Monday, February 13, 2012

Beijing, Li Mei & firing people

SO much to blog about tonight, but I am so tired... we'll see how far I get. I am in Beijing for the night on my way to Tianjin. I drove two hours from Songyuan to the Changchun airport and got there about an hour before my flight tonight, so I had a lot of time to actually make notes about things I'd been meaning to post about, now I have a whole list!

I'm glad to be staying in Beijing, the original plan was to head to Tianjin straight away after I got in, but luckily the guys that picked me up were tired too, so we're staying the night here. I wish I had time to explore the city, but it's very late and I'm very tired, so that's out unfortunately. Back on the plus side, my hotel is more on the Western side, so I'm pretty excited about the bathroom (Western toilet, stall shower with what looks to be an awesome showerhead!).


Today I had 4 hours of my business English class with the same group from Friday and Saturday. They came to class with my Chinese name today: 李美 (Li Mei). According to them it means "beautiful," "American" and "Liz." What they don't know is that it also is the name of the Mortal Kombat character below, lol, which I am definitely ok with.


When the term "ladies man" came up yesterday in conjunction with Fabio's namesake, a bit of a joke started about another man in the class, David, being a ladies man as well (both are actually happily married). They asked me to rename David, so now I have a Fabio and a Romeo in that class; I love it!

Today we covered writing business communications and I had the students do an exercise that involved them writing a letter terminating an employee. These were very interesting to read/hear; everyone was way too nice in their letters. They had a really hard time saying "you're fired" or explaining why without contradicting themselves and later saying the employee had done a good job, because they didn't want to hurt the employee's feelings and they were too concerned with the Chinese idea of being polite. It makes me curious as to how that goes in real life situations here, does anyone ever get fired?

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