Teaching and living overseas is often great fun.  I remember my first ride in a taxi from the airport in Korea to my school and I pulled out a customer comment form from the back seat of the car.  The title of the form was "Intercourse Discomfort Report".  I knew I was in the right country to be an English teacher.

These questions are from an English Department test which was prepared and administered at a school in China despite the objections from the native English teachers... sometimes we wonder why we're there... but alas, it really is funny in the end!  Not all the students will understand the idiocy, but some do... and it's fun to smile with them.

For all you intrepid hikers here's one you don't want to miss out on in China. Cliffs, rickety boards, death defying feats of bravery when all I was after was a nice afternoon hike.  See what happened when we got up and I couldn't turn back...

Here's some language trivia for you. Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England nor French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

According to the Times, when faced with accusations that hamburgers were inimical to the country's diet, Den Fujita, the first McDonald's Japan president, declared: "The reason Japanese people are so short and have yellow skins is because they have eaten nothing but fish and rice for 2,000 years. If we eat McDonald's hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years we will become taller, our skin become white and our hair blond".

"McDonald's Behind the Arches" by John F. Love