the sunlight and shadows.

Fast forward a bit, and it's out the door, around the corner, and up the street for a fifteen minute walk to school.

 

You'll note the seasonal variation in the photos, which are a compilation of the relatively rare times when A) I've had my camera with me, and B) the bright morning sunlight (fairly rare) has inspired me to take a few pictures.

 

 


Most days, we see Hat Man somewhere along the way. He's very distinguished, with a neatly trimmed grey mustache. That's him with the black overcoat.


Then it's past the abandoned commercial building of some kind ... (snarling barking Doberman not pictured)


...past the breakfast cart...


...and the entrance to the girls' boarding school. (Said girls, who tend to travel in clumps and screech in delight whenever they see a "cute!!" little foreigner, being the bane of my childrens' existance..) 


Xander and Zekey on the final stretch.


And here we are! The bell rings in another ten minutes, so finish your breakfast and get to your classroom.

True confessions

The astute observer of this blog will no doubt observe that in the past several months, posts have been sparse to nonexistent. To which I reply, well yeah, for a hypothetical observer, you're pretty gosh darn observant. (That's probably why they call you an observer, isn't it?)

For all you non-hypothetical observers out there, well you're not interested in excuses or explanations, are you? And I'm way past the point in my blogging where I'm interested in writing them, except to say that the past several months, I've been primarily occupied with matters of A) work and B) nebulous personal issues of an indeterminate nature, neither of which are interesting or necessarily advisable to put on the internet for an audience of...dozens of people.

However, aside from these topics, I have managed to accumulate a few stories and pictures here and there. And now that the semester is winding down and a vacation is approaching, I thought that the time was right to put a few things down in pixels again, for posterity's sake. So, on with the show!

note 1:
Yes, this does seem to be an empty promise, but due to the modern miracle of robo-posting, rest assured that if you're seeing this, it means that I have kept my promise to myself not to post anything  until I have a month's worth of material online and ready to go on a pre-programmed daily basis. The fact that this month happens to be the shortest month of the year is (ahem) entirely coincidental.

note 2:
And I do realize that I've hinted at matters to mysterious to reveal in a blog format. One clue: International Giraffe Smuggling. I can tell you that, although it sounds promising and that the hypothetical rewards are great, bitter personal experience has taught me that the enterprise is, in the end, not worth the considerable risks and great personal trauma involved.