Posted 10:31 AM by Gobbler
On the Road Again

Just how do you pass 35 hours on a train? Some might say that this is not a question that even nedds consideration. Considering the overall marvellousness of trains, so they say, there is no possiblity of ever getting bored or needing any kind of stimulation beyond the knowledge that you are 'training it'. while this may be true for some people and traditionally, as a keen train person, i wouldcount myself as one of these people, the fact remained that i was with two people who did not share these very same romantic notions of life onna train. something nhad to be found, some activity discerned, to pass tyhe time. there was an obvios activity to embark upon, neatly summed up by rubrick with the words "Lets start drinkin.'"

When i woke up this morning i felt as if i had never been so ill. a crushing headache worked alongside a grimly churning stomach to make me feel frankly rather ill. the stuffy, close air of the train did nothing toi alleviate the grim feeling that boiled up within me, and there was no hope of a way out. it was nine am and we werent scheduled to get off the train for another 14 hours. 14 hours of hell.

Rubrick did not appear to share these thoughts, as he said to me "Hey man, good job we got drunk last night, passed the time quite well" i could only mumble some words tro the negative, for by this time i had already made up my mind and was on my way to the toilet.

Because, you see, a bottle of lemon iced tea and a bo9ttle of water had done nothing to remedy the situation, and the fallback plan, the desperate last measure, was to attempt top throw up, clear all evidence of the disgusting bijou away (for it was bijou that had been my downfall, the source of all my woes; dirt cheap alcoholic dirt that tasted of paintstripper mixed with dirt that was on the whole very very dirty) and hope to, after the evacuation, feel better.

After disgourging all the tea and water, bought at expense, and other proceeds from my belly, I felt a little better. after going back to bed for four more hours i felt better still, and by the time we got off the train, at an early time of half past eight, i felt almost normal. we found our way to hollies hostel and now, a couple of beers later, i feel almost normal; which is in many ways quiiite frightening.

So we are here. its amazing how quickly 35 hours passes really, by far the longest train journey i have had the ill-fortune of spending. a mere picnic to the train journey i will be having, however, in a few months time.

Tomorrow we're off to see Chinas biggest buddah. In many ways ive had enoguh of buddahs, but then again rtheres nothing quite like a good buddah. and so till tomorrow, when i will regale you all with fascinating stories of this really big buddah that i went to see. wow.

Posted 11:08 AM by Gobbler
‘I like the chinese
They only come up to your knees’ – Monty Python

Today was a busy and tiring day that will shortly expire in a cloud of sleep.

Chinese food is on the whole very good. Anyone coming here would be well advised to get their hands on some good old yu xiang rou zi and gong bao ji ding and mu lan rou and of course some marvellous Yang zhou chao fan. But it pays, every now and again, to eat something that is foul to remind you of how nice the other stuff is. Hence todays lunchtime experience.

After an hour and a halfs tiring entertainment of the children where I, feeling that I couldn’t justify playing the fruit or vegetable game again switched unceremoniously to the job and country game and spent 25 minutes yelling out “Lawyer, businessman, computer programer, doctor, worker, farmer, artist, writer, nurse, teacher” etc half a million times I went with one of my students to the refectory to join the queue for my aluminium tray full of the swill-like slop that the dirty chefs dumped on my tray.

What I had been given I tried not to look at as I made my way to the teachers table, but was forced to examine at close quarters on assuming my seat, no only because it was now only inches from my face but also because I was now confronted with the unnerving task of having to eat it. As I conducted my study of the probable contents of my lunch a kind teacher fetched me an aluminium dogs bowl full of pale green water that I imagined, given the context, was supposed to be soup and not the fetid sea water which would have otherwise been my assumption. It contained scraps of some green leaf-like vegetable which had the look, consitency and, as I soon discovered, taste, of seaweed and traces of egg, apparently only half a dozen for the whole school, which looked to have been ironed flat and then assiduously cut into strips.

While the contemplation of the soup distracted me for some moments I was after a time inevitably forced to return to my chief target, the main course. An assortment of browns took up most of the scene, a few of the hues containing what I optimistically thought might be meat. Besides the swamp of brown there were two elements that thankfully stopped the meal resembling the results of a painful half hour on the toilet after a vicious salmonellad chicken vindaloo the previous evening. Firstly there was a generous cube of rice that had been detached dextrously from the large rectangular tray of it with a spatula that the chef used to carve my cube from the whole in a sawing motion. The meal was finally made polychrome with the presence of some cucumber. It was the regular cucumber found in restaurants and commonly used as a starter with the peculiar exception that it was not in the regular stick shape but all manner of irregular small shapes and tasted vaguely of saliva; both unusual features can be accounted for by the explanation that a knife was not used to cut it up but instead was chewed down to size by the chef and then spat out.

The eating experience was irregular. The light brown oval shaped thing was not the breadcrumbed chicken breast that I naively thought it might be, for example. It tasted vaguely of fish but seemed to contain nothing beyond light brown breadcrumbs that became increasingly soggy due to being left in the pool of oily light brown water that collected in my tray from the variety of browns that made up my other dishes. Three of them, (true to form of all chinese meals, there was a number of different browns to choose from) it turned out, contained a meat product. The first was a meatball that in this case was somewhat farther away from the customary ‘ball of meat’ and somewhat closer to ‘meat of ball’. The other two contained meat that to this moment baffles me as to its cut or animal of origin. Both were of a brown colour, were coated in a loose brown sauce, and tasted vaguely of a flavour that can best be described as somewhat brown.

This memorable experience completed I returned home to prepare for my next class which began at 1. Then I remembered, as I cycled home on a newly damaged bluebelle (while cycling home at three in the morning last week I had a nasty run in with a big rock that a builder had carelessly left in the unlit thoroughfare. Bluebelle could not surmount the obstacle, but I could; the result being that I was lauched Superman style over the handlebars to crash land unscathed some metres ahead, and Bluebelle received a dented and slightly bent, though still operable wheel) that such nonsense as devising a lesson plan was unecessary as I still had a store of plans that I had purloined from other people. In any case the class still had to finish their presentations on their magazines which they had begun a fortnight before. Readers of a previous blog that might have been entitled “The Catatonic Chinaman” may recall the frustration caused by the blithering blockhead and should be aware that it was the very same class that I had today. One oclock soon coming round, I made my way there.

It soon emerged that a good number of the class had struggled with the task, and that about twenty of them hadnt turned up, leaving only 40 odd. These two facts are not necessarily connected, however, as I had missed the class the week before and some students may have found better things to do. No fault of mine I should like to make clear; I had been informed that my students had exams and that the class was cancelled, which turned out to be untrue. Three of the presentations were about ten minutes long and only one of those was good (though that was excellent). The other two were painful struggles as the students searched for the correct words. One of them took to mumbling a few things in english and then explaining what she had said at length in Chinese. After stopping her twice asking her to stop doing it but getting nowehere andseeing no point in upsetting her I allowed her to continue.

After all that I tried to enlive the class with a little chat so told them all about the fruit game and how much my middle schoolers enjoyed it. I jokingly asked if they would like to play it and a couple of them, before they had time to assess the situation, responded like automatons in the positive. Mind you, the fruit game is bloody good, it might even work with 22 year olds…

We played a quiz anmd the questions were so easy on the whole that the students took to standing up to answer as soon as I had asked and then working out what the question was and how to answer it. I countered this by asking not what was originally coming, something like ‘name five jobs’ but “Explain Einsteins theory of relativity”. The poor girl who leapt up first was quite at a loss as to the answer, but resourcefully grasping at the straw of the word ‘relativity’ answered “Uncle, Aunt, Grandfather, Grandmother, brother.” Oh dear! Minus one point for Your team, hehe heeh! Don’t second guess Foreign Expert Teacher Goulden young lady, though youre the same age as I.

The rest of the day involved a chinese lesson and cycling about town trying to sort out the big trip which begins tomorrow with a 35 hour train ride across China to Chengdu. 35 hours. TRAIN. 35 hours. TRAIN. On a train for 35 hours. That’s absolutely right. So im unlikely to blog tomorrow. Tried to get cash out at the bank of China with my debit card but the machine eat it. Luckily SuperBill was on hand to get it back. The lady handed it over with no fuss, saying “Oh yes, it does that.” I switched to Travellers Cheques and met with much more success, but was loathe to do as they are an irreplaceable and useful commodity out here. But now were more or less set.

Its time to bring this chapter of blog to a close. I apologise for not replying to a months worth of comments, I havfe read them all and will reply, but I hope you’ll understand that as its now 2 am and ive got to get up at 7:30 or so starting to tackle them now might not be the worlds most brilliant strategy for success.

I hope you enjoyed this blog. I was just going to cal it good night and not bother but im rather glad that I did now. I hope to be around these next ten days. Your blogger, nick

Posted 10:20 PM by Gobbler
A little teaching update

Or: "A bounder, a cad and a threat to humanity,
Each blundering step made causes a calamity."

I quote from February 24th: “Also, my “college” students this morning were 50% crap and only 25% commendable. I think I might start chucking some of them out if they continue to disregard the lesson…”

I am happy to say that the classes have got better in their behaviour. Let us begin with the High School and College. There are still those who don’t pay attention, but usually they keep themselves quiet. (Except for Hero, who Ive mentioned before, who considers himself the comic genius of the class. His usual angle of hilarity is announcing something half in Chinese because he doesn’t know the English words, which usualyy raises a few titters. Hes a pleasant student but also an irritating oik. Hes also 20.) Half of those that pay little attention sit at the back of the class with their heads in their hands saying nothing or quietly mumbling, the other half study something else. I don’t really mind as long as they keep shtum, and it doesn’t bother me in the High School classes as some of them don’t appear to be the sharpest tools in the box, but the college ones get me a bit. These students, let us remember, are training to be english teachers, and it seems to me that an English Teacher barely capable of announcing their name in comprehensible English is not going to be hugely successful at teaching his or her students the language. But I suppose its not my fault and unless I abandon the other 40 students and focus on them, theres nothing I can do about it.

The standard of English within classes is quite mind-boggling. My eldest class is, naturally enough, supposed to be my best. It consists of about 60 22-odd year olds who recently got back from actually teaching English for a few weeks about the area. Some of them are pretty good and can even string an interesting sentence together, speak clearly and confidently and arent a million miles away from understanding words like splendid, fascinating and extraordinary. They know trains. They are pro-active and have got me to do an english corner tonight at which they want me to talk about something. (I might have to talk about WW2 tanks to make sure that they don’t invite me back, but then I do have GOUT (Goulden’s Open Understanding Teaching) methodology and so shouldn’t really do that.) But one of them, oh mercy, one of them, proved so impressively moronic, so comprehensively idiotic the other day that I got quite frayed around the edges and almost throttled him. At the weekend I bought a small hammer (which interestingly also has four differently sized screwdrivers in the handle, curious, and only 6 yuan bargained down from 20, not bad) without knowing quite why at the time. When I showed it to people at the party I was on the way to with words akin to “Look, Ive got a small hammer. Interestingly, it has screwdrivers ensconced in the handle. Would you like to see?” they generally feigned interest, then escaped as soon as possible to the corner of the kitchen (the furthest extremity of the party limits) where they remained for the rest of the evening, occasionally casting furtive glances my way in case I tried them to show them the hammer again. I did not buy the hammer to disturb party goers, so why did I buy it? Perhaps it was the innerworkings of my mind preparing me for this colossal dunce of a student, equipping me to ‘get through to the man’, to break through his inch thick skull and see if there actually was anything going on in there. Im speaking metaphorically of course. Just the same I’ll leave behind the hammer again, just in case.

So, Im in class, this 60-odd strong class of my best students. I hand out magazines. They must answer 4 questions. They start off easy. I’ve found that it helps to start off easy.

1) What is the name of the magazine?
2) What sort of magazine is it?
3) What sort of people read it?
4) Take one article/part/bit/paragraph, read it and describe it.

This was to be an oral presentation, in groups. Question two is admittedly a little vague. Question four has four words where one would have done but I find that different students understand different words. I read through each question twice or thrice. I checked they knew words like magazine paragraph, etc. I asked if there was anything they did not understand. I asked if there were any questions. I asked them to begin working.

Half of the class exploded into action as if they were particularly ferocious and agitated bottles of champagne with corks just removed, some others resembled a pan of thick custard on low simmer, with an occasional ‘plop’ sound bursting through the surface showing that something was happening after all. The rest were, on the whole, somewhere in between. It would have been pleasing to describe some of them as behaving as if they had just eaten a pound of the worlds most vicious vindaloo accompanied by a nan bread and six cans of Red Bull, -such behaviour would I believe involve jumping up and down and running around the room screaming “It burns! It burns! Help me! Help Me! The birds! Ahhh! I can see the birds! Run for your lives!” before collapsing to floor and expiring with a splutter- but nothing of the sort occurred at all.
If I could have wished anyone was to expire with a splutter that day it would have been the gargantuan block-head that was and is his Supreme Ignorance the Student at the Back Esq., but in the event it was me rather than him that came closer to it.

Now, one thing to be quite sure to remember when teaching chinese students, even good ones, is this. If they say they understand it doesn’t mean that they do understand, it just means that they know I’ll be happy for the time-being if they say yes all the time. You will im sure agree that this strategum of doing and saying things that work for the time being are indeed alright for the time being, but are rarely at all alright for the time-shortly-to-come-into-being, which for conveniences sake we’ll call the time-later. We all seem to make this mistake every now and again. My classes like to make this mistake now, then, here, there and again which turns out to be quite often. It is thus necessary to carry out continuous systems checks to see that they are getting on ok, and for this reason I went round the class checking that each group was getting on all right. It was on such a round that I first encountered this sturdy example of adamantine stupidity.

In this 60-odd strong class there are just two blokes. Most of the time they look like browbeaten, crushed and thoroughly trouserless husbands, another look is of a sneaky child trying to grab a lolly pop before mum spots them. Only occassionally do they resemble keen scholars. One such moment was during the ‘I’m a Tiger!!!’ game, at which they almost excelled. This was not such an occasion. Together at the back, their usual enclave, they sat mindlessly staring into space like dummies. I decided to get to work on one of them, the one with the magazine. Sure, all he needed was a little friendly help to get him going, perhaps explain a few things. Sure, he could have asked a question when I asked if he didn’t understand, but why worry about it now? It seemed altogether better to try and push forward.

Making any headway whatsoever quickly began to look difficult as he, with a desperately confused look, shut up like a clam. “Can I help?” “Are you all right?” “DO you want any help?” “Do you understand all the words?” “Do you understand the questions?” All met with an extraordinary silence. “What – is – the – ma – ga – zine – called?” Not a whisper. “What – do you understand the word what?... Do you?” A faint nod and somewhat less than faint perspiration.

This continued for about five minutes, when he had more or less decided to understand and do some work. It seems I might have upset the poor chap; his facial expression, besides being impossibly dumbfounded, had the look which suggested that he had just heard that all his family had been murdered, that all the world was about to end and he couldn’t take it all in; not that he was incapable of answering question 1). Perhaps I should have hit him with the hammer –just a light tap you understand- and see if he could be prodded to life. Perhaps I’ll try nd stay away from him next time, its difficult and perhaps detrimental to the education of the other students to attempt to imput some knowledge into a mind of such a determinedly vacuous disposition.

Posted 10:26 AM by Gobbler
Blog For The Road

this is the third post for today. it is a short one. On thursday im off for may holiday and may not be on for a while, but then i may be on plenty. but just to warn you that i may be away for an even longer period than has been customary of late. i dont know what has befallen the old blog but i fear that even harder times may be ahead for Goulden Moments. Tis sad

Posted 10:21 AM by Gobbler
"A misanthrope I can understand; a womanthrope never." Miss Prism, The Importance Of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

It really is clever you see. I notice today that I havent posted in almost a week, and feel naughty. I get round this by splitting one blog into two. Post one and then immediately post another. How very clever.

But how, if at all, does the title relate to the substance of this particular blog movement? Its all to do with feminism, dear reader. Fem-in-ism. Oh yes. 'Ism''s are good food for thought. There are a number of quality isms out there. To mention just a few youve got Conservatism, Fascism, Communism, Capitalism, malapropism and Miss Prism. Feminism it is. I cant quite get my head around feminism I must admit. Perhaps this is because I am not female. Thats a thought that I thought of while thinking about ti the other day, but further thinking lead me to the next thought which is that feminism, being about, at least in part if not wholly, about sexual equality, should be for everone. We can all be feminists if we want. But at the same time Ive yet to hear of a male feminist. Anybody know one? This is a genuine question. I may become one of the very first, at least if a chum of mine has anything to do with it, as she is conspiring to convert me. She has sent me a couple of articles on the subject to prepare my naive uninformed mind. More on this later, but I should like to put down a few initial observations, for all you feeble minded males out there, to take note of. And for all you women to take note of. If you know these things already, pat on the back. If you know ths and youre male then youre a rare and enlightened breed of bloke, and if you are a woman then youre one the road to enpowerment.

1. A woman is a woman, not a sex object.

There, pretty simple huh? Thats about it, I think.

This means, as far as I can tell: Do not confuse the two. Page 3 should be banned. Porn is ok, (or rather isnt really, but due to liberalist sentiments pervading in the feminist camp, should not be banned, so long as the women are not being exploited), prostitution is not. Beautiful ladies are ok, and ugly ones are ok too. Beautiful ladies dressing up to the nines so that every gentleman within binocular distance is reduced to dribbles is ok, but gentlemen ogling (and thus thinking about women in a sexual fashion) is degrading to women. (Hence the inherent wrongness and inequality of page three. Women using their sexuality (sex appeal) to empower themselves is fine, but women like page 3 models are not empowered, because they are being manipulated by others for money. Thus it seems your sexuality is a personal thing not to be employed in the professional sphere, unless youre self-employed, because your employers will exploit it for profit, and this is bad.) In short, women are allowed to attract men sexually, but men are not allowed to be attracted to women on a sexual level beyong the innocent and benign, because this leads to such exploitation as page three.

No doubt Im getting my wires crossed. I suspect that I'll get an angry and disappointed email from the feminist in question, accusing me of being flippant in this blob of blog. It wasnt the intention. So Im asking all you punks out there, what do you think? Im in the process of replying to the talkbacks, i am gettig them and reading them, but it takes time. My thoughts on this are quite half baked, all words of wisdom appreciated. (even such muddy gems as 'Schoolboy who play with schoolgirl during wrong period, get caught red-handed.' - thankyou to you soldier) These ideas of mine are hlaf baked but the good news is that the oven is still on and theyre still in there. perhaps were all just supposed to have sufficient moral high standards that we grow to consign things like page 3 to the waste bin of history and the 'bums and tits' sun readers, along with the rest, should grow up a bit.

And thats quite enough vaguely serious stuff for now; I am stopping. But what do you think?

Posted 9:22 AM by Gobbler
In the name of Bloggy

Or:

"What do you do?" "Toboggan!" - Billy Connolly

Have you ever considered that the world would be a much better place if every hill of decent proportions would profit from having a huge slide on it, from the very top to the very bottom? I have. Like some huge bobsleigh run, without the ice? Wouldnt it be a fun and, after all, thoroughly excellent mode of transport, travelling downhill on a big fat toboggan? certainly, I think so.

But it so rarely happens. So rarely do the local authorities perceive the genius of installing a big fat todoggan run. Instead they consider a much better idea to build rollercoasters on flat ground. Clearly rollercoasters are to be heartily commended (with the definite exception of the one rollercoaster i have seen in china, which was utter nonsense and a shameful testament to chinas dirth of quality rolloercoaster action) but why not let gravity do all the work. Take somewhere like mount Snowdon for example. Wouldnt it be good to, after having toiled to the top, zip back down again at breakneck speed on some bewheeled toboggan? well poosticks to you if you dont think so, because I do. And I know.

Because I have seen it. I have been there, where such a place exists, and in the most unlikely of places. Xuzhou, land of the farcical mountains standing oh a good 170 metres tall, has put, in a moment of rare indeed exclusive genius, a winding track down one side. One kilometre of yum.

The second time we (two in a toboggan) went down, one of our excited group took the first toboggan. As the toboggans are designed for one or two chinese people, average height 5'6", average weight 10 stone, and as he was a starvation proofed gentleman to the length of 6'3", he got his own toboggan. Chris and I lept in the next toboggan and gave hearty chase.

It became clear after 100 yards and two corners that our quarry ahead of us, as the saying goes, appeared to be having difficulty with the concepts. Tjhe chief concept being that one should go down the hill as quickly as possible and generally leave the break well alone. so great were the technical difficulties he was experiencing, in fact, that as he came into view as we rounded the corner it looked to us that he had somehow found the reverse gear. We had just jumped up to fifth (they didnt actually have gears, i am of course talking metaphoricorally) and the break (It did have a break though, entirely necessary piece of apparatus) wasnt up for the task - no APS fitted I guess - and we collided at something approaching 'Ramming Speed'. Kerr-unk, so we went.

No fatalities being reported all limbs accounted for and the customary checklist of 'testicles, spectacles, wallet and watch' receiving a quadruple affirmative, we continued. well, not wishing to repeat the calamity, but not wanting to go slowly either, we hung about for a bit and then tried to catch up. It was at this point, while we held onto the sides of the half tube of stainless steel track, that in some hilarious movie some buggers would have come up behind us and rammed us, but it didnt happen. However, considering this an increasing possibility, we nipped off and tried to ctach up once again. WE had overestimated our skills, we didnt catch up. Matey had just got off his vehicle and was off to look for a cup of tea by the time we arrived.