F2F Class Notes 10th April (Celeste) [R]

Vocabulary

Ben and Tony took/had most of my classes. 

They held the majority of my classes. 

Celeste colored/dyed her hair lighter/blonder.

Where did we leave off? (native) = Where did we finish reading?

hinder / hindering / hindered / will hinder – to stop / to prevent / to not allow to continue

squat adj. – low and thick, short and wide

The situation wasn’t what she thought/imagined/expected.

baton = truncheons

keep me alone = Leave me alone / don’t bother  me / don’t talk to me 

jumble = heap or pile, unorganized

decipher / deciphering / deciphered / will decipher – to make out the meaning of sth / to discover sth

Reading: Is this what the west is really like?’ How it felt to leave China for Britain

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/10/xiaolu-guo-why-i-moved-from-beijing-to-london?nsukey=Ml9KSkn4X0%2BTki2vIOXL7pnPAGbMQDkG4Xd51PbUNA3uwdY4PmpwxegAyvwDI5VKaHTD6dJGrmREizzegwYrKPEZZOL0E6%2BMIJTJRuyaDkcemyk9BAhYJqCAV9jd0aIOjx3Jzyt3weaRa4bOd7YZRNh3plA6Oce3Pw4ScQLPivlvFXIoyS3OawfpnEARcM91

I remember very well the day I left China. It was 1 April, and the Beijing sandstorm season had begun. I dragged my luggage towards the subway, choking in the sandy soup. This was my chance to escape the world I had grown up in. But that world was trying one last time to keep me.

“I will be walking under a gentle and moist English sky soon,” I said to myself. “It nurtures rather than hinders its inhabitants. I will breathe in the purest Atlantic sea air and live on an island called Britain.” All this was destined to be nothing more than a memory.

When I arrived at Heathrow, there was no one to pick me up, and all I had was a reservation letter for a student hostel near Marylebone station in central London. Dragging my luggage, I jumped into a taxi. As I looked out at the streets through the rain-drenched window of the taxi, it smelled damp and soggy. The air clung to my cheeks. The sky was dim and the city drew a low and squat outline against the horizon: not very impressive.

We travelled slowly, through unfamiliar, traffic-jammed streets. Everything felt threatening: the policemen moving about the street corner with their hands resting on their truncheons, long queues of grey-faced people at bus stops but no one talking, fire engines shooting through the traffic with howling sirens.

Before I left China, I was desperately looking for something: freedom, the chance to live as an individual with dignity. This was impossible in my home country. But I was also blindly looking for something connected to the west, something non-ideological, something imaginative and romantic. But as I walked along the London streets, trying to save every penny for buses or food, I lost sight of my previous vision. London seemed no more spiritually fulfilling than home. Instead, I was faced with a world of practical problems and difficulties. Perhaps I was looking for great writers to meet or great books to read, but I could barely decipher a paragraph of English.