Chingle all the way

Dubai here I come. After working my socks off for the last 4 months I’m taking a well-earned trip to Dubai for 3 hours of luxury and whatever else Dubai Airport has to offer. This will of course be followed by a quick 2 week visit to Dublin to see the re-birth of the Celtic Tiger…..which I’m just hearing has been deferred for another 10 years.  Oh well.  But might I just add that those suggestions in your local propaganda sheets suggesting that China is in for a bit of an economic bump this year is just Western bitterness and jealousy. There is no mention whatsoever in the 5-year plan about an economic meltdown. It’s all growth and glory. So there!

To celebrate the end of term, the departure of students, and my forthcoming homecoming, I decided to give my good class one more assignment. They were to write this post. I would combine the best of them into the final entry of the trimester. So here it is. Enjoy the fruits of my fabulous (and, indeed, award-winning; check it out below) teaching.

"Outstanding" is probably an understatement.

And teacher Philip let us our hopes and colourful dreams to come true you have, to must have dreams cherish your life. And he told us, nàge, with his beautiful blue eyes and high nose, not to start every sentence with ‘and’ and that’s what we’d do, nàge, if we ever listened. And I hate the Japanese.

Last week we watched a video in class and it showed, poor people and, my heart was touched inside, nàge, and I knew, I had to cherish the life I have to let me live a beautiful life and colourful shopping. And I was deeply. I love my family and Steve Jobs because it give me something to do in class.

I wish to want to go to an American university like, nàge, Harvard because it is a dream in my mind and touch my heart very lovely. And then I want to be an businessman and run my father’s business. I don’t know what he do but him a manager and that’s what I like do cause I will have lots of, nàge, money and I can to spend it on really inappropriate clotheses.

How many marks, nàge, is this worth? Is it even worth my while?

 

The NIT Annual Dinner

I can safely say without embellishment or exaggeration that this was the worst ‘celebration’ I have ever attended. It was obviously planned by someone who hates fun. As crashing disappointments go it was a 457 car pile-up. Starting at 8.30am with an absolutely pointless 2-hour listen to some profoundly boring speeches in the freezing sports hall and realising after about a minute that you should just have clocked in and then did a runner back to bed. Followed by hanging around the Hilton Airport Hotel in your finery waiting for it all to begin and concluding at 9pm that it never was going to begin and the only feeling to shake you out of your near-death numbness was the feeling of relief that you were on the bus going back to school. I though the 2 bottles of wine on each table were just the appetiser to get you started before the event began, when in fact they were the entire event. The drunken rant by the Doctor could have been a highlight if it wasn’t so unsurprising and so Chinese. The ‘entertainment’, the spot prizes, the outrageous prices…plus 15% service charge for waiting extra long to be served at the bar…in a not unexpectedly not very busy bar, the who really gives a toss toasting, all convinced me that next year I’ll be sick.

Now it’s all over, the school is almost empty, the heating is off, the great migration from Beijing has begun, and I’m packing my bag with stories to tell. With the Euro plummeting daily I should be a Euro millionaire by the time I hit Irish soil. But I guess a pint is about a trillion Euro now so that won’t last too long. And the one big question remains to be answered. Will the sins of my advertising career be expunged by the nobility of my teaching career? For the answer to this and many other questions, feel free to pick me up from Dublin Airport at 11.30am on Thursday 19th January. Over and out.

Still cold

It was all a misunderstanding

Advertisement