Strange Demands

China just got in touch, finally. Rather than the fleets of clone-lawyer-assassins i was expecting, I get this:

Hi: I need 100 Yuan, the keys to the apartment and expert prove.
ava

In a perfect world, I could say "bold added by editor" or whatever. But I cannot. That business was there when I found it. Like most of lifes little oddities, this one is best dealt with by breaking it on down.

A) The keys to the apartment. This seems reasonable. I should send that to them.

B) The 100 yuan. Though they do not mention it in this particular email, I found out later that it is because I didn't stop my phone access. So, Gotta pay the bills. Fine.

C) expert prove. I am at a complete loss for what this could mean. Possibilities?
a: My letter of reccomendation, in which I will fax it to them and see if they get the joke
b: My expert certification, which they never even gave me in the first place
c: I am not an expert, there is nothing to prove, this is silliness.

While I firmly belive that C is the correct answer, i'm fairly confident they mean B. I hope they don't mean A, because the letter is true - I did a good job teaching there for 5 months.

All in all, I'd say i'm getting off with a slap on the wrist. they can send me all the absurd emails they like. Now i just need to figure out how to get 100 rmb and a set of keys to them. I guess by mail. I dunno.

In other news, Today i got my assessment by some of my students. I got 3, in total, from one class. The rest wanted to take theirs home to make me nervous. Anyways, the format went like this

1: I liked...
2: I didn't like...
3: I want to see more....
4: I want to see less....

What i've got so far? 2 reviews have "EVERYTHING" written under question 1 and thats it, and the other one has five stars drawn at the top - i guess some kind of bizzare restaurant review. or maybe they're supposed to be pentagrams. "I want to see more... SATAN!!!!". With these kids? Who knows. I just have to yell at them to speak more english every half hour on the half hour and things go swimmingly. So far the major problem is that attendance drops pretty hard on saterday. For obvious reasons. The other problem is, i have 4 classes rapid fire with no lunch break. So i'm trying to ride 'em harder on the weekday courses so we can hang out and watch a movie on saterday, with neither harm nor foul. It really is good practice, and it'll teach 'em swear words. I was worried at first, until one of my 15 year old students told me she had seen and enjoyed Saw 4, and was wondering if i could bring similar films. I was thinking more along the comedy vein myself - Anchorman, Super Troopers, old episodes of star trek to see if they get the McCoy/Spock dualism thang. But hell, maybe what these kids really want is the faces of death series.

Nah. Not enough dialogue. Comedy it is!