Sunday 07 October

The Arch Cafe in Xiaoximen Street

Spent most of the morning in preparation for the week of teaching ahead.

I’m trying to make the classes more interactive to get the students more involved and increase participation.

Richard in the Arch Cafe

In the afternoon I caught up with Richard, a native English speaker teacher from Britain with a heavy Yorkshire accent who is teaching English at the adjacent University.

He has been teaching here for almost 2  years and is spending a lot of time  working on his PHD on Russia and also doing Russian-English translation.

Young girl with maths
homework in the cafe as
she waits for her music class

Together, Richard and I headed into town to the Arch Cafe in downtown Quzhou.

The cafe is quite close to the river in a relatively quiet street and really nicely decorated.

The quietness of the cafe has is attractive for all sorts of reasons. For example a young girl was doing her maths homework in the cafe as she waited for her music class nearby.

Silas, proprietor of the
Arch Cafe

It serves coffee, tea, drinks, beer and snacks. It could easily be in King Street, Newtown, except it was quite spacious and not cramped at all.

 
The cafe is run by Silas, another Britain, who studied Chinese and speaks Mandarin embarrassingly well. I took an instant liking to him because he had a tea towel over his shoulder as he was clearing the bar – as I usually do when cooking.  As Rocky (our homestay student from Yongkang in the same province as Quzhou) has told me, typically in China, only farmers toss small towels over their shoulders.

Richard and I spent a pleasant afternoon in the cafe, chatting and exchanging teaching tips while we each worked on our class preparation – there’s WiFi internet  available in the cafe. Because of  his teaching experience here, he provided some very useful tips that I can apply in class.

 Later we headed off to one of the local ‘refrigerated display’ restaurants for a meal. We made a selection of some chicken kebabs and assorted vegetables and a short time later the dishes started arriving, and we started eating. In this region of China, one of the most common "people's" dishes is a stir-fry of tomato and egg.

We ordered rice, expecting it to arrive at the end as is usual here, but it never actually arrived by the time we finished everything. I have discovered that rice is only served as a "filler" for poor people and that is is not normally served as part of a meal. Any carbohydrates here are either presented as noodles or dumplings.

Chicken kebabs and the local
traditional tomato and egg dish

A dish of taro (very similar to potato)
and scallions