Olympic Volunteer Training

I joined an interesting array of thirty foreigners from all over the world to teach English to Olympic volunteers for a week. Well actually many of us didn't do much teaching, we were just there as the token laowai (foreigners) to get the students comfortable with being around foreigners (you know, kind of like someone scared of lions would be put in a cage next to one to get over their fear). The most ridiculous part of the camp though was that it seems it was set up by Li Yang, the businessman cum English teacher who developed the extremely profitable style of teaching 'Crazy English'. We foreigners were almost unanimous in our dislike of this style of teaching, which involves a lot of yelling random words in English which has absolutely no practical application (the idea is that it gets Chinese to overcome their shyness of speaking English to foreigners, but to be honest I've yet to meet a 'shy' Chinese person in my life, even when it comes to speaking a foreign language), but it sure as hell has made Li Yang a very rich man. So we foreigners would typically stand around the class while Chinese teachers trained in the Li Yang style would blabber away in high energy Chinese, mixed with occasional words of English. Fortunately my teacher never worked me more than the six hours a day agreed upon in our contract, but a number of the foreign teachers ended up working all day, every day. Geri the Austrian, distant relative of Arnold S., had his camera and flash going nonstop throughout the week, so I decided not to compete with a camera-wielding Austrian and only took pictures of the opening ceremony, the end-of-the-week picture session, and a handful of pics of my students.