This wasn’t so much of a surprise to me really, as throughout the duration of the suicide attempt, sorry, I mean car journey, I had been trying to get a straight answer as to where exactly this school was. No one I had asked at the other University knew where it was. Even the people who arranged my placement and sent me there were chocolate teapots when it came to explaining where it was. I assumed when I applied for a teaching position in Shanghai that I would be remotely close to the city. How mistaken I was.

Shanghai itself is the most heavily populated city in the world – with about 13.7 million people living in the ‘city’ proper. Tokyo is widely regard as the biggest city, if you take into account the other areas and ‘cities’ that are in the Tokyo ‘area’. Tokyo has 31 million people in this total area, but the city proper in Tokyo only has around 10 million people living in it. Now compare that Shanghai has a total of about 13.9 million including all its surrounding areas. It doesn’t take Einstein to realise that all of the people and therefore life/fun is to be had in the vicinity of the 13.7 million people. I was now living for a year as one of the ‘others’

Jinshan translates rather poetically as ‘Gold Mountain’. Now, there is a very small hill on the outskirts of the main living area. And I do mean very small. I lived in the school hotel, on the 3 ^rd floor and was just about on a level with the peak of the ‘mountain’, not taking into account the 30ft pine trees which had been grown to encourage the illusion of grandeur that this minor bump on the earth had. So that’s the mountain part. As for the gold, well I certainly didn’t see anything to suggest that the name came from the colour of anything in the place, or for any previous abundance of the precious metal. However, the name seems appropriate when you consider the link between this town and black-gold – better known as oil.

Whilst there were no braying donkey oil pumps, Texas style, any visible off shore oil rigs or any of oil tankers in the beautifully brown waters of the sea (or any ships, boats or life in general come to think of it) there was a monstrously huge complex of processing plants of varying descriptions. The town of ‘Shihua’ translates, not so poetically, into English as ‘Petrochemical’.

So this was my new home. Not much to boast about – it was pretty much just a standard Chinese hotel room, although I did get the added ‘foreign teacher bonus’ small fridge, microwave and PC. It was nice enough – not the height of luxury, but then I am quite sure that living in luxury was one of my considerations when applying to teach in China. Once the bags were unpacked and a few posters and photos were on the wall it did become quite ‘homely’ really.

My first few weeks at East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST) were pretty uneventful. At one point it did appear that I might not actually stay there, as my second experience with contract negotiations was very similar to banging my head against a brick wall. I was initially and very generously offered the chance to teach every weekday evening and all day Saturday and Sunday. I politely declined and with my stubborn streak coming through I managed to hold out for Monday to Thursday evening teaching and a 3 day weekend (well, 4 if you include all day Monday when I didn’t have to teach either!). As I write that, I wonder why I ever left……

The first couple of moths went by pretty smoothly. There were the usual settling in concerns that you get in any foreign country – finding and ordering strange food with no knowledge of the language, for example – but it seemed to go pretty smoothly. I had a fantastic waiban (basically a local who looks after you) who was a fellow English teacher and generally all round nice lady. Super helpful and I will be eternally grateful for her patience and assistance throughout the whole year – thank you Joy! Now that is all well and good, but I’m not sure if I’ve quite conveyed how quiet, small, dirty and generally dull and faceless Jinshan was/is. There really is very, very little to do in the evening…..and anytime in the day for that matter. You know the kind of place you drive past on the motorway and say ‘I’m glad I don’t live there’ – well that’s pretty much what you’d say if you drove past this place. As such, my life there was pretty damn quiet. At first, that was fine as me and quiet can go together quite well. But after a while true boredom sets in. Thankfully I was in luck, as there were 2 other fellow ‘Jinshan sufferers’ that were in the same situation as me.

The first I knew was Emily. She also cam on the British Council programme and had the distinct misfortune of being in a town even smaller than mine and about one hour away on the bus. Fortunately that bus went from door to door of our respective schools and as such many a weekend was spent visiting and even more frequent phone calls were made to share stories of the day and generally save each others sanity. I think it was her who was kind enough to give my phone number to a complete stranger and as such one day I got a phone call from the other member of the trio and met up with David, an American who was teaching at a local high school right in the middle of the same nightmare….sorry….town I was in. We met, shared our experiences of boredom, frustration, inexplicable Chinese behaviour and it quickly became apparent that we would spend a lot of our time doing this. It’s funny, no matter what my intentions of trying to experience as much as I could that was China and Chinese life, it turned out that the security and comfort I got from being with fellow foreigners was what helped me the most.

As for the teaching, well it was pretty much what I expected. The first class was quite literally petrifying. I’ve never been one for public speaking and as I walked into my first class the butterflies in my stomach were very close to lifting me off the ground! I clearly remember my attempts to keep a calm exterior as the emptiness in my stomach engulfed me as I walked into classroom 306 and saw about 55 people crammed into a room with a capacity of 40, each one of them a smiling, bright eyed, knowledge hungry student. "What on earth am I doing here?" was my first and most common though through that lesson and most of the first few months.

I muddled through misunderstanding, badly explained exercises and a barrage of inquisitive questions ("Do you know Owen/Beckham?" "Do you have a girlfriend?" "Do you like Chinese food?") that was my first class. I pretty much muddled my way through my first couple of weeks of teaching. It soon became apparent (or certainly felt it) that a lot of my reason for being there was purely as a novelty. I had 2 hour classes, once a week, teaching oral English to about 400 different students and the direct effect I had on improving their spoken English was minimal if it was at all. Much of the problem was getting the majority to actually start talking and say more than just 2 or 3 words when they did. So I pretty much settles into the role of Mr. Motivator (minus the lycra – although I did still wear other clothes, I might add) and tried my best to encourage the students to talk as much as possible without correcting too much, as most of the Chinese English teachers would have done (or so the kids told me).

I did put quite a lot of thought into what I was doing though. I cannot always be congratulated for my responsibility and effort in undertaking various tasks, but this time round I certainly tried (at the start at least!). I remember trying to put together a 16 week programme for all of the classes – and I really did put effort into this. After I had prepared it I was really pleased with my efforts in producing a course that I thought was ‘the dogs bollox’. In hindsight and with more experience in and understanding of teaching, I can safely say that this programme was in fact just ‘bollox’. But I guess I was on as of much a learning experience as the students then.