When afternoon means - evening?

Each day the cultural gap becomes clearer as we interact with different chinese people. Case in point the chinese preschool teachers. We had been told on the weekend when registering Alex that they would be visiting us for a home visit on Monday afternoon - and no, a more concrete time could not be ascertained. And so we had arranged for another student to be available for this time as, although we had asked that of the two "first classes", Alex be assigned to the class whose teachers spoke the most english, they spoke marginally more english than we did chinese. We had experienced a home visit when we had enrolled Alex in her american preschool so we had an idea of what to expect - we thought.

Now to us afternoon meant any time after around 1pm until around 5pm, though to be frank the closer to 5pm the less "afternoon" it would be. And so we were increasingly frustrated (well at least as the anal, obsessive, control freak I was) as first 4.30pm then 5pm rolled around with no sign of the teachers. How embarrassed I was growing that we'd had a student waiting around with us for so long to help us. And then - 5.30pm arrives and with it, the teachers. All three of them. Actually one teacher and a teacher's aide as well as a type of "life skills" teacher who would be responsible for teaching the children things such as buttoning clothes, eating with spoons etc.

The interview did progress pretty much as expected, Alex warming up to the teachers and interacting with them. Their main concern seemed to be that we not interfere with Alex's integration into the class and to ensure that she was potty-trained. We provided them with the phone number of one of Brett's colleagues Niu Linlin who spoke english and was happy to be our conduit for information - for which we are profoundly grateful. At the end of the time, the teachers headed off to catch a taxi and we went to grab some dinner from our new local "favourite" restaurant - when we saw the teachers getting into a taxi at the end of our driveway, Alex was so excited she was shouting "hey - it's my teachers. Look mummy, let's go see them." It was probably a measure of how excited Alex was to have teachers again - seeing as she had enjoyed school in America so much. And so we brought home our usual 5元 meal (less than one US$) for dinner and Sebastien managed to fall over and bloody his lip for the second time in 6 days. I shudder to think about how many teeth he's going to lose on this marble floor!