Pimp Your Foreigner

I'm signed to a 20 hour a week contract, so when classes of mine are cancelled due to no one showing up, I tend to sit around the teachers room doing nothing. If I'm feeling inspired, I'll write something here... or maybe even do a lesson plan or two.

All that (sort of) changed when last night I was informed by one of the other Foreign Teachers that since I was being paid for hours I wasn't working, I was to be put on promotional detail.

I didn't really know what that meant, but I was up for anything.

Turns out what it means is that I stand outside a competing school with two of the Chinese Teachers, and we all hand out fliers that let parents know that our school has way more English lessons than the more expensive one their tykes are in.

I know... minimal... Chinese, so I couldn't actually talk up the school to any of the parents, but I knew before I even went out that that wasn't why I was there. I was being (and will continue to be) paraded around so the parents could see: LOOK!! WE HAVE REAL LIVE FOREIGNERS!!!

It's actually really funny.

Also funny was running into other solicitors when we changed our location to in front of a heavily trafficked supermarket. The funny part was that he was handing out brochures of some sort for one of the city's hospitals. I never knew that hospitals had to resort to guerrilla marketing like that.

All in all, it was fun being on show I guess. Kinda cold, but... uhh... strangely flattering. Very strangely.

- Shawn